Culinary Metaphor Watch

In the Nov. 13 New Yorker, Rebecca Mead reviews Alex Kuczynski's Beauty Junkies, a "memoir-exposé" about cosmetic surgery.

Over the course of a decade, starting at the age of twenty-eight, [Kuczynski] received Botox and collagen injections, microdermabrasion, liposuction, an upper eye-lift, and a shot of a mucuslike substance called Restylane, which left her blubbering into a mug of vodka while sitting on her bathroom floor, her upper lip accidentally inflated to "the size of a large yam."

Not just a yam, a large yam. But here's the good part:

A decade or so ago, for about a minute, Kuczynski and I moved in the same circles, and she once gave me a recommendation for a dermatologist, whom I visited for a single consultation. The doctor--possibly the same one who later gave Kuczynski the yam lip--was ten years my senior, and had clear, translucent skin that glistened pinkly, like prosciutto that had been sliced to an inviting, tissue-paper thinness, and she said that if I, too, started undergoing facial peels...

Would you take it as a compliment if someone compared your face to a slice of fatty, salty ham?

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A little extra: I had a Culinary Metaphor Watch, Election Edition in the works but blogger helped me inadvertently delete it. Is anyone using the new blogger? Is the new blogger less likely to screw things up as the old blogger sometimes does? Anyhow, it was about how the right is associated with manly meat and potatoes and the left with girly-man food. I had a great quotation from a CNN Crossfire episode where Bob Novak talks about how much he enjoys burgers and Paul Begala proudly declares his love of Cobb salad. Then there was a right-wing editorial in the Chicago Tribune about John Kerry's moronic botched joke that contained a derisive line about Kerry existing on a diet of lentils and diet soda. And I was going to talk about the old idea of liberals as the "Brie and Chablis" set and refer to Geoff Nunberg's book Talking Right and Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? Anyhow, I intended to recreate that entry but then the election came and went and the urgency isn't there any more. Now that the Dems have more power, it seems less appropriate to kvetch about Rove-style kulturkampf. Trust me, though, it would have been killer.