Hello and welcome to the very first FOIAbites, our newest offering here at FOIAball.
In it, we’re combining my two favorite things: FOIA and food. Will it work? I think so!
But it may help if I explain why. Since launching, we’ve published 25 stories. But on my desktop, I have hundreds of folders packed with records. Some are from school that fulfilled requests after we published, others are from harebrained ideas that only partially panned out. Many are interesting, but maybe not worth a full feature.
I’ve also enjoyed spending the back half of my newsletter talking about cooking. As I wrote more, though, I got less interested in coming up with adjectives to plop, plunk, or plonk down scoops of tomato paste, instead trying to tell stories about my life in the kitchen.
One night, I thought maybe I could weave them together. So here we are. The structure, the style, the tone of these, it’s all a work in progress. Which means, if you like it, love it, or hate it, please tell me. I want to hear what you think.
Speaking of which, thank you to those who replied a couple weeks ago. If you sent a message in, please know I got it and it warmed my heart.
Going forward, this feature will be only for paid subscribers. But this one, to give you a taste, is free. Call it an amuse-bouche of a blog.
And upgrade now to make sure you never miss another.
How Matthew McConaughey has it better than me
It was just a couple weeks after getting laid off that I decided to give FOIAball a try. Around that same time, I got offered a part-time job.
You wouldn’t think working in a refrigerated warehouse shipping cuts of meat to restaurants across the country has anything to do with public records. But in my life, these two have been completely intertwined.
The third request I sent for this site was for Matthew McConaughey’s emails to the University of Texas’ Athletics Department. It came back with no hits.
But a fun thing about life is people are way more willing to help than you might think. I called the school’s records office and explained to a staffer what I wanted. She suggested writing it differently.
That was the same week a good friend said he was short-staffed at work, needing help lifting 50-pound boxes of meat all day. After decades in front of a laptop, I figured I could handle eight hours of manual labor. If I hated it, I would just slink away.
I spent the day playing Pork Tetris, retrieving cuts buried deep in one freezer and shuffling them to another. I guess I worked hard enough for them to have me back, which was good, because Texas wanted $115 to fulfill the new request.
As I built this site, I worked at the warehouse. Clocking a couple shifts a week, each ending with a furious bike ride home, eager to see what may have arrived in my inbox.
In late July, the new McConaughey request came back. It was 544 pages. I was stoked. But an annoying thing about college athletics is that the inboxes of employees are no different than yours, riddled with total junk. Newsletters, blast emails, alerts about nonsense. ATX Today’s “55 facts about Matthew McConaughey on his 55th birthday.”
I scrolled and scrolled, getting more and more frustrated. But buried in the middle was something. A staffer emailing with someone who was clearly Matthew McConaughey’s personal assistant.
So, I sent a third request out. Which cost another $75.
This, you see, is why FOIAball needs subscriptions to stay afloat. It takes five people, subscribed for a year, to cover this article.
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Luckily for me, one expense shrank drastically over the summer. The warehouse had an employee freezer where anything that couldn’t be sold, usually a busted vacuum seal, was free to take.
I went home after shifts with pork chops and pounds of chorizo and entire turkeys. More bacon than I knew what to do with. Ground goat and lamb shoulders.
As I worked there, I moved from stacking boxes to shipping orders for their direct-to-consumer business. The company (I don’t want to kill their SEO, or out them, but here’s a link because the stuff is fantastic) mailed meat straight to customers. And some of the people ordering… I can’t say who, but I know what some very famous individuals like to eat.
I loved the work. But filling orders for billing addresses in Los Angeles that shipped to houses in Nantucket could be demoralizing, hard not to dwell on the life I didn’t have.
Matthew McConaughey, I was not. While he never appeared on the order sheet, he gets plenty of white-glove treatment from the University of Texas.
(Deservedly so, we might add. This isn’t shade at the school, just observation.)
When you’re Matthew McConaughey, and you need a VIP parking pass for Longhorn football, it comes with a personal note from the university’s president.
If you’re attending the Red River Rivalry, well, just how many people do you think are looped in to ensure he has zero hiccups going from his private jet to the sidelines?
Nine.
The “McConaughey: Cotton Bowl security and in and out logistics” email thread began with his assistant passing along flight information to the school and a security consultant, writing that, “Since we don’t have a police escort it’s a tad harder to get him in.”
Not a problem. The consultant, a former FBI investigator who now runs security for the College Football Playoff, cc’ed two separate Dallas Police deputy chiefs, the events manager and the head of security for the Cotton Bowl, and a name that was entirely redacted, alongside two assistants for McConaughey and the Texas AD’s senior assistant.
“I have copied our key folks that will ensure his arrival into the correct parking lot and space and will get him safely into the Back-of-House with access down the tunnel. We will have a … Security asset and PD available to ensure he gets into the protected area and we will help move him back to the vehicle postgame.”
Dallas Police replied promptly, letting them know McConaughey was on their radar.
The emails also show some of the ways that people try to keep his identity shielded from (my) prying eyes.
On his Cotton Bowl travel schedule, he’s referred to as “MM.” In an email for the parking permit, it’s “M. McConaughey.” As though there could be any other.
Sometimes it’s just his first name, like with “Credential for Matthew for SEC Championship.”
That was for another parking pass. Since I don’t think it can be reused, here’s his Silver Lot permit for when Texas played Georgia.
Around the holidays, I started working more days at the warehouse. After one 16-hour shift a few days before Thanksgiving, the manager asked if I wanted something from his private stash.
He came back with a boneless rib roast, almost five pounds. It must have been a year old, ice crystals shrouding the entire thing. But still, it was Akaushi Wagyu, sourced from Texas cattle ranchers who flew cows over from Japan in a custom Boeing 747. The kind of meat Matthew McConaughey might eat.
I don’t know if I’ve ever been that excited to cook something. I did so much research, the hunk of beef occupying most of my waking thoughts. Did I want to do a reverse sear? Or high-heat first? I bought a sous vide machine for a friend years ago. Would it be rude to ask to borrow it? I kept pulling it out of the freezer, admiring it.
When the time came, I defrosted and salted it (the night before), then slathered a garlic, anchovy, and thyme butter over it. I socked it in a 250-degree oven. An hour in, I was walking my dog and worried it might be done. Even knowing that thought was stupid, I sprinted back to probe it. It was at like 56 degrees.
But I just did not, could not, would not mess this up.
It took patience, faith, time, the same things needed now, starting up my own publication. That, and frequent jabs with a meat thermometer.
After a well-deserved rest, I blasted it in a high-heat oven and carved a slab.
Plating it, I felt the entirety of the past seven months. Of hard work. And of the wonderful generosity of the people around me. FOIA officers helping me out, friends throwing me hours, and the paid subscribers who are making this publication sustainable.
I’ve had lots of meals, cooked many things, but this felt like something else. An extravagant luxury, both earned and deserved.
The next day, we shaved it up for sandwiches, topped with onions and melted provolone. It was even better.
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Matthew McConaughey via YouTube