About five hours after the end of yesterday’s match, FIFA.com, perhaps in response to pressure online, began allowing a limited number of comments onto the “Have Your Say” discussion board that referenced the disallowed goal. The first such comment allowed was from Deutschnuk, on June 18 at 21:49. In the 24 hours or so since then, by my count, seven other comments, not including replies, have been posted that are critical of the call (by sp0rtsfan8, bknutz, T-Rixx, stinson87, LAUREN2010, MarcS420, and jacob163).

To counter these, FIFA.com has also posted (as of this writing) seven comments arguing that the call was justified, often by suggesting that the USA side was playing rough (from algeroid7, Stipe24, Brisaca, roedl22, j0000nz, and two from SVNFTW). One comment has also been posted that discusses the call but considers both sides. From reading the board, in other words, you’d assume that soccer fans were more or less split on the question of whether Coulibaly made a bad call.

The reason that this distribution seems utterly unrelated to the distribution of opinion amongst soccer fans, bloggers, and commentators across the rest of cyberspace is that there still seems to be massive comment suppression happening on the “Have Your Say” board.

The primary evidence for this suppression is that the volume of comments does not appear to be returning to anywhere near the normal volume on other boards (which, it bears mention, are also probably subject to some censorship as well). If things have improved since the first five hours after the match (during which only 37 comments in total were approved), it’s only slightly: only 77 total comments have been approved in the 24 hours after the game, whereas 137 comments were approved in that same time span for the lower-profile Algeria-Slovenia match.

And of the comments that have been approved by FIFA.com since the match’s end, only 31 have come from Americans—that’s an average of less than one per hour. By comparison, 31 comments by Americans were posted in the first half-hour after the conclusion of the USA’s 1-1 tie against England.

In spite of what seems to be a slight policy shift, none of the undoubtedly numerous deleted comments that referenced the call in the first five hours after the match ended have been revived and posted. And there are many areas of discussion that still seem taboo, so we have no idea how many comments are still being deleted. As of this writing, for instance, no comment has been approved that mentions the referee by name, even as FIFA itself prepares to comment publicly on his performance on Monday.

And no comment has been approved that mentions (as do most newspaper articles about the match) the numerous soccer analysts and experts that have criticized the call, including Bob Ley and Alexi Lalas of ESPN (who called Coulibaly’s nullification “a disgrace”); CNN/SI’s Peter King (“Americans, and the world, should be outraged at FIFA”); the New York Times’ Jeff Klein (“Horrible performance from the Malian referee, who wrongly nullified what would have been the winning US goal!”); and even the British paper, the Guardian (“what looked like a perfectly good late winner was ruled out”), whose home team stood to benefit from the call.

Some other interesting FIFA-censorship-related tidbits have also been floating around, such as the organization’s decision to seize and destroy a Liverpool FC banner containing the words “Save Liverpool FC Hicks & Gillett Out,” according to Richard Buxton of Click Liverpool, because it “contravened their rules against obscene or vulgar images being displayed at games.” George Gillett and Tom Hicks are the unpopular American owners of the club.

Buxton also reports that FIFA “ejected 36 Holland fans from yesterday’s 2-0 win over Denmark for wearing mini-dresses designed by Dutch brewer Bavaria, citing ‘ambush marketing.’”

And here’s some interesting new wording from the capsule summary of the controversial match result on FIFA.com: “USA retrieved a 2-0 half-time deficit to earn a deserved draw with Group C rivals Slovenia.”

Emphasis added.

Here’s the news from today, according to the New York Times: 1,200 members of the National Guard have been sent to the border to “combat drug smuggling.” More drug-related violence can only be dealt with through greater enforcement, goes the Bush-McCain-and-now-Obama story. We’ve got to fight the war on drugs; to fight the drug criminals; to save the people from violence.

There’s just one flaw in this story: it’s got the causality going in the wrong direction. US drug policy is the cause of the current epidemic of violence and lawlessness in northern Mexico and along the border, not the cure for it. The more resources we devote to enforcing our drug prohibition, the higher we drive prices, the bigger the incentives to smuggle drugs, the bigger the spoils for the gangs of lawless criminals to whom we redirect the unimaginable profits of several massive, centuries-old industries, and the more these gangs will be willing to fight to the death over pieces of that enormous black-market pie.

By legislating common drugs out of the legal marketplace, we are creating a black market out of thin air. It is not hyperbole to suggest that US law is not just providing a subsidy of billions to the Sinaloa cartel—our laws have actually legislated the cartel, and its rivals, into existence.

Who stands to lose the most if we legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana and cocaine, and open these industries to legitimate companies? The Sinaloa cartel. We devote $11 billion of military and law enforcement resources to eliminating their competition and maintaining their monopoly power—and thus their staggering profits. They are probably the foremost advocates of the current US drug policy. Their worst nightmare would be for the marijuana industry to turn into something like tobacco: low-margin, heavily regulated, taxed, nonviolent, unglamorous, highly competitive, unable to command a risk premium. When was the last time you heard about a tobacco gang shooting?

The effects of US drug policy have never been felt more tragically in northern Mexico, where turf wars between rival drug cartels are fought. Ciudad Juárez, where the murder of innocent civilians is as commonplace as a fender-bender, is now confronting the very real prospect of a lost generation of youth—a generation so scared to walk the streets of its own city that it grows up as if in a coma, with fear the only coherent thread of civic life. In Juárez, beheadings are barely newsworthy. Is it any wonder that some of the civilians caught in this warfare would risk their lives to cross the border into the US?

A rational humanitarian policy would contemplate welcoming residents of Ciudad Juárez into the United States as war refugees. Why don’t we do this? Maybe it’s because admitting there’s a war in Mexico might mean confronting the horrifying truth that this war is ours, our failed war on drugs, and the citizens of Juárez, these would-be refugees, are our collateral damage. Washington now seems comfortable with the idea that we own the violence in Baghdad, yet the idea that we own the violence in Juárez is still Washington taboo. We don’t even believe we’re involved.

As Tax Cannabis 2010—a November 2010 referendum to legalize, tax, and regulate marijuana—gains steam in California and has a slim lead in public opinion polls, with vast bipartisan support amongst academics (especially social scientists) and medical doctors, it becomes more and more bizarre that the Obama administration, far from being merely mum on the topic, has come out strongly and repeatedly in favor of the current US drug policy. Even most right-wing commentators acknowledge that our drug policy disproportionately affects minorities, imprisoning and disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of minority citizens for private behavior with public health/safety risks that, in the case of marijuana (according to the American Medical Association), are vastly less than those of high-fructose corn syrup.

Let us, as Obama might say, be perfectly clear: our supposedly pro-minority, pro-human-rights, pro-diplomacy president holds the unambiguous position that the importance of preventing Americans from smoking herb dwarfs any concerns about the uncontained numbers of murders, Mexican cities on the brink of civil war, a lost generation in northern Mexico. The administration’s decision not to go after the medical marijuana dispensaries in California now seems like a sleazy handout to his Hollywood hippie base. It is clear that enforcing the marijuana prohibition is of paramount political importance to the administration, and that the DOJ and military intend to be swift and merciless with such enforcement anywhere near our national borders.

Can we use taxpayer money to create and maintain an unprecedented network of interior border checkpoints whose dogs sniff every single person driving along the interstate highways between Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas? Yes, we can. Can we shift the focus of our military forces and allocate thousands of troops from our national guard to hunt down people who want to transport bud across the Sonora desert? Yes, we can. Can we utilize our scarce prison beds and resources to imprison and disenfranchise 600,000 nonviolent Americans for passing joints around their living rooms, even as we furlough and parole murderers and rapists because we don’t have enough room for them? Yes, we can.

Protesting Arizona’s anti-immigrant laws has become fashionable in recent weeks, and it’s been nice to see some normally staid American authority figures (like mayors and police officers) stand up for the rights of Mexicans (and people who look Hispanic) in the US. Now how about an open conversation about the fact that the US drug prohibition has created a violent black market out of thin air and, in the process, brought upon northern Mexico such a scourge of violence that millions of innocent Mexican civilians have lost the basic opportunity to lead safe, civilized lives?

As of today, Obama is no longer a mere heir of the broken US drug policy. He isn’t just carrying on the torch of keeping hundreds of thousands of nonviolent pot smokers in jail for victimless crimes. He’s now doubling down in the war on drugs. He’s increasing the subsidies for the Sinaloa cartel. He’s raising their prices and profits—and incentives to fight over more and more turf—to unprecedented levels.

This is Barack Obama’s war now: the blood of Juárez is on his hands.

The Italian Ministry of Agriculture has a recent history of operating at the curious intersection of neofascism and culinary purism. Zaia’s “zero-tolerance policy” on food fraud became famous with his 2008 bust-up of cheating Brunello di Monalcino producers, which was hailed as a victory for consumers. But in a less-reported crackdown the following year, Zaia, a member of the extreme-right-wing Lega Nord—the political party that has advocated the seccession of Northern Italy—also instituted, with Berlusconi’s backing, a policy banning new “ethnic” restaurants from opening in certain northern Italian cities, including Lucca and Milan. It was a move that the left-wing newspaper La Stampa called “culinary ethnic cleansing.” Reporting on the policy, the Times of London quoted Lucca city spokesman Massimo Di Grazia as saying that “French restaurants would be allowed”; he was “unsure, though, about Sicilian cuisine. It is influenced by Arab cooking.” Continued the Times: “Asked if he had ever eaten a kebab, Mr Zaia said: ‘No—and I defy anyone to prove the contrary. I prefer the dishes of my native Veneto. I even refuse to eat pineapple.’” This, from the country’s Minister of Agriculture.

Sometime in 2001 or 2002, I recall meeting, and discussing pure-ingredient fervence with, Giorgio Alemanno, who was Italy’s Minister of Agriculture at the time (this was two Ministers ago). The man talked about wine with great passion. And like Zaia, he was also an absolute right-wing zealot. As mayor of Rome, Alemanno was famous for praising Mussolini, expelling immigrants, and mowing down gypsy camps. “Upon his election,” reported the Telegraph at the time, Alemanno “was greeted by crowds of supporters, among them skinheads, who chanted ‘Duce! Duce!’ and raised their arms in a fascist salute.” It’s interesting to see Zaia, with Berlusconi’s backing, continuing in this tradition.

Certainly, when we buy mozzarella di bufala—or Brunello di Montalcino—we want to get the real thing. But if we’re enjoying what’s sold as Brunello or bufala, and feel like we’re getting our money’s worth, is the cow/Cab crime really so great?

I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”

Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.

When I arrived in Portland last month, the first thing I wanted to do was buy a bike and get around the way the locals do. Since I wouldn’t be in town for too long, and it wasn’t clear that I’d be able to take the bike with me when I left, I wanted something extremely cheap.

There were bike shops on every other corner in Southeast Portland, the sort of Brooklyn-ish neighborhood where I was staying. I walked into what looked like the grungiest of them—a store that sold mostly used bikes. There was one employee, and he was heavily tattooed and seemed pretty cool. I completely leveled with him: I didn’t know anything about bikes, really; I could barely change a tire; I was only going to be in town for a little while, and I wondered if he had something cheap that I could use for puttering around town.

I know this is sort of quaint, but the last time I bought a bike, I think I spent $35, and it wasn’t hot. It was a road bike; it had 18 speeds, I think; it squeaked; and it served my needs (biking from my house to school every day) perfectly well. (The bike later died a peaceful death at Burning Man, but that was due to maltreatment, not poor quality.) I was looking for something like that.

The guy in the store asked me how much I wanted to spend.

I sort of stuttered my way and ultimately refused to answer the question because I was embarrassed to say something like “less than a hundred dollars,” for fear of coming off like Borat inspecting the Hummer before buying the ice-cream truck.

Yeah, the bike guy answered, he had something super-cheap for me, an old road bike that they’d fixed up. It wasn’t exactly my size, but it would do. It was a 1991 model, a Trek, I think; it was in good working condition, it had some newer components, and it came with a warranty. I could have it, he said, for $475.

So I went to another store. Same deal, more or less. There was one bike for $275, but it was a girl’s Raleigh from the 1960s with a wicker basket.

I started looking around the Web. At the down-to-earth-sounding Recyclery, another Portland used bike shop—and probably a great one—there are currently 59 used bikes on offer. But 34 of them cost more than $1,000, only eight are priced under $500, and there are none under $300. Even to rent a bike for one week from the Recyclery costs $175—more than I paid for my weekly rental car the previous time I was in Portland.

At Portland’s Costco, meanwhile—on the outskirts of the city—you can buy a brand-new Schwinn Midtown city bike with Shimano shifters for two hundred something dollars. But, according to the clerk there, those Schwinns aren’t moving.

I don’t doubt that the Schwinn Midtown is a far inferior bike, from the point of view of a bike connoisseur, to whatever’s being sold used in Portland. But you’ve got to love a city whose citizens put a set of moral/aesthetic principles—whether it’s riding a bike with proper disc brakes or refusing to support the Big Box stores—this far above their own financial well-being. And although every city has its bike aficionados, I think that in Portland, most people just buy rebuilt bikes locally because it feels right to do so, not because all these everyday bike riders can really tell the difference between Shimano TX-30 derailleurs and M-970 XTRs.

Still, what’s up with this bike micro-inflation? Why does there seem to be no market in Portland for used bikes that are actually cheap? Portland is otherwise a pretty cheap city. Beer is cheap. Used clothing is cheap. By major urban standards, housing is cheap, too, unless you compare it to the strip-mall-type cities. And certainly there are plenty of people in town who can’t afford to spend $475—never mind $1,000—on a bike.

I asked a few people in town about this, and got some general sense of agreement and common frustration: cheap bikes were impossible to find around here. The word on the street was that so many people were selling their cars (or taking their cars off the road) and using bikes to commute to work that there just weren’t enough bikes to go around. I also heard about a guy who was actually in the business of bicycle arbitrage—he would immediately snap up the few cheap bikes that would come up on Craigslist, fix them up a bit, put them back up on Craigslist, and make a good profit.

So I started looking at Craigslist—not just in Portland, but in other cities too, and not just at bike prices, but also at car and truck prices. I looked at a wide range of midsized-to-large cities that I thought represented a diversity of urban layouts, bike prevalence, wealth, and so on: Austin, Miami, New York City, Phoenix, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.

From each of these cities I collected an extremely basic data set: the asking prices for the 50 most recent cars/trucks and bikes advertised. I excluded children’s bikes, frame-only bikes, and non-working bikes; I excluded non-working cars and cars that were being sold for parts. I also excluded obvious dealer spam from each. Then, I looked at the medians. Here’s what happened:

Median price, first 50 items for sale on Craigslist, 8pm PDT, 8/13/09

I didn’t run any serious statistical tests on the data set. This is because there are a few fundamental problems—the largest being that we’re not comparing apples to apples in terms of what’s being sold. That is, we don’t know if the same types of bikes are being sold for more in Seattle than in Phoenix, or if there are different types of bikes being sold in the two markets. The ads also change so frequently that replicating these results might be difficult; and 50 data points might be too small a sample.

Still, whether it’s over/underpricing or just selective selling, what struck me about this informal little analysis was that not one city fell out of line in the inverse order. Where cars were selling for the most, bikes were selling for the least; where cars were selling for the least, bikes were selling for the most; and so on, inversely, in between.

So, it looks like even though there are tons of bikes and bike shops in Portland, there still aren’t enough sellers in town to satisfy the strong demand in this biker’s paradise. Perhaps, in the long run, when enough arbitrageurs start shuffling bikes around the country (and enough arbitrageurs start underpricing each other to drive down their margins), more cheap used bikes will become available in the bike-friendly cities.

In the meantime, if you’re a Portland or Seattle resident thinking of selling your car and going green, maybe you should drive down to Phoenix and ride a bike back. You’d leverage both sides of the inverse relationship—plus there’d be some beautiful scenery along the way.

Florence Fabricant, in a recent article, embodies a common attitude amongst American food writers when she reveals the results of an exhaustive search for the true recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana, one of Italy’s most beloved pasta dishes: “After half a dozen plates of it during a recent trip to Italy, one detail became clear: for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale—cured, unsmoked pig jowl.”

Although it would be a difficult hypothesis to test empirically, Andrea and I had the same immediate reaction to this statement—his from growing up in Italy, mine from living there for a while: in Italy, almost nobody would care in the least bit whether pasta all’amatriciana were “authentic.” People would care whether it tasted good.

Now, just because people in Italy wouldn’t care whether amatriciana were authentic doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The preservation of culinary history, lest old recipes be lost in time, is a noble endeavor. But historical documentation doesn’t seem to be the purpose of the food writers who go around enforcing amatriciana’s authenticity. It’s more the idea that there’s one, and only one, way to make this dish—a blend of I’ve-been-there-and-you-haven’t self-righteousness with cultural/culinary naïveté.

To wit: “Italians take guanciale for granted, but it’s fairly new to American kitchens. Almost all the recipes in American cookbooks,” continues Fabricant, “call for ordinary bacon—which is too smoky—or Italian pancetta, which is too lean…‘Good guanciale makes all the difference,’ said the actor Michael Tucker, an accomplished cook, who, with his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, has a house in Umbria. In his book, ‘Living in a Foreign Language’ (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), he describes buying guanciale from Ugo Mazzoli, the butcher in Campello sul Clitunno, near his house.”

Guanciale is lovely in amatriciana; few would dispute that. But Simone, the Genoese guy who taught me to make amatriciana, does it with pancetta—like his mother did. Would Simone love a well-made amatriciana with smoky American bacon, too? Of course he would. He’s not a lever-pulling lab rat. He’s just a dude who, like many other Italians, likes good food.

Is amatriciana made with guanciale? Yes.

Is it made with pancetta? Yes.

Is it made with Tyrolean speck? With French lardons? Probably, somewhere in Italy, yes.

To illustrate the absurdity of Fabricant’s point of view, Andrea offers the following hypothetical: imagine an Italian food critic undertaking a careful investigative journey through the American pastoral hinterland in search of the authentic hamburger. She tries a half-dozen burgers, reads a few cookbooks, and concludes, in her article in Corriere della Sera, that “for a hamburger to be authentically American, it must be made only with Wisconsin cheddar cheese, lettuce, and tomato, and it must be served with french fries.”

Fabricant is not wrong, exactly, about how to make a good plate of bucatini. But she, like too many food writers, constructs a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation full of Ugo Mazzolis harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta.

People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.

It’s one thing for a food writer to opine about which pizza style is his or her favorite—everybody seems to do it, whether in New York, New Haven, or Naples.

But it’s a breathtaking mistake for a seasoned food writer like Alan Richman, in his widely read new GQ evaluation of the top 25 pizzerias in America, first to completely misstate the definition of Italian DOC pizza; then to imply, without evidence, that the whole Italian population supports that misstated definition; and, finally, to use that misstated definition as the basis for a condemnation of the entire pizza culture in Italy. He writes:

“ITALIANS ARE WRONG. Not about cars or suits. About pizza, and they’re not entirely mistaken about that, only about crusts and buffalo-milk mozzarella…the Italians are proudest when they can substitute fresh mozzarella from the milk of buffaloes and label their pies Margherita DOC…In my opinion, buffalo mozzarella is pizza’s second-worst topping, exceeded only by whole anchovies… All that excess liquid has to go somewhere, which is why the bottom crust turns to mush, not that it was ever particularly crispy…this is why Italians need a knife and fork. This is why our pizzas are better than theirs.”

“The Italians are proudest” when they can substitute in buffalo-milk mozzarella and “label their pies Margherita DOC”?

The Italians aren’t wrong—Mr. Richman is, about just about everything. First of all, Margherita DOC doesn’t require buffalo-milk mozzarella. The rules set out by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana allow for either (1) mozzarella di bufala from Campania (water-buffalo-milk mozzarella); (2) mozzarella STG fior di latte appennino meridionale DOP, (a regular cow’s-milk mozzarella that can come from Campania, Molise, Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia, or Lazio); or (3) another cow’s-milk fior di latte. This from the statutory definition:

“Mozzarella: mozzarella di bufala campana D.O.P., mozzarella S.T.G. fior di latte dell’appennino meridionale D.O.P. o altro fiordilatte certificato.”

Ditto for the rules for pizza Margherita as set out by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, which not only states that either bufala or fior di latte is acceptable, but even gives a different name to a bufala pizza. Under the Italian Ministry’s definition, the regular “Napoletana Margherita” has fior di latte, not bufala; then there’s “Napoletana Margherita Extra,” which calls for bufala:

“Agli ingredienti base devono essere aggiunti, per la «pizza Napoletana Marinara», l’aglio e l’origano; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita Extra», mozzarella di bufala campana DOP, basilico fresco e pomodoro fresco; per la «pizza Napoletana Margherita», la mozzarella STG o fior di latte Appennino meridionale e basilico fresco.”

But Mr. Richman doesn’t stop at getting the definition wrong; he also suggests that all Italians, if offered the choice, would choose bufala—implying that they embrace, or somehow aren’t bothered by, the sogginess of the crust. Is Mr. Richman—who has “traveled 20,000 miles” in researching this extensive set of pizza rankings—unaware that the fior di latte-vs.-bufala crust-moisture debate is a raging, unsettled controversy in Italian gastronomical circles, both inside and outside of Naples? This is one of the world’s great food cultures we’re talking about, and its culinary community deserves better than the naïve assumption that they all just like their crusts soggy.

“I’ve eaten in Naples,” explains Mr. Richman. But he must not have eaten at (arguably) the city’s most famous pizzeria, Da Michele, which uses only fior de latte d’Agerola, and never mozzarella di bufala; they don’t like the excessive liquid that drips from bufala. And although there are many pizzerias in Naples that do put bufala on pizza, just about all of them also offer fior di latte, and customers are divided between the two options. In other regions of Italy, in my experience, the use of bufala is even less common.

To misunderstand the cultural norms of a foreign country is forgivable; we’ve all been guilty of that at some point or other. But to flippantly trash another country’s food culture on the basis of a set of statutory rules that one hasn’t even looked up is irresponsible journalism.

I think a retraction should be in order.

Wine is still the thing to accompany a family dinner or elaborate restaurant meal in southern Europe, which is why their per-capita wine consumption remains higher than ours. But because Americans increasingly tend to order wine at bars, and Europeans generally don’t, this gap is closing rapidly. The US now beats Italy in total wine consumption.

In Italy, amongst young professionals, a far more popular nighttime endeavor than going to the sort of upmarket (or so-called “gastronomic”) restaurant where you’d order wine is getting a big group together at a pizzeria. And contrary to US stereotypes, the Italians actually almost never drink wine with pizza—it’s strictly beer (or Coca-Cola).

In most of Spain, it’s the cervecería—not the wine bar—that defines the nighttime casual-eating-with-groups culture, and there, draft beer (“caña,” typically poured in tiny glasses) is beautifully paired with what’s often eaten: raciones of fatty jamón iberico and sweet pan con tomate; marinated fish, garlicky shellfish, and vinegary vegetables; boiled octopus drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with paprika; or pinxtos/canapés (bites of food served on slices of baguette), which often come free with each round of drinks.

When Spanish or Italian beer comes fresh from the tap, its elegant taste profile can yield extraordinary pleasure. Mahou, Nastro Azzurro, Estrella Damm, Forst, and Cruzcampo may not be dissimilar from each other, but they’re all models of balance, clean, bright, and refreshingly bitter. They’re usually poured properly—allowing the head to collect into something creamy and dense—and, like dry Basque sidra, they’re well suited to the occasion, which is precisely what seems to have been lost in translation in America’s rapid adoption of wine as a cocktail.

Even at Spain’s expensive restaurants, beer is often offered as an apéritif—an alternative to dry Manzanilla or Oloroso sherry, before you start with the wine—something I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

Because Spanish and Italian beer doesn’t have the sort of hopped-up, boozed-out complexity that caters to critics—it’s not trying to be Belgian or Oregonian—you won’t see them much at, say, New York’s beer bars, and there’s a popular misconception that these countries just don’t do beer well. (That misconception is backed up by the fact that when you order, say, Peroni by the bottle at a bar in the US, it almost always turns out to be something skunky and/or honeyed and legitimately disgusting. Don’t ever order Italian beer when it’s imported in bottles. But that’s an article for another day.)

Yes, the wine bar concept is spreading through southern Europe, and that might be applying a gentle upward pressure on wine consumption amongst the trendsters there.

But the wine bar is still really an American thing, and it hasn’t really yet permeated mainstream yuppie culture anywhere across the Atlantic. Generally speaking, in Europe, the words “wine bar” signal a New York fetish nightclub, or a restaurant with terrible pan-Asian cuisine and an overpriced list of Champagne magnums and Grey Goose bottle service. These places typically serve crappy imported beer, and often don’t even run a tap—the ultimate fuck you to the country’s authentic beer culture.

Why must hot bodies and a well-conceived drink program so rarely overlap?

On culinary televangelism and the Parkerization of cuisine

In the introduction to his book La Cocina al Desnudo (roughly “The Kitchen Laid Bare”), the chef Santi Santamaría writes: “one of the greatest challenges faced by today’s chefs is to avoid becoming the court jesters of the snobs and the posh.”

One of the highlights of FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, was a spirited hour-long debate on the status of Spanish cuisine between Mr. Santamaría (Santceloni, Racò de Can Fabes, EVO, Tierra; on the right end in the photo), one of Spain’s great culinary traditionalists, and José Carlos Capel (on the left end), a well-regarded food critic for El País who, generally speaking, embraces the avant-garde.

It was a debate to which Ferran Adrià, one of the pioneers of molecular gastronomy (the culinary movement to which Santamaría alternately refers as “cocina de la vanguardia,” “tecnoemocional,” and “cocina del laboratorio”), was surely invited—and didn’t come.

Perhaps Mr. Adrià felt no need to defend himself. In late April 2009, his restaurant, elBulli, was named the best in the world for the fourth year in a row in the annual survey of the World’s Top 50 restaurants, by the British Restaurant Magazine, while Santamaría is absent from the list entirely. Fellow molecular gastronomy houses The Fat Duck (UK), Noma (Denmark), Mugaritz (Spain), and El Celler de Can Roca (Spain) round out the rest of the top five. (The chefs of Noma and Mugaritz studied with Adrià.)

Santamaría, without being so immodest as to suggest that he, too, deserved at least some ranking in the top 50, hinted at the absurdity—and it really is an absurdity—that food critics and publications from the US and UK, regions mostly devoid of complex food traditions of their own, should be the judges of whether fideua, bollito misto, and blanquette de veau are now hopelessly passé, and whether a kitchen need be outfitted with a centrifuge, liquid nitrogen tanks, and stockpiles of sodium alginate and calcium chloride in order to be considered one of the world’s best.

That question is at the crux of a crisis in modern cuisine—a culture war. Although these men that have learned to make human beings breathe like dragons have been anointed as philosopher-kings by America’s culinary televangelists and food bloggers, what exactly is the composition of this jury? Does it represent any depth of food education? Any geographical breadth?

Restaurant’s top 50 list, which is determined by more than 800 food critics from around the world and sponsored by S. Pellegrino, is clearly influential—influential enough, at least, to come up in the discussion between Messrs. Santamaría and Capel.

But what are we to make of the fact that, the entire continent of Asia, home to the world’s greatest culinary bounty, has only two restaurants in the top 50—Les Creations de Narisawa in Tokyo (#20) and Iggy’s in Singapore (#45)—and they’re both French? Even more preposterously, the list tells us that the three best actual Asian restaurants in the world are in Sydney (Tetsuya’s, #17), New York (Masa, #27), and London (Nobu, #34).

As the wine guru Jancis Robinson has indirectly asked, what does it say about the composition and wisdom of the food media elite if this is their jury verdict?

Is this the Parkerization of the food world?

Yes, chemical pyrotechnics and scattered plating make for good food porn in magazines. And yes, it is interesting, at least intellectually, to watch the arcs of cuisine and modern art intersect in molecular gastronomy. Yet the notion that one must be a molecular gastronomist to be truly great restaurant—and that is, increasingly, the consensus view—is poisonous. It devalues both subtlety and directness. It devalues terroirs of all different sorts. It devalues the commitment to any one culinary tradition. It devalues the multi-generational emotional and even theoretical structures that define many great restaurants. And above all, it devalues pure deliciousness.

Are the world’s greatest chefs and restaurants—as many of its greatest winemakers and wineries have irreversibly done—being forced to reinvent themselves as pretentious pleasure pumps for the adolescent palates of an army of camera-wielding tourists who write for food blogs and lifestyle magazines?

Court jesters, indeed.

Spain’s Felix Solís Avantis is probably the biggest wine producer you’ve never heard of, pumping out more than 200 million liters per year. The company’s industrial facility in Valdepeñas (in La Mancha, near Ciudad Real) is more or less the Death Star of wine factories. The warehouse alone is the size of an airplane hangar, and it’s so mechanized that there is not a human being inside it: giant, sliding robots whisk the cases from place to place, storing and retrieving vast quantities of wine.

The most interesting thing about Solís, though, is that, according to Ana Escamilla González, the director of marketing, the company actually produces only 10 wines in Valdepeñas, but they’re bottled and labeled under 400 different brands around Spain and the rest of the world. On average, then, each wine gets about 40 different labels, different looks, and different prices. Ms. González told me that the international “presentations,” as she calls them, are created in consultation with local marketing specialists. The Russian bottle, for example, has a warrior surrounded by lots of gold flourishes, while the Japanese bottle, she says, has “the same warrior, but without the gold.”

“Versioning” a product—varying it slightly and selling it under different brand names—is a well-known technique in marketing courses at business schools; among other things, it’s often a way of getting around laws that ban price discrimination. A classic example in the IT literature is the adoption of a device that intentionally slows the page-per-minute speed of a laser printer, so that the company can then sell a so-called “crippled” version of the same printer at a lower price and reach an additional market segment. Tim Harford reports in Slate that IBM did the same thing with the 486 processor: “the cheaper version was the expensive version with some extra work done on the chip to reduce its speed.”

I can’t decide if it’s less brazen or more brazen to employ the technique when the product inside the package doesn’t vary at all. Clearly, this marketing department is familiar with the wine placebo effect. Maybe they have their own name for it. In any case, they probably don’t sit around discussing it—instead, they trade on it.

Should we stage a Boston Wine Party, and throw our wine into the Atlantic?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the bewilderingly diverse wines on display at this week’s FENAVIN, Spain’s national wine fair, is the price range: 2€–5€ is most common, trailed slightly by <2€ (a significant category, with strong representation from La Mancha, the wine fair’s home region) and 5€–10€.

In the 2€–3€ range are a vast assortment of sometimes steely, often aromatic, almost always appropriately acidic whites from Castilla-La Mancha and other lesser-known regions. If you want a 1994 or 1995 Gran Reserva from La Mancha—an eminently mature Tempranillo, Cabernet Sauvignon, or Tempranillo-Cabernet blend—it might cost you up to 6€.

All of this is a prescient reminder of the three-tined gouging of the American wallet—and, by extension, of the American palate—that defines our wine industry.

The first tine is regulatory: the unconscionable customs duties imposed at our borders, and, worse still, the preposterous bureaucratic labeling and testing rules that are imposed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. (Is there anything that more clearly reveals our government’s still-Puritanical view of wine drinking as a vice than this agency’s name?)

The irony of these idiotic rules, at least as concerns the importation of Spanish wine, is that the EU’s own regulation of so-called “quality wine” (i.e. non-table wine) is actually far more restrictive than our own domestic wine laws, which allow all sorts of preservatives and additives that would be illegal in Europe.

Yet we force Spanish wine producers to spend thousands of dollars in farcical chemical analysis (a boondoggle for sham chem-lab outfits that have been legislated into existence) and an onerous label-approval process. These arbitrary, extortionist barriers to entry function like a medieval wax seal, blocking much of Europe’s best-value wine from ever showing up in America.

This protectionist regime reminds me of the brief rule of Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador. Before President Bucaram was removed from office after six months for “mental incapacity,” he famously (okay, famously in Ecuador, anyway) imposed a 1000% “luxury tax” on imported wines and liquors. The toxic effects of the luxury tax on consumers were a principal reason for his ouster. (The silver lining was that Ecuador got its first woman president, Rosalía Arteaga, who had been Bucaram’s vice-president—before the legislature got rid of her, too, two days later.)

US wine policy doesn’t just rob consumers blind—it also takes away pressure on our own producers to compete globally on price, which ultimately works against them. Ever wonder why the US exports so little wine?

The second tine is legislative: the extraordinary markups that importers and distributors still take are protected by a state-by-state three-tier system (importer–distributor–retailer/restaurant) that was set up at the repeal of Prohibition for the sole purpose of limiting how much Americans drink.

In the civilized modern world, wine stores are allowed to buy wine from wine producers, and sell it at a reasonable markup. In our bizzarro world, a middleman is legislatively mandated.

These archaic blue laws and the industry that they have engendered—artifacts of an era in which the religious fervor that brought about Prohibition was still a very real cultural norm—continue to rob consumers of billions of dollars, year after year.

The third tine is what happens in restaurants: wine multiples of 2.5x, 3x, or even 4x. When US consumers are being asked to pay $40 at retail for a wine that sells in Spain for 3€, we’re exactly matching Bucaram’s 1000% markup.

In short, if we were to do a Spanish version of The Wine Trials—Fearless Critic’s guide to inexpensive wines—its price cut-off wouldn’t be anywhere near the $15 per bottle that it is in the US.  would probably be limited to wines under 5€, or US$6.65—or perhaps even under 3€, or US$2.25.

The Spanish wine industry, of course, deserves a lot of credit for pricing so reasonably. Congress should be deeply ashamed of its consistent record of preventing our own country’s industry from doing so.