Notes From Nowhere

The 2015 movie City of Gold follows Jonathan Gold, food writer and critic, through LA as he eats at food trucks, family places in out-of-the way mini-malls, and sometimes high-end restaurants. Gold says he and his car, a truck the size of a small tank, are one entity. So there he is, driving around LA, getting out for tacos and for any number of dishes which I don’t even know the names of, from a million cuisines that immigrants bring to the city. To my mind the film is about discovery and about love, two of the best things of all.

The film could almost make me want to move to LA and just eat my way through the city, as Gold does. It reminds me of some of my summer excursions in the Italian mountains, where we were eating in the kind of place that is called “circolo,” often run just by a single woman or by a family, where the workers who earn a hard living in alpine jobs—in forests and marble caves and so on—get their lunch. The places Gold goes to are like this, entirely out of the way of any Michelin guide or old-style food critic. To eat there is to love the place and to want to get to know its people. And then it comes also with the most delicious experiences. Must see, five stars. *****

Here’s an update for everyone out there who shares my love for giraffes, from your fearless reporter on animal news. Giraffes made it into the news at least three times recently.

In 2014, social media picked up an incident that wasn’t intended as news at all. Copenhagen zoo killed and cut to pieces a giraffe who wasn’t deemed suitable for breeding, feeding it to other animals. Controversy ensued, covering, on the side of the zoo’s director, arguments about the giraffe’s genes, and on the side of others, outrage.

The incident stayed with me, since it seemed unclear who had won the dispute. Now, two years later, there’s an unexpected twist. It’s been discovered that the kind of animal we call giraffe is not that: not a kind of animal. It’s four kinds! If that’s true, and there are four or more separate species, as researchers now think, there are fewer of each species than there were thought to be, in total, of the presumed unified kind. And that may change their conservation status. From ranking rather low—a species of “least concern”—some or all of the newly determined species may count as endangered. I can’t recall ever being happy about an animal making it on the list of endangered species, but here’s a way to make it on the list that doesn’t seem to come with the usual downsides…

The third bit of news is so lovely, it almost makes you forget the dire fate of other zoo-dwellers…