I Remember Nothing (7 page)

I feel bad about Teflon.

It was great while it lasted.

Now it turns out to be bad for you.

Or, to put it more exactly, now it turns out that a chemical that’s released when you heat up Teflon gets into your bloodstream and probably causes cancer and birth defects.

I loved Teflon. I loved the no-carb ricotta pancake I invented last year, which can be cooked only on Teflon. I loved my Silverstone Teflon-coated frying pan, which makes a beautiful steak. I loved Teflon as an adjective;
it gave us a Teflon president (Ronald Reagan) and it even gave us a Teflon Don (John Gotti), whose Teflonness eventually wore out, making him an almost exact metaphorical duplicate of my Teflon pans. I loved the fact that Teflon was invented by someone named Roy J. Plunkett, whose name alone should have ensured Teflon against ever becoming a dangerous product.

But recently DuPont, the manufacturer of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) resin, which is what Teflon was called when it first popped up as a laboratory accident back in 1938, reached a $16.5 million settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency; it seems the company knew all along that Teflon was bad for you. It’s an American cliché by now: a publicly traded company holds the patent on a scientific breakthrough, it turns out to cause medical problems, and the company knew all along. You can go to the bank on it.

But it’s sad about Teflon.

When it first came onto the market, Teflon wasn’t good. The pans were light and skimpy and didn’t compare to copper or cast iron. They were great for omelettes, and, of course, nothing stuck to them, but they were nowhere near as good for cooking things that were meant to be browned, like steaks. But then manufacturers like Silverstone produced Teflon pans that were heavy-duty, and you could produce a steak that was as dark and delicious as one made on the barbecue. Unfortunately, this involved heating your Teflon pan up to a very high temperature before adding the steak, which happens to be the very way perfluoroctanoic acid
(PFOA) is released into the environment. PFOA is the bad guy here, and DuPont has promised to eliminate it from all Teflon products by 2015. I’m sure that will be a comfort to those of you under the age of forty, but to me it simply means that my last years on this planet will be spent, at least in part, scraping debris off my non-Teflon frying pans.

Rumors about Teflon have been circulating for a long time, but I couldn’t help hoping they were going to turn out like the rumors about aluminum, which people thought (for a while, back in the nineties) caused Alzheimer’s. That was a bad moment, since never mind giving up aluminum pots and pans, it would also have meant giving up aluminum foil, disposable aluminum baking pans, and, most crucial of all, antiperspirants. I rode out that rumor, and I’m pleased to report that it went away.

But this rumor is clearly for real, so I suppose I am going to have to throw away my Teflon pans.

Meanwhile, I am going to make one last ricotta pancake breakfast:

Beat one egg, add one-third cup fresh whole-milk ricotta, and whisk together. Heat up a Teflon pan until carcinogenic gas is released into the air. Spoon tablespoons of batter into the frying pan and cook about two minutes on one side, until brown. Carefully flip. Cook for another minute to brown the other side. Eat with jam, if you don’t care about carbs, or just eat unadorned. Serves one.

We would like a bottle of Pellegrino. The waiter brings the Pellegrino. There are four of us at the table. The waiter brings glasses for the Pellegrino. The glasses happen to be extremely tall. Tall glasses are not necessarily the best glasses for Pellegrino, but before I can say a word on this profound subject, the waiter pours the Pellegrino into the tall glasses.

When the waiter is done pouring, there’s a tiny amount of Pellegrino left in the bottle. My husband takes a sip of his Pellegrino, and the waiter is back, in
a flash, with the last drops of our Pellegrino. He tops off my husband’s drink.

The first bottle of Pellegrino is now gone. We’ve been at the table for exactly three minutes and somehow we’ve managed to empty an entire bottle of Pellegrino.

“Would you like another bottle of Pellegrino?” the waiter says.

I haven’t even had any of this one!

I don’t actually say these words.

I love salt. I absolutely adore it. Occasionally I eat at a place where (in my opinion) the food doesn’t need more salt, but it’s rare.

Many years ago, they used to put salt and pepper on the table in a restaurant, and here’s how they did it: there was a saltshaker and there was a pepper shaker. The pepper shaker contained ground black pepper, which was outlawed in the 1960s and replaced by the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill and the Permanent Floating Pepper Mill refrain: “Would you like some fresh ground black pepper on your salad?” I’ve noticed that almost no one wants some fresh ground black pepper on his salad. Why they even bother asking is a mystery to me.

But I wasn’t talking about pepper, I was talking about salt. And as I was saying, there always used to be salt on the table. Now, half the time, there’s none. The reason there’s no salt is that the chef is forcefully trying to convey that the food has already been properly
seasoned and therefore doesn’t need more salt. I resent this deeply. I resent that asking for salt makes me seem aggressive toward the chef, when in fact it’s the other way around. As for the other half of the time—when there
is
salt on the table—it’s not what I consider salt. It’s what’s known as sea salt. (Sea salt used to be known as kosher salt, but that’s not an upscale enough name for it anymore.) Sea salt comes in an itty-bitty dish. You always spill it trying to move it from the dish to the food on your plate, but that’s the least of it: it doesn’t really function as salt. It doesn’t dissolve and make your food taste saltier; instead, it sits like little hard pebbles on top of it. Also, it scratches your tongue.

“Is everything all right?”

The main course has been served, and the waiter has just asked us this question. I’ve had exactly one bite of my main course, which is just enough for me to remember that, as usual, the main course always disappoints. I am beginning to wonder whether this is a metaphor, and if so, whether it’s worth dwelling on. Now the waiter has appeared, pepper mill in one hand, Pellegrino in the other, and interrupted an extremely good story right before the punch line to ask if everything is all right.

The answer is no, it’s not.

Actually the answer is, No, it’s not! You ruined the punch line! Go away!

I don’t say this either.

•   •   •

We have ordered dessert. They are giving us dessert spoons. Dessert spoons are large, oval-shaped spoons. They are so large that you could go for a swim in them. I’m not one of those people who likes to blame the French for things, especially since the French turned out to be so very very right about Iraq, but there’s no question this trend began in France, where they’ve always had a weakness for dessert spoons.

One of the greatest things about this land of ours, as far as I’m concerned, was that we never fell into the dessert-spoon trap. If you needed a spoon for dessert, you were given a teaspoon. But those days are over, and it’s a shame.

Here’s the thing about dessert—you want it to last. You want to savor it. Dessert is so delicious. It’s so sweet. It’s so bad for you so much of the time. And, as with all bad things, you want it to last as long as possible. But you can’t make it last if they give you a great big spoon to eat it with. You’ll gobble up your dessert in two big gulps. Then it will be gone. And the meal will be over.

Why don’t they get this? It’s so obvious.

It’s so obvious.

Last week I went to one of those Internet conferences I get invited to now and then, and of course
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman was there. He wasn’t actually there in person. It wasn’t that important a conference. He sent a tape of himself. He took the entire thesis of his best-selling book
The World Is Flat
and squished it down into twenty minutes. Coincidentally, two nights earlier, I had found myself standing across from Friedman, in person, at a craps table in Las Vegas. As he rolled the dice to make a five, I shouted, “This is it, Tom, this is your chance to make
up for being wrong on Iraq.” But he rolled a seven and crapped out.

And then there he was at this conference. There was a big banner over the screen that said
THE WORLD IS FLAT
, and all the bright, young Internet people watched Friedman talk about globalization and say that technology had flattened the walls of the world. They were enthralled by him and actually managed to stay focused and off their mobile devices for the entire time he was speaking. Afterward, instantly, they all turned their mobile devices back on, and the huge conference room was suddenly illuminated by hundreds of small boxes and orchestrated by the sound of thousands of tiny fingers tapping away.

Friedman, of course, is not just a columnist for the world’s most powerful newspaper—he’s something else. He’s a panelist. There’s an entire population of panelists today, mostly guys, who make a living in some way or another but whose true career consists of appearing at conferences like this. Some of these panelists are players and some are merely journalists, but for a brief moment, the panel equalizes them all. The panelists perform in front of audiences that include ordinary people, but their real performances are for one another at places like the Foursquare Conference in New York and Herbert Allen’s summer CEO-fest in Sun Valley; the panelists’ job is to put into perspective whatever conventional wisdom happens to apply at the moment, and to validate it.

In fact, these conferences tend to be validating in
every way, and it’s no surprise that at the last two I attended, there were representatives from Walmart who appeared onstage and were never once asked about their public-relations difficulties over pesky things like the way they treat their employees. (At both conferences, though, the men from Walmart were cheerfully asked about their company’s policy of requiring executives to fly tourist and sleep two-in-a-room on business trips. Both times the men from Walmart cheerfully replied. Both times the audience cheerfully chuckled along.)

Anyway, it interests me that every time I go to one of these conferences, there’s a piece of absolutely unarguable conventional wisdom about the Internet that seems sooner or later to turn out to be wrong. It’s not easy to be wrong about the Internet—the Internet consists of pretty much everything in the universe. So pretty much anything you say about it is going to turn out to be partly true in some way or other. Nonetheless, it turns out not to be.

For example, when I started going to these conferences, it was a given that the Internet was going to set everyone free; this was back in the day, when we understood the Internet to mean e-mail. The world was full of executives and panelists who took the position that it was much simpler to return twenty e-mails than ten telephone calls. But executives now return hundreds of e-mails every day, and life is not remotely simpler. They return e-mails day and night. They never go home from their e-mail. What’s more, they absorb
almost nothing that happens, because the minute it does, their BlackBerrys are blinking at them.

Then the dot-com boom began, and a new piece of conventional wisdom emerged: the dot-coms would make us rich. This was true. They did. And then, suddenly, the dot-coms crashed. So not quite true.

Time for a new piece of conventional wisdom: there was no money in the Internet. This was confounding: it seemed that an amazing, unheard-of, completely mystifying episode had occurred in the history of capitalism. A huge business had emerged, but there was no profit in it. Warren Buffett, who is the king of the panelists, the überpanelist, the second-richest man in America, the sage of Omaha who plays online bridge with the first-richest man in America, gave a speech during this period, and reminded all his acolytes that between 1904 and 1908 there were 240 automobile companies in business; by 1924, 10 of them accounted for 90 percent of revenues. This sentence was quoted as if it had come straight from the Mount, although no one was entirely sure what it meant. Was everyone going to go out of business, or just almost everyone? The guys who’d started in garages would make money, of course—they’d already made money. The guys who’d invented the technology and the software would be rich. But everyone who’d come afterward would be doomed.

Many panels were held on this point, and many panelists were thoughtful and interesting (and puzzled) about the bleak future ahead. But one thing was clear: there was no money in the Internet. And advertising
was not the answer: advertising would never work because the people using the Internet would never ever accept it. The Internet was free. The Internet was democratic. The Internet was pure. Ads would never fly. What’s more, in the TiVo world we now live in, the ads would be blocked by Internet users who would never stand for them.

Which brings me to this conference on the Internet I attended last week, where, it will not surprise you to hear, there was a new piece of conventional wisdom: there were billions of dollars to be made in the Internet. It had suddenly become clear that there was a lot of advertising money out there, and all you had to do was provide content so that the ads had something to run alongside of. It crossed my mind that the actual definition of “content” for an Internet company was “something you can run an ad alongside of.” I found this a depressing insight, even though my conviction that all conventional wisdom about the Internet turns out to be untrue rescued me somewhat from a slough of despond on the subject.

And by the way, the world is not flat. There are walls everywhere. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have gone into Iraq, where everybody crapped out, not just Tom Friedman.