Posted on 01/14/2002 6:35:59 PM PST by Dubya_gal
A man's gotta chew The headquarters of M&T looks harmless enough: burly men on forklift trucks stack wooden crates; a truck delivers industrial-sized multipacks of Diet Coke. But M&T is the New York nerve centre of a dangerous phenomenon that on Sunday evening struck at the very heart of American government - the pretzel. It's not as if Tom Ridge, the US director of homeland security, doesn't have enough on his plate already. But this weekend the president was at home with his two dogs, watching the Baltimore Ravens play the Miami Dolphins, when he forgot to chew a pretzel properly, choked, blacked out and fell to the floor, bruising his left cheek and cutting his lip. He thought it only lasted a few seconds, said White House spokesman Ken Lisaius, be cause when he came to, the dogs were where they were before he blacked out - albeit "looking at him a bit strangely". (This may not have been due to the pretzel: Spot and Barney are known to harbour concerns about the nature of the president's relationship with senior executives of the Enron corporation.) "I could not find any reason that this would happen again," said the president's doctor, Richard Tubb, seemingly overlooking the possibility that Bush might, say, eat another pretzel and forget to chew it properly. And so the full PR artillery of the pretzel industry was readying itself yesterday at M&T, which supplies the street-corner vendors of Manhattan from its midtown warehouse and bakes large, soft pretzels at its sister factory, Makkos. "I think," says Richard Berger, Makkos director of sales, "that Mr Bush was probably eating a hard pretzel. There are similarities, but we make soft pretzels - crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. I wouldn't say we look down on hard pretzels. They're just different." The distinction matters. Soft pretzels are about six inches across, topped with large chunks of salt and sold hot at a dollar a piece. In a city rightly championed for its wealth of street food, they are a curious anomaly: they are the most popular of all, and yet they taste of cardboard, except when coated, as they are by most New Yorkers who eat them, in copious amounts of mustard. Then they taste of mustard. The hard variety has the same three-hole shape - pretzels were originally baked by a sixth-century German monk, according to legend, to represent the Holy Trinity, while the folded bread looks like arms in prayer - but they come at a tenth the size, and much tougher. They were invented by accident, the legend runs, when a baker fell asleep and forgot to remove them from the oven. Hard pretzels are sold in bags, and they taste of thicker cardboard. The White House is remaining tight-lipped as to which kind the president had been eating. Buying and eating a soft pretzel from Fuhad Hossain, who runs a mobile stand on a windy corner outside the Port Authority bus terminal, proved remarkably non-hazardous. "I've never had a customer choke," said Hossain, 25, who used to work at McDonald's. "I like this better than my old job. The customers like the food better. And they don't choke, so I don't know what Bush was doing. I liked Bill Clinton better." Would hard pretzels prove more lethal? Tony Daccache, the fast-talking clerk at the Happy Deli on Eighth Avenue, proudly displayed his corner shelf crammed full of varieties: sourdough hards, sourdough thins, honey whole wheats, butter-flavoured and honey mustard. He had heard about the president and the pretzel, and he wasn't impressed. "Let me tell you: you gotta chew. He didn't chew? Of course he choked. Listen. These are the number-one snack in America, as far as I know. Number one. I guess it's because they fill you up." Daccache insisted no customer had ever choked on a Happy Deli pretzel. "What's wrong with you? It's their fault if they do, anyway! They gotta chew." I chewed (on a sourdough hard, $2.99 a packet). I didn't choke, but it did seem a more realistic possibility that one might. Daccache wasn't in any danger of choking, though: he didn't like pretzels much himself, he said. Bill Daucherty, sales director of Wege's Pretzels, another major manufacturer, took a pragmatic view. "We know the president doesn't chew his food so well, but the attitude we take is: all publicity is good publicity. It shows you need to chew your pretzels" - he paused, remembering his PR role - "but it also shows the president had chosen a healthy snack, which is what pretzels are. But you do have to chew them." Those who fear that the president's pretzel scare might distract him from the war on terrorism have little to fear. In fact, it turns out, pretzels have a proven record in fighting Islamist fundamentalism, says Albert Milanese, who runs Martin's Pretzels, gourmet suppliers of the soft version. "It was in the 16th century, when Vienna was under siege from the Turks - it was the pretzel bakers who were up all night, working, and they heard the Turks coming and woke the rest of the town." The attackers had tunnelled underneath the city walls, but the Viennese, alerted to the threat, routed them. "So there's sort of a historic parallel." The battle was a bloody affair that left many dead. It could have been so much simpler. The Viennese could have offered the invaders a bag of sourdough hards, sat them down in front of a football match, and let nature take its course.
A pretzel made President Bush faint - but is America's favourite snack really a lethal weapon? Oliver Burkeman investigates
Tuesday January 15, 2002
The Guardian
Two weeks ago, beneath the riotous neons of Times Square, New York police officers were on alert, scanning the crowds of New Year revellers with radiation detectors. They feared that a terrorist might detonate a "dirty" nuclear bomb. But the real threat to US national security, it turns out, may have been lingering two blocks away, in an anonymous warehouse of corrugated iron and twisted barbed wire in Manhattan's meat-packing district.
Bill Clinton : "I did not inhale."
George W Bush: "I did not chew."
I heard that as well. Charles seemed to think Imus was off his rocker for suggesting it.
While I don't think Bush has been hitting the bottle, I am having a hard time buying this pretzel misadventure.
Exept...you just can't make this stuff up! (LOL)
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