Pink Eyed Jim’s Blog

It’s lucky that the people at work have me to save them from themselves. Why, just the other day, Jeremy (one of the chefs) suggested that we call his calamari dish “Calamari alla Puttanesca.” Now wait just a god-damned minute here, Jeremy. You can’t say things like that at Rutgers!

If you, the reader, are slightly confused at this point, good. You should be. Rutgers University’s antipathy for freedom of speech doesn’t make any sense.

In order to lower your level of confusion, I will at least tell you what “puttanesca” has to do with Rutgers’ antipathy for freedom of speech.

You see, one of the popular spots on campus for Rutgers students is the “Grease Trucks” which are all in a Rutgers-owned parking lot across from Scott Hall. These trucks have been making “fat sandwiches” since the 70’s. The typical fat sandwich is some permutation of a few basic ingredients, all stuffed onto either a steak roll or a pita. The ingredients range from cheese steak to mozzarella sticks to chicken fingers to burgers to gyro meat to veggie burgers to fries. The sandwiches are all given sophomoric names (no surprise that the grease trucks are all of a hundred or so feet from “frat row,” Union Street) such as the Fat Bitch, Fat Bastard, Fat Darrell, Fat Dyke, Fat Filipino and so on.

Rutgers decided back in February that these names had persisted long enough. Groups of students complained that the names led to stereotyping and (though you’ll never find out how) domestic violence.

“This is part and parcel of social progress,” she said. “It may seem small, but these [sandwich names] are part of a general climate of insensitivity toward the LGBT community and a lack of respect for racial ethnic and national differences, as well as for women as a whole.”

Then why “puttanesca?”Epicurious.com has an internet food dictionary, which begins its entry for “puttanesca” as such:

puttanesca sauce; alla puttanesca
[poot-tah-NEHS-kah]
Generally served with pasta, this sauce is a spicy mélange of tomatoes, onions, capers, black olives, anchovies, oregano and garlic, all cooked together in olive oil. A dish on a menu described as alla puttanesca signals that it’s served with this sauce.

Seems benign enough, doesn’t it? The entry continues:

The name puttanesca is a derivation of puttana , which in Italian means “whore.” According to one story, the name purportedly comes from the fact that the intense fragrance of this sauce was like a siren’s call to the men who visited such “ladies of pleasure.”

How dare those crazy Italians name a dish after whores?!? Don’t they know that that’s not how we do things at Rutgers, because naming dishes after prostitutes and anything else generally considered offensive simply reinforces stereotypes and somehow (incredibly) leads to domestic violence.

Why is Puttanesca named after whores? This is where it all breaks down, folks. Epicurious says “the name purportedly comes from the fact that the intense fragrance of this sauce was like a siren’s call to the men who visited such ‘ladies of pleasure.’” Sicilianculture.com says:

at the end of the evening, the prostitutes would come begging at local restaurants for leftovers. This sauce was made of all leftover ingredients. So basically, it can contain anything, the Italians NEVER throw away anything, and if there was sauce on the stove, anything that may be going bad was put into the simmering sauce.

So either the sauce is named because of its seductiveness, because it’s a sauce the prostitutes used to cook, or because it was a “whore” of a sauce - made to take any leftover ingredients that might be lying around. I’ve even seen the suggestion that it was so named because the average housewife could, after a clandestine meeting (read: affair) while her husband was away, make a puttanesca sauce that tasted like a long-simmered sauce in time for him to arrive home!

Hmm…

I understand that some people are very sensitive little flowers that practically bruise in the wind. I understand that some people think that the jokes are about them.

Don’t flatter yourself.

I also understand that a sandwich called a “Fat Nigger” never would have made it past the drawing board. I don’t agree with that fact either. So why tolerate the offense when “directed” at Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, or Transgenders? Why have the Italians tolerated puttanesca for decades and decades?

Because they realize that it is the slightly poetic and highly ironic name of a dish that they’ve come to love. And if it’s the prostitutes who invented the dish, maybe the Italians have come to say, “I still don’t approve of those whores, but they make a damn good pasta sauce.”

Granted, no one says “I still don’t approve of the LGBT community, but those ‘Fat Bitches’ sure are good.” But I’ve yet to hear somebody rally around the name of the sandwich as a call against that community, just as there have been no riots in Italy where the people have been chanting “down with those puttanescas.”

The RUGG website laments, “This issue is not one of free speech versus political correctness but rather how we as a community want to treat each other.”
Don’t you idiots realize that you turned it into an issue of free speech when you caused the University to force the vendors to cover their signs, and eventually change them (at significant cost to themselves) against their discretion? If the issue is supposedly “how we as a community want to treat each other” then why are you treating members of your community as though they don’t have their right to freedom of speech?

We love to chant platitudes without thinking of how we’re being completely hypocritical at the same time.