Commentary Archive — Karen Stabiner

The restaurant lover’s guide to picking a president

Los Angeles Times

We judge presidential candidates on so many extraneous criteria: the style and color of their clothes, their hair, their height; whether they laugh or smile or scowl.

The legendary food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote, “First we eat. Then we do everything else.” In that spirit, I think it’s our patriotic duty to add how and where Kamala Harris and Donald Trump dine out to the list. It turns out not to be extraneous at all.

Swing state women: Time to rewrite history.

The Boston Globe

When I was 17, I was denied the editor’s job at my high school newspaper because I was a girl — which I know because years later the faculty sponsor confessed and apologized.

When I was in my twenties, I got a job at a magazine where the men who did the hiring secretly considered dress size a job qualification, and months later watched the copy desk threaten a walkout to make sure a wildly capable size 10 got a job.

The Walzes: food czar and empath

Minnesota Star Tribune

A two-part series: “Tim Walz, food czar?” and “Gwen Walz’s empathy”

“We are not playing around.”

It was January 22, 1990. I know the date because somebody on the news had just mentioned the seventeenth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

‘American Fiction’, Alzheimer’s, and mid-century moms

Boston Globe

We bemoan the onset of Alzheimer’s, yet having seen ‘American Fiction’ twice, I can finally consider the possibility that my mom had some kind of disconnected peace, absolved at last of her parental responsibilities.

A mountain of food? No thanks.

Boston Globe

The big platter of food in the photograph looks so good: a mountain of seafood, roasted vegetables, and rice.

Oh well. Guess I’ll go somewhere else for dinner.

What’s the worth of a Michelin star?

Los Angeles Times

Fine dining needs a therapist. Restaurants at the high end of the spectrum — ambitious chefs, multiple courses, impeccable service and prices that reflect all the effort — are having an understandable identity crisis. Getting to the top of the mountain takes a toll. Staying there can mean a world of pain.

Chef David Kinch closed his lauded Los Gatos, Calif., restaurant, Manresa, on Dec. 31, after 20 years and three Michelin stars. The work, he said, had been “backbreaking.” He’s ready to shift his attention to his bread bakery and two casual places.

I live in Seattle, just west of Los Angeles.

The bike path is lovely in September, first thing in the morning, the fog thick and low, the waterfront deserted. In TruSeattle, way up north, it is ninety degrees and sunny, but in NuSeattle, the town formerly known as Santa Monica, in otherwise sunny southern California, it is grey and cool. Last weekend it rained, both mornings.

We used to be able to cope, back when this coastal weather pattern ended in June; in fact, we were so smug about paradise that we gave a funny nickname to the one less than perfect month. June Gloom meant thirty cloudy days interrupted by a couple of hours of late afternoon sun if we got lucky. That was okay. We had the rest of the summer to look forward to bright sun, ocean breezes, and no need for air conditioning.

How will the movies tell our stories if neighborhood restaurants are gone?

The Counter

Subtract restaurant scenes from your favorite movies and the world gets a whole lot duller—but that sound you hear is tomorrow’s memorable locations shutting their doors for good.

I was raised to believe that good food came in store-bought packages, but homemade jam got me through quarantine summer

The Counter

My mom was a decent cook, but my, how she loved convenience. Anything frozen or prepackaged, to make dinner easier, and anything store-bought for dessert. She was hardly lazy; that wasn’t it. She was scared of dirt, the kind that clings to food that grows, which surely contained a germ or tiny bug that would kill us all. I do not exaggerate.

Mother of the Bride

The New York Times

A five-article series, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

I vow to not jinx the Cubs by watching even one game

Chicago Sun-Times

The goat's got nothing on me.

It's 1984 – we all remember 1984 – and I've just moved into a house with the man who in three months will become my husband. He's one of those Cubs fans who can rattle off batting averages and specific plays. Me, I just love the Cubbies. I grew up in Skokie; it was the only option.

Reno's retirement

Los Angeles Magazine

I have never been an absolutist about relationships, but four years ago, when we acquired a horse, I was adamant about how this had to end. I told our twelve-year-old daughter that the day she went to college, he would go back to the sale barn he came from, to be sold to the next little girl who was ready to fall in love. A horse was a big financial stretch for us, but we told ourselves we could handle it, in great part because we knew the effort was finite.

A proper greeting (and it isn't 'Hey')

The Los Angeles Times

Hey, reader.

If you bristle ever so slightly at the presumed familiarity of that salutation, you're almost surely over 40, and you likely grew up well north of the Mason-Dixon line.

If you say "hey" back, the demographic possibilities are a lot broader. Everyone from anywhere who was born after 1980 seems to have adopted this onetime Southern regionalism, as have over-40s who work in a business that uses "trending" as a verb and requires them to stay forever young.

Summer cooking : The corn chronicles

Los Angeles Times

One man, who eats complicated foods and sophisticated wines, confessed that, for all the extravagant dishes he has sampled, he has always longed to taste fresh corn.

A realist asked me what I would do if the kernels didn't form properly, and for a moment I imagined myself the heroine of an O'Henry short story, sneaking out in the dead of night to paste a healthy ear of supermarket corn on the stalk, to spare Sarah the heartbreak of an inedible ear.

A VW van for your feet

Los Angeles Times

You had to have been there. For less than 40 bucks — maybe 30, who remembers? — a weird and compelling pair of sandals, nothing more than natural leather straps crisscrossed on top of a fat suede platform, with a name straight out of an orthopedic shoe catalog: Kork-Ease. They took a certain segment of the female population by storm in the 1970s, and now they're back, the price adjusted for inflation, you bet.

As blue jeans fade, so does individuality

Los Angeles Times

Listen, the car dealer in my neighborhood has a great deal on a new Mercedes. It's got everything — a ding in the left rear bumper, a little crumple in the front grill, a paint scrape on the driver's door, a missing hubcap — and he's only going to charge an extra $4,000 for all those custom touches.

This president gets a 'No' vote

Los Angeles Times

Too much prime-time soap opera, not enough reality 'Commander in Chief' is not the distaff White House of feminist dreams.

First, the disclaimer: My husband, teenage daughter and I are inveterate watchers of "The West Wing." Having had quite enough of the reality series that is the Bush administration, we have for years used "The West Wing" as both our escape and an ongoing current-events tutorial.

What Yale women want

Los Angeles Times

If the last generation of women obsessed about cracking the glass ceiling, a new crop of college undergrads seems less interested in the professional stratosphere than in a soft — a cushy — landing.

The New York Times recently got its hands on a Yale University questionnaire in which 60% of the 138 female respondents said that they intend to stop working when they have children, and then to work part time, if at all, once the kids are in school.

The rise and fall of the female waistband

Los Angeles Times

Is there a mother anywhere in the United States who has not had an argument with her daughter over a waistband — or rather, the lack of one? A walk down any retailer's aisle presents an array of jeans that come to a screeching halt a full latitude shy of the waist. They seem to defy the laws of gravity, except when they don't, and we're treated to more information about a stranger's taste in underwear — brand, color and size — than we might have wanted to know.

Girls want the media to shape up

Los Angeles Times

The television series "Fat Actress" is like a yo-yo diet. Kirstie Alley looks blissful in the credits, boogieing with an abandon that covers entire ZIP Codes - but what about those Jenny Craig ads that reassure us about how much weight she's losing? A fat actress isn't really happy, it seems, unless she's headed for thin.

Everywhere we look, we see the contradictions of a culture obsessed with women and weight: Big is beautiful, as long as it's not too big; you can't be too rich or too thin, but please, honey, don't be anorexic. Emphatically skinny is still in, but fat has achieved a certain political correctness; it's been redefined as a healthy rejection of the undernourished look.

Send her to the ash heap

Los Angeles Times

It is time to retire Cinderella. The penniless gal saved by a handsome prince has been a Hollywood favorite ever since Disney's animated version hit the screen in 1950, but "The Prince & Me," the latest retread, proves that the story has run out of steam. The target audience -- tween-age and teenage girls -- stayed away from it in droves, as well as from several other recent versions of the once-unassailable myth. What used to work doesn't anymore, confounding executives who await the release of this summer's fairy tales with growing apprehension.

Can separate ever be equal? For girls, answer isn't simple

Los Angeles Times

For more than 30 years, Title IX has prohibited gender discrimination at any school that receives federal funding. We think of it as the legislation that led to parity in athletic programs, but Title IX did much more than that: Among other things, it prohibited single-sex classes in public schools unless there was documented proof of inequity in the coed classroom.

Last week, that changed. The Bush administration issued revised Title IX guidelines that will allow single-sex public schools and classes. Separate but equal seems to be staging a comeback, at least where gender is concerned.

The trouble with 'girl trouble'?

Chron.

If girls are made of sugar and spice, the spice must be hot pepper flakes--or so it would seem from the run of bad press they have received this summer. A spate of new books tells us our daughters are mean or aspiring to be, sexually aggressive or about to be, wilder than we want to think, downright nasty and as self- doubting as ever. We seem particularly eager to read about the mess we have made: Check any bestseller list and you will find teen girls in trouble.

Sarah's party dress

Los Angeles Times

It looked to me like the right dress. Calf length, shimmery enough for a party dress, big flowers splashed all over and a demure white collar and cuffs. It had the sort of full skirt that spun when an 8-year-old twirled around, always the deal maker for my daughter. The saleswoman offered to hold it until I picked up Sarah from school. I figured this whole dress issue would be retired before dinner.