"Well, pay me! He ate it."by KenFirst off, let me confess that I added the comma after "well" in the above cartoon caption. Sorry, I just couldn't read it without the comma.Okay, that said, let me explain that New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff offers this cartoon as the first in a series of three he says sums up a piece he happened to reread recently, Anthony Bourdain's April 1999 "Don't Eat Before Reading This," which "detail[s] the unsavory behind-the-scenes restaurant practices that foist crummy cuisine on a credulous clientele."All of which apparently came to mind because Bob was thinking about a familiar phrase: "Like watching sausage getting made."
The idea being that you may like how sausage tastes, but that if you saw how sausage was made, you would find it a lot less appealing. The idiom applies not just to sausages but to the unsavory activities that are the backdrop for what we enjoy or admire, from law to medicine to politics to whatever.
The Bourdain piece, Bob says, "brings the sausage metaphor home to its source -- food." And here are the other specimens that for Bob "sum up his piece in a few cartoons.""Push the salmon with dill sauce.""Is there anyone here who specializes in stress management?"NATURALLY THERE'S A SLIDE SHOWAnd it's of restaurant quality. Perhaps not surprisingly, I can't resisting this gem from the great Carl Barsotti:"The chef said all the regular stuff isas special as it's going to get today."Okay, maybe one more. You can check out the classier offerings for yourself. I offer you this cautionary tale from the great Jack Ziegler:"That's the food biz. Celebrity chef one day,graveyard shift hash jockey the next."#
