Hightower Lowdown

Are you ready for New Year's Eve? I don't mean the usual reservations and a bottle of bubbly, but the serious, millennium ending dawning of the new year and dreaded Y2K bug. As the clock ticks into 2000, goes the warning from some seers, computers worldwide will malfunction, and the result will range somewhere between global chaos and Armageddon. Survivalists are preparing for the worst, building bunkers and stocking them with sacks of food, vats of water, and plenty of guns and ammo.

But another class of people is concerned not merely with being deprived of food, but deprived of gourmet food.

There is already a major run on the specialty markets, from the gourmands filling their in home bunkers with tins of pate, imported jams, Grey Poupon, extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, Macadamia nuts, cans of organic vegetables, a case of red, a case of white, and chocolate covered espresso beans. And, of course, water[-- ] but bottled Pellagrino or Perier, my dears, definitely not that stuff in plastic jugs. As one New York foodie told the New York Times, "Just because we're in the dark doesn't mean we're not going to eat well." Let the masses eat powdered eggs— he'll be dining on insalata di tonno, cannellini e cipolla.