SUNDAY, MAY 29, 2011
THE OTHER WHITE MEAT
Lion's on the menu thanks to shady sellers
BY IKE SRISKANDARAJAH
It sounded like a sick joke: A Tucson, Ariz., restaurant announced it was adding “farm raised, African lion” tacos to its menu.
Many Americans who heard about Boca Tacos’ seeming publicity stunt earlier this year were surprised to learn the big cats can be legally butchered and sold like hamburger in the United States.
But they can, and around the country businesses are offering lion meat as a novelty — many of them doing so without knowing that supply chain is murky and unregulated, and at least one of the major suppliers has been tied to criminal trafficking of endangered species like tigers and leopards.
In the case of Boca Tacos, the experiment with lion meat was called off before a single meal was served: Animal advocates circulated the owner’s business and personal addresses online, leading to a series of death threats. Recent attempts by another Arizona restaurant, as well as one in Philadelphia and one outside Tampa, met similar fates.
But despite the controversy, one gourmet grocer in Cambridge, Mass., sells farm-raised African lion in addition to other strange game. Its cooler of curiosities boasts everything from alligator to zebra.
During a recent visit by The Daily, a butcher at Savenor’s demonstrated how to properly cook a lion steak. When he dropped the meat in the pan, it clenched up like a fist. The butcher explained that “predators are pretty much solid muscle. When you add heat to muscle, it automatically constricts.” The trick? “Hold it down.”
“I think the best thing to know about lion is that it’s really not a bad taste — it’s halfway between a dolphin and a bald eagle,” store manager Juliana Lyman joked.
It actually tastes like pork. Except it’s chewy, and costs $60 a pound at Savenor’s.
African lions are not endangered, so the meat is legal to sell, but deeper investigation reveals the market for the king of the beasts is part of a mostly unregulated and shady exotic animal trade that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says is a multibillion-dollar industry.
Savenor’s wouldn’t disclose its source, except to say that the meat comes from Illinois. Another lion meat retailer, ExoticMeatMarket.com, offers a similar account: “Our African lions are raised in the state of Illinois.”
There is reason to worry. The Illinois man who supplies nearly all the lion meat in the United States has been busted in the past for passing off meat from endangered animals, such as Bengal tigers, as meat from legal species, including African lions.
Richard Czimer owns and operates Czimer’s Game and Seafood in Homer Glenn, about an hour from Chicago. Last year, he told a reporter that his cuts of big cat come from a man who runs a skinning operation and delivers him the leftover meat.
When asked where the pelt trader gets his lions, Czimer said, “I wouldn’t have any idea. ... He has his sources, and I do not infringe on his business, just as he does not infringe on mine.”
Czimer declined to talk to The Daily, but a special agent at the Fish and Wildlife Service, based in Springfield, Ill., said he knows Czimer and where his lions come from.
“There’s no such thing as lion farms,” said Tim Santel. More often it’s “a woman living paycheck to paycheck in a trailer home who keeps her lion in a chain-link fence."
“I don’t think the majority of people understand how widespread this is in the United States,” added Santel. “You could have these dangerous animals living right next door to you and not even know it.”
Santel says there are a variety of ways to start a private collection, including auctions, catalogs, and online retailers.
“I could go out and in a couple of hours buy a lion for a few hundred dollars,” said Santel, adding that even a federally protected tiger or leopard sells for as little as $1,000.
Santel first learned about Czimer’s exotic game through a six-year undercover sting. The investigation, known as Operation Snow Plow, started when Santel received a tip that a man who owned a plowing business in the Chicago area was buying endangered Bengal tigers and selling them for their parts.
Santel recalled one of the stakeouts: “One particular day in March 1998, there were eight tigers killed at one time,” he said. “They were acquired from an animal dealer, brought to an isolated warehouse in suburban Chicago, where two individuals with handguns shot all eight tigers.”
What they figured out, said Santel, is that a live $1,000 big cat is worth less than the sum of its parts.
At ExoticMeatMarket.com, a lion tenderloin retails for $1,400.
“They’re selling these hides for up to $10,000 apiece,” Santel said. “The gallbladders are probably fetching them a few hundred bucks. You know, the teeth and claws might give them some more. The skulls are being sold for whatever.”
And then the extracted corpses went to Czimer, who haggled the men down to $3 a pound for around 200 pounds of meat per big cat. It’s illegal to sell endangered meat, but Czimer got around this by labeling tiger meat as lion.
Operation Snow Plow led to one of the biggest busts of the black market animal trade in American history. In 2003, Czimer pleaded guilty to selling endangered tigers, leopards, and even liger. In front of a judge, he confessed, “I knew exactly what some of them were.”
Czimer served six months in federal prison and paid $116,000 to the Save the Tiger Fund. A month after his conviction, the Animal Liberation Front set fire to his store. But now it’s apparently back to business as usual at Czimer’s exotic game market and distribution.
Based on a genetic analysis earlier this year of a smorgasbord of Czimer’s meats, the Food and Drug Administration accused Czimer of selling endangered grizzly bear meat and labeling it as black bear.
Scott J. Mcintire, the FDA’s Chicago district director, declined to say whether the investigation had turned up any lions among Czimer’s meats.
Ike Sriskandarajah is a reporter for Public Radio International’s “Living on Earth.”
Coquette: Advice for the young and lonely
Dear Coquette,
How would you suggest dealing with loneliness?
After graduation, I moved away from my family and where I grew up in Oklahoma to Connecticut for work. My job is an amazing opportunity, the likes of which was not available to me back home. Work requires me to put in a lot of hours, which of course, does not leave much free time for socializing.
It has been about a year and a half since I moved, and I don’t have any friends here. I have taken a few classes at the local community art school and I regularly attend Pilates classes in an effort to meet people.
I am afraid that I am not a very open person; it is difficult for me to approach someone. I would like to overcome this. Even though I am friendly with people, I am not sure how to move beyond that to really make a friend.
Art and Pilates classes are fine, but they’re also introspective and singular pursuits. They don’t really offer anything more than cursory social interaction, and it’s pretty easy to end up lonely in a room full of people with a similar interest.
What you need is a team — either a team sport or a team-based volunteer group — an activity that builds interpersonal relationships. Most importantly, you want something where you and the gang all go out for drinks afterward.
Come on, you’re only a year and a half out of college, and you live in a college town. There’s all kinds of fun, social stuff you can do. Instead of art classes, join the Junior League of Greater New Haven and do some volunteering. If you work at Yale, you can participate in grad-pro intramural sports instead of Pilates.
The key here is that the activities you choose should naturally lend themselves to extended social interaction. It’s not about meeting people. It’s about finding settings that are interactive, casual and routine where you can spend the kind of time with people that it takes to get to know them.
Also, you shouldn’t overthink this. Making new friends isn’t something you need to have in the forefront of your mind once you’re a part of a group. Friendships happen spontaneously, and building them isn’t something you can plan. You can only plan to put yourself in situations where it’s likely to happen.
Big hunk o’ love
Key to the King’s indulgence buried in 8,000-calorie sandwich
BY GRAEME WOOD
In 1992, the U.S. Postal Service asked the nation to vote by postcard on whether the new Elvis Presley stamp should depict Elvis as a young man — slickly pompadoured, tie loose, cool as a diner malt — or as the jonesing, sequined lard-ass he later became. The decision wasn't a hard one: Voters overwhelmingly chose the young Elvis, preferring to remember their idol in the days when he put Crisco in his hair rather than into his face. Memories of Presley's shape late in life remain painful for some fans, who prefer the image of a lithe young star with a pelvis so provocative that, even fully clothed, it could not be shown on television. But Elvis morphed into something much worse, burying himself in his own pudge, until on Aug. 16, 1977, his heart decided it could no longer work under those conditions and left the King dead on his bathroom floor.
By age 42, Elvis had long been gobbling drugs and fatty foods. But his romance with saturated fat reached a sort of point-of-no-return 18 months before the end, on a chilly night that started at Graceland, his estate in Memphis, Tenn. On Groundhog Day in 1976, Elvis's guests at Graceland included two Denver cops, Jerry Kennedy and Ron Pietrafeso, who had served as bodyguards for him during a ski trip in Vail, Colo., two weeks earlier. As gratuities, Elvis gave Kennedy a Lincoln Mark IV and Pietrafeso a Cadillac. (Elvis's relations with law enforcement were unremittingly strange. He wore and owned a Denver police uniform. And once he showed up unannounced at the White House and asked to be made a federal agent. Richard Nixon posed for a photo and — without apparent irony — badged him into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.)
That night, the men lounged in the Jungle Room, which Elvis had custom-designed to resemble a Tarzan-style rainforest, complete with a permanently running waterfall and a Kon Tiki throne from which the Big Kahuna himself held court. Elvis was seized by a reverie — a fond recollection of his favorite sandwich of all time, the Fool's Gold Loaf, served by the Colorado Mine Company in Denver. He had tried it just once, and like a lost love, it now beckoned across the years, each one of its 8,000 calories a memory of unspeakable delight. He described it for his guests.
The recipe, devised by restaurant owners Cindy and Buck Scott, was simple. Take a whole loaf of Italian bread and slice it lengthwise. Hollow it out and slather it with margarine. Then add a whole jar of jelly and a whole jar of creamy peanut butter, creating two large boats of PB & J. Finally, add a whole pound of fried bacon. Before adding the bacon, dab away the grease on paper towels (presumably to avoid adding unnecessary fat and rendering the sandwich disgusting). Then reunite the sandwich halves, deep-fry, and serve. For this, the Scotts charged $49.95, the equivalent of $189 in today's dollars.
Elvis' guests murmured approval at the description of the sandwich, and Elvis — unwilling to see them disappointed — insisted that they go at once to Denver. At midnight, Elvis' people called the restaurant to order their sandwiches, and they alerted his pilots, Milo High (his real name) and Elwood David, that the boss was on a mission. The plane, named the Lisa Marie for his daughter, who had turned 8 that day, was still a novelty, as Elvis had acquired and re-equipped it just a year before. The Convair 880 normally seated 96, but Elvis had torn out the standard seats and installed leather recliners, as well as a bedroom and dining facilities. On the two-hour trip, they drank Pepsi but abstained from all food.
Awaiting Elvis and his two friends in a private hangar at Denver's Stapleton Airport was a scene worthy of the "Satyricon": 22 piping-hot Fool's Gold Loaves on silver trays, with a chest of cracked ice and Dom Pérignon on the side. Elvis, the two cops and the two pilots started eating at 1:40 a.m. and took two hours to finish. The cops drank Champagne; Elvis and the pilots drank Perrier. And then they got back in the plane and returned to Graceland.
The whole enterprise cost about $16,000 and burned around 10,000 gallons of fuel. The total number of calories consumed was so great that the men would literally have had to walk halfway back to Memphis to burn them off. However, Elvis was not totally unpragmatic. He allegedly had the Scotts write down the recipe for his personal chef, Pauline "Brown Mama" Nicholson, so she could prepare it on-site in case the craving struck Elvis again. (She is known to have prepared him countless fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, but the Fool's Gold Loaf never made a recorded encore.)
There's much to deplore about this sordid caper: the carbon emissions, the profligacy, the tastelessness, the thought that each gooey loaf must have been lacquering the walls of Elvis' arteries and bringing him that much closer to his final performance. The Fool's Gold Loaf never caught on widely — it survives in Elvis folklore, and in novelty cookbooks — and the Colorado Mine Company was shuttered in the 1980s.
On the other hand, the quest for the Fool's Gold Loaf is one of the purer expressions of the total lack of sense and inhibition that made Elvis, and rock 'n' roll more generally, so appealing in the first place. Few people have allowed their ids to dominate them as thoroughly as the man who flew a thousand miles to kill himself with a stack of grease-drenched sandwiches. The libertine streak that inspired such a whim is the same one that made those hips gyrate to such devastating effect two decades earlier.
And most of all, the expedition survives in memory as a testament to the King's extreme streak of hospitality and friendship. Elvis, the puffy and obese addict, would spare no expense to satisfy his cop buddies' late-night cravings. This is touching loyalty. The crowds may have preferred the early Elvis, but there is something to love about those late-Elvis jowls after all.
Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
SOMETHING'S FISHY
Ocean conservation group warns against the mislabeling of seafood
BY KAREN KELLER
Americana: White Sands, A Projectile Playground
White Sands National Monument is the home of a missile testing site. It's also the only national park where you get a security briefing. —Video by Joe Stevens
The DVR that was DOA
Why one of Microsoft’s greatest products was also a colossal failure
BY RICK BROIDA
For a while there, my home-theater setup was coveted in my neighborhood. Not because I’d stocked it with fancy high-end gear or because it was decked out to look like the bridge of the Enterprise. No, what made my neighbors green with envy was a lovely shade of blue — the color scheme of Windows Media Center.
I know, you’ve probably never heard of it. And if you have, you likely thought it was something you had to pay extra for, or didn’t really need. Countless friends and family members have stood before my TV, gawking at the gorgeous Windows Media Center UI, and demanded: “What is that?”
Here’s what it is: one of Microsoft’s most beloved products, and one of its biggest failures — in part because it’s known by so few and beloved by fewer still. Remember the months leading up to the Windows 7 launch? Remember how, along with performance, security and a spiffy new UI, Microsoft couldn’t stop crowing about the latest version of Windows Media Center? Exactly. Never happened. The company rarely mentions its existence, let alone promotes it. Even today, if you look at the Explore Windows 7 Features page, you won’t find a single reference to WMC.
So what happened? Why does WMC feel like Microsoft’s redheaded stepchild? And why haven’t more users embraced it? I chalk it up to a confluence of events and the worst mismanagement of a hot property since Colonel Parker met Elvis.
Windows Media Center debuted in 2004 as a special edition of Windows — namely, Windows XP Media Center Edition. It provided a stylized front end for all your media, a “10-foot interface” that you could control from the couch using a wireless keyboard or remote. Install an inexpensive TV tuner — or even two — and MCE could act as a DVR. For folks whose cable companies didn’t even offer DVRs yet, that was pretty huge. And unlike with TiVo, you wouldn’t have to pay a monthly service fee.
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 came next, adding support for Media Center Extenders — set-top boxes that let you stream media from your PC to your TV — and DVD burning. That’s right, you could archive your recordings of “Lost.” To this day, even a TiVo can’t do that.
For Windows Vista, Microsoft made Media Center a proper part of the OS, tweaking both the name and the look. Gone was the old green UI; in its place, a redesigned, HDTV-friendly blue one. This version added support for multiple analog and/or digital TV tuners, meaning you could theoretically record up to four shows simultaneously. (Once again: In your face, TiVo!) Also new to the mix: support for CableCARD, the new gizmo that promised to replace unsightly cable boxes.
This is where Microsoft should have put some muscle into WMC marketing, into positioning a Vista PC as a viable TiVo/cable-DVR alternative. Instead, it had to put out the fires caused by Vista. What’s more, the whole CableCARD thing had turned into a fiasco. It required expensive, hard-to-find OEM hardware. You couldn’t just buy an adapter; you effectively needed a whole new PC.
That changed with the arrival of Windows 7, which allowed for non-OEM hardware. But even now, 20 months later, there’s exactly one Windows-compatible CableCARD product on the market — and it requires a PCI slot. (Sorry, laptop users.)
In the interim, the switchover to all-digital broadcasting left analog-tuner users out in the cold. A digital tuner and a good antenna could bring in a handful of local stations, but who’d be satisfied with that after gorging on hundreds of cable channels?
Microsoft doesn’t deserve all the blame for this, but certainly the company could have thrown its weight behind CableCARD products and WMC itself. Instead, the platform was left to languish, again, and most users still have no idea what the hell WMC is.
Until recently, anyone Googling fixes for frustrations like these would likely land at The Green Button, a thriving user community where hobbyists were always on hand to lend advice. But last month, for reasons unknown, Microsoft shut down the site. Its forums live on under Microsoft’s Windows Experts Community umbrella, but it’s not the same. It’s like the company is simultaneously trying to drive WMC users away while keeping them under its thumb.
That’s a shame. When everything’s working, WMC is a thing of beauty. For the past year, I’ve had a sweet little HP slimline tucked inside a TV-stand cubby. Inside it, a Ceton CableCARD adapter delivered four tuners’ worth of cable TV goodness — premium and HD channels included. Third-party plug-ins added colorful channel logos to the TV guide, streamed thousands of Internet radio stations, and even stripped the commercials from recorded shows. When the hard drive got full, I just plugged in another one. It was awesome.
Then, without warning, the motherboard failed, bringing down the whole works. And you know what? I’d had enough. I went out and bought my first TiVo. Microsoft clearly doesn’t care if I’m a Windows Media Center user or not, and I’ve reached the point where I’m tired of wrangling with my TV. I just want to watch my stories, dammit.
The Y.A. sisterhood
Fashion’s sassiest bloggers talk to The Daily about embracing a younger audience
BY EMMA BARKER
Young-adult entertainment is having a moment. Harry Potter’s rounding out puberty in his eighth film adaptation this summer, and ab-obsessed “Twilight” fans are as hormone-ravaged as ever. But there’s another reason for Y.A. appreciation: two witty grownup chicks. In the past year, a spate of women’s websites have popped up that practice a silly style, nostalgic for their late teen years. The writing is honest about sex and feelings about sex. It’s packed with smart references and sharp observations. It’s kind and “You go girl!”-ish in a way that aims to just make you feel like you’re not a freak, that there’s someone else out there who has gotten drunk and said something crass at a work event or who has gotten breast-reduction surgery. In the past week alone, two such sites have launched: Jane Pratt’s xojanedotcom.com and hellogiggles.com, started by actress Zooey Deschanel, producer friend Sophia Rossi and blogger Molly McAleer.
At least some attribution for the frank and irreverent comedy tone on womens’ sites must go to Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the Fug Girls, creators of gofugyourself.com, and proprietors of what their fans call Fug Nation. You’ve probably heard of them, or been sent one of their posts about Taylor Momsen’s tragic getups, or read the site every day like it’s your job. Now, the Fuggers have taken their young-adult tone straight to the source — their first novel, “Spoiled,” will be available to 15-year-olds everywhere on June 1.
The book follows Molly Dix (why yes, it is a nod to Heather’s own “umm … less than ideal” surname), a 16-year-old every-girl who is bright, sarcastic, funny and just pretty enough not to really know it. We meet her at home in Indiana packing up her life. Her single mom has just died of cancer, and she revealed on her deathbed that Molly’s father is macho-man movie star Brick Berlin, whom Molly is about to meet and move in with on his Los Angeles estate. (The basic plot is eerily similar to a certain recent love-child scandal with a certain bodybuilding ex-governor, although Heather and Jessica insisted they knew nothing of the news before it broke. Heather laughed, “What if we put it out in the universe and then the universe made it so? If so, sorry Maria.”) From there we follow Molly through meeting her prissy new half-sister Brooke — a fellow motherless, and mostly fatherless, teen who singlehandedly validates the book’s title — and Brooke’s hilariously named friend Arugula, dealing with the fame monster, and being the fresh meat in the high school rumor mill.
“I really think that’s one relatable thing,” Jessica told The Daily. “Even if you weren’t the new kid in school, you were the new person at your job or the new one on the block or whatever. There’s this whole idea of how much of yourself you give up when you’re in that situation, how much are you willing to change to fit in.” For Heather, there’s a degree of autobiography here. She moved around a lot as a kid and, while she didn’t have the tabloids waiting for her to leave the bathroom with toilet paper on her shoe, the feelings are the same. “I think a lot of the emotions in the book are universal,” explained Jessica, “but, you know, my dad is not a movie star. He is a CPA.”
Maybe it’s true that 30 is the new 20, and 20somethings these days are still living out their teen angst. Maybe it’s Heather and Jessica’s lack of condescension, or our reality TV-fueled addiction to the kind of dramatic treasure trove that’s only unearthed in young adult and romance genres, but “Spoiled” is as easily read as a razor-sharp comedy about Hollywood’s over-important youth culture as it is as a big hug for teens with peer problems.
Credit: The Daily (www.thedaily.com)
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