I have been vilely deceived!
It all started almost exactly a year ago, when I saw him for the first and last time. It was sunset. I was driving. He crossed the road from tree to tree with a pair of powerful flaps before my eyes. “An oriole! An oriole!” I shouted immediately, ecstatic, aware of the value of the sighting. With her ostentatious lemon-yellow plumage of a diva with tropical aspirations, her exquisite taste for eyeliner and its coral red beak, the oriole, the Gina Lollobrigida of birds, is elusive and rarely seen outside its dressing room. That day being the eve of my birthday, I considered it my great gift.
I am fond of birds. Literally amateur: as far as they are concerned, I swim in a sea made of ignorance and admiration in equal parts. I know just enough to feel ignorant. I use a mobile application that captures the sounds of nearby birds and identifies them. The moments I turn it on shine a little brighter with the brilliance of discovery. I see the images of the birds appear on the screen to the sound of the trills. Little by little I learn to distinguish them without help.
I’ve been completely happy for a week now. These days, in the morning, a fluted melody sounds in my garden, a single elegant woodwind phrase, as if underwater, between the pack of sparrows and the shrill acrobatics of the swallows playing at top gunand the app shows me the image of the oriole!
The first time it happened, I ran to Twitter to shout cheers!, and among the applause of the public and the displays of joy from my followers, a couple of ominous voices from expert naturalists appeared calling for calm: “be careful with the starling, it will kill you.” “He’s playing it.” “Catastrophists!, Pythonesses!, Sad!”, I responded, intoxicated with excitement. But then I closed the app and started reading about the starling, the king of synchronized aerial dance shows.
I was amazed by what I discovered about his extraordinary vocalization capacity. Male starlings have two types of song: the cry, intended to mark the territory for other males, and the song itself, which serves as a magnet to search for a mate. For a female starling, the more diverse and florid her song is, the more attractive a male will be. With this in mind, starlings have become virtuoso plagiarists, imitating not only the songs of other birds, but also human sounds, such as car horns or ambulance sirens. In the trenches of the First World War they were hated by soldiers because they imitated the sound of falling shells.
That same night, before dinner, I went out to the terrace, activated the app, and there it was: the black starling. No sign of the oriole. I did the same the following days. In the morning, in the sunlight, the starling dressed as a diva. At night he showed his true identity.
Many restaurants do the starling. They imitate slogans, songs, slogans that have the power to attract customers:
“Organic!” shout the neon lights in establishments whose menus are full of quinoa or goji berries, labeled with a seal indicating that they have been grown without pesticides, yes, even if they have been grown a thousand kilometers away and burning diesel to be transported here.
“Proximity product!”, say the signs, and the letters do not lack the avocado, which, although it may have been planted on the Peninsula, has required emulating in a land ravaged by drought the conditions of the tropical climate of which It is original. Proximity based on leverage and shoehorn and with collateral damage at the expense of the taxpayer.
The song “local cuisine!” is even funnier. Proximity, proximity, roots in a territory are not limited solely and exclusively to the ingredients, but also to the cooking techniques: just start looking for casserole noodles, widow potatoes, legume stews, fish romescos. , stews or broths on the menus of restaurants in areas where these preparations are historical to be missed.
The trill “market cuisine!” It is to laugh so as not to cry. The expression was first coined in 1976 by Paul Bocuse, the so-called Pope of the kitchen. At his restaurant in Lyon, the chef didn’t know what he would cook for his customers before he went to the market. The menu was decided throughout the morning depending on what the farmers offered at their stalls. That’s market cuisine. The oriole does not have a fixed letter. For years, swarms of starlings have offered the same tataki of supermarket salmon, rather than from the market, but they know that the slogan “market cuisine” sells, even though they have no idea what it means. It is also not strange to find distracted octopus legs, offered on cards that read “Mediterranean cuisine.” I say distracted because neither the Dakhla nor Agadir fishing grounds are in the same sea as the Balearic Islands.
Actually, I feel bad about bringing the birds into this. Let’s not call liantes restaurants starlings. Let’s call them morning cantamanas.
#Market #local #organic #Mediterranean #cuisine #ways #deceive