Lauren Bloomberg

Center stage at GoogaMooga in Prospect Park. Check out more photos from GoogaMooga here.

There is no denying that Saturday's GoogaMooga was a mess. Lines poured into one another and waits topped over an hour. Beer cards were sold and then couldn't be redeemed. Food and drink ran out. All in all, it was not a good scene. But did you really expect anything different? This was a first run festival in a first-time venue. Even Woodstock (not that this was anywhere as epic as Woodstock) had plenty of problems! The big difference (well, one of the hundred differences)? No smartphones. In 1969, the revelers were unable to air their grievances on Twitter (or tweet post-production about how there was no service for tweeting) for the world to read -- then have their tweets picked up and re-posted on blogs. At Woodstock everybody just got stoned.

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From the series The Butcher's Shop (1580 to 1590) by Annibale Carracci

As we've discussed here many times before, we are in the midst (some might say on the downward slope) of a pop-culture bubble, wherein an exorbitant amount of everyone's time and money is spent consuming food, thinking and reading about food, stockpiling food, seeking out new food by hopping from restaurant to restaurant, and generally being obsessed by food in a way that certain classes might have been able to in eras before us, but probably never on this sort of scale.

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Received 12:02 a.m. (our time), bowl of noodles at Ippudo in Tokyo. Red bowl! (photo: Tracy Van Dyk)

Tracy Van Dyk (FiTR San Francisco correspondent) on the Tokyo Ippudo: "There was no wait. There was no English sign outside either."

For comparative purposes:

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I'm still thinking and reading about Maurice Sendak, who died yesterday at the age of 83. And I just came across something new (to me) based on my favorite of his books. In 1980, American illustrator Gene Deitch made a short animation of Sendak's controversial In the Night Kitchen, published in 1970. It has the same unsettling, surreal qualities:

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"Every time The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs was mentioned, Stan's dad tossed his cookies."

We are swimming in a sea of food wonderfulness, and trite positive imagery surrounding our means of sustenance is omnipresent. But the history of the English language is replete with food imagery and metaphors being used in a negative way; here are some of Fork in the Road's favorite examples. Proving that everyone didn't always love food as much as we do. Perhaps you can suggest some expressions we've missed.

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I'm thinking about fruits as political symbols because of the Occupy Wall Street protesters I observed yesterday. There were some big crowds in Bryant Park in the morning and hundreds of protesters marched for the rights of immigrant workers in the U.S.--many of them carried images of the tomato as their symbol. This one caught my attention, a tomato inscribed with a single word, dignidad.

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Africa, not actually waiting to be discovered

There's an interesting story in The Wall Street Journal about how we should get ready for a "Nigerian P.F. Chang's" because African food is the next big thing.

There is only one largely unexplored continent left -- and it isn't Antarctica. With the exception of North African and Ethiopian cuisine, there has been very little foodie-world attention devoted to the flavors and foods of the world's second-largest continent.

The whole Africa-is-waiting-to-be-explored thing is a bit tiresome, but it's true that New York hasn't exactly embraced a range of African cuisines. What's frustrating is the author's explanation:

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At Kaia, your bunny chow comes with a full range of chutneys and other condiments.

It sounds really playful, doesn't it? But the South African specialty of bunny chow has some darker underpinnings. A specialty of the city of Durban, and specifically of the ethnically Indian population there, it consists of a Pullman loaf of white bread hollowed out with curry poured inside. Originally, the dish was vegetarian.

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Yesterday, Fork in the Road put up a quiz, asking you to match up expressions that represented hash-house lingo of the 19th century, and diner slang of the 20th, with the names of the dishes that engendered them.

Now here are the matchups.

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Invented dialect spoken here ...

New York City is famous for several schools of what might be called waiter's lingo, or lunch-counter slang. In the 19th-century hash houses of the city -- where a nickel bought a full meal that often included a plate of beans -- a steak might be called "slaughter in the pan" and a Napoleon pastry, "fallen greatness."

[Or you can skip the quiz entirely, lazybones, and just view the answers here.]

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