WEDNESDAY, APRIL 3, 2013
6:00 p.m. – Food Trucks Open for Business
7:00 p.m. – Lecture, Q&A with the Author
Arlington Public Library
1015 North Quincy Street
Arlington, VA 22201
RSVP at the Event Page. It’s an excellent library!
Food and Drink
Turmeric futures prices on Wednesday shot up by 3.23 per cent to Rs 6,330 per quintal as speculators created fresh positions, driven by an improvement in demand in the spot market amid lower output expectations.
Turmeric is perhaps my favorite spice and I sprinkle plenty of it on the Indian rice I cook. The article is here, via James Crabtree.
In San Jose, I.B.M. plans to serve the assembled analysts a breakfast pastry devised by Watson, called a “Spanish crescent.” It is a collaboration of Watson’s software and James Briscione, a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.
I.B.M. researchers have watched and talked to Mr. Briscione as he works, selecting ingredients and building out dishes. Watson has read those notes, 20,000 recipes, data on the chemistry of food ingredients, and measured ratings of flavors people like in categories like “olfactory pleasantness.”
Watson’s assignment has been to come up with recipes that are both novel and taste good. In the case of the breakfast pastry, Watson was told to come up with something inspired by Spanish cuisine, but unusual and healthy. The computer-ordered ingredients include cocoa, saffron, black pepper, almonds and honey — but no butter, Watson’s apparent nod to healthier eating.
Then, Mr. Briscione, working with those ingredients, had to adjust portions and make the pastry.
“If I could have used butter, it would have been a lot easier,” said the chef, who used vegetable oil instead.
Michael Karasick, director of I.B.M.’s Almaden lab, had one of the Spanish crescents for breakfast recently. “Pretty good” was his scientific judgment.
There is more here, including Watson on drug discovery (not just diagnosis) and Watson on complex data analytics. Fascinating throughout.
You can basically create a gummy replica of yourself to eat. It looks absolutely delicious.
FabCafe in Japan is offering the service for approximately $65 (6,000 Yen), which sounds like a complete steal to me. It’s apparently a 2-part process that requires a 3D body scanner and a lot of gummy colors. FabCafe, which made a chocolate replica for faces, is doing this for Japan’s White Day (in Asian countries, White Day is like Valentine’s Day but the girls give the gifts to the guys. Awesome).
Here is a bit more with photo, hat tip goes to Rob Raffety.
The popularity of kimch’i in Japan greatly stimulated the South kimch’i processing industry. Ironically, it was Japanese attempts to capitalize on manufacturing kimch’i that inflamed Korean claims to its ‘ownership’. This dispute, commonly known as the ‘Kimch’i‘ War…began in 1996 when Japan proposed designating kimuchi (the Japanese pronunciation of kimch’i) an official Atlantic Olympic food. By then Japanese-Korean trade relations were already under stress due to the fact that Japan had already been involved in exporting the Japanese instant version of kimch’i, which lacked the distinctive flavor from the fermentation process. In response, South Korea filed a case with the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC), pat of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, arguing that there was a need to establish an international kimch’i standard.
That is from Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea, by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka. This is an excellent book on Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times, all rolled into a scant 237 pp. A good author can do wonders…
Drought tolerance would be the most significant new biotech trait introduced in the near future, Mr James said, “because drought is, by far, the single most important constraint to biotech to increased productivity for crops worldwide”. Monsanto will launch the first drought tolerant GM maize in the US this year.
From the FT, here is more. Furthermore this is additional evidence that we have been wise to stick with GM crops.
Blake Shurtz, a perceptive MR reader, asks:
What are your thoughts on pictures, or a lack thereof, on ethnic food menus? Do you think better dishes have pictures? Why doesn’t every dish have a picture? The logic of fast food is to show pictures/numbers for non-english speakers to be better informed, but the converse doesn’t seem to happen as often.
Pictures are most likely a good sign when they are dingy and the menu plastic is peeling off. Even then the food may be bad, but at least you know you have a mom and pop operation which is not very polished on the tech side. “Nice” pictures are a bad sign. Pictures are least likely to be a bad sign for Vietnamese food, when they are basically neutral and also fairly common. Think of the Vietnamese as trying to go mainstream with their food but in any case failing. Pictures for Thai food are becoming a worse sign over time. As more people come to learn Yam huapli thot, the pictures are coming to signal that the restaurant is making a determined appeal to uninformed buyers. There is a subset of cranky but excellent Chinese restaurants which offer (non-corporatized) pictures of some of their dishes, including those with tofu. This segment of the market is dwindling but still can be found. The choice of what gets a photo is determined by the expected quality of the image (whole fish get showcased), rather than the taste of the dish per se.
Love actually rings in at $43,842.08, according to RateSupermarket.ca, which has calculated the price tag of the typical modern relationship – from a one-year courtship, followed by a one-year engagement to the wedding day.
And it is itemized:
The Toronto-based independent financial products comparison website pegs the price of courtship at $6,936.74. That includes a dozen “fancy dates” (nice restaurants and theatre tickets), a dozen movie dates, 36 “casual dates” (take-out food, coffee and movie rentals), weekend getaways, a beach vacation plus random other expenses for things such as “apology flowers,” treats and new clothes.
The engagement period rings in at $9,944.34, which includes more dates, an engagement party with a price tag of $2,000 and the big ticket item, a ring with an average estimated cost of $3,500. (The popular wedding website TheKnot.com estimates that cost at around $5,000, but RateSupermarket.ca pointed that that it doesn’t consider rings purchased from lower-end retailers such as Walmart.)
Oh, and the wedding? Well that’s another $26,961.
Here is more, with the pointer from Chad R.
Numerous readers have requested that I cover this topic, and here is one report:
Maker’s Mark, the Loretto, Kentucky, bourbon manufacturer, has the sort of problem that every consumer-products company wishes it had: too much demand for too little product. But the company’s solution might surprise the very consumers demanding its product—adding water to its existing supply of bourbon, thereby cutting the alcohol content in each bottle from 45 percent to 42 percent.
Let me first note that I have zero institutional knowledge of bourbon. I have never tried bourbon (I have eaten in the excellent restaurant Bourbon Steak), and even worse I have never read a book about bourbon, but here is one hypothesis. Could it be that future buyers, who have never tried the older 45 percent will accept the 42 percent as the normal taste? (The company might even fool some of the current drinkers.) In that case, if the company has a large flow of future buyers, relative to the current stock of buyers, this won’t even count as a price increase/quality degradation for the future flow. A direct price increase, in contrast, would be a price increase for everyone, present and future.
This explanation, however, runs the risk of being “too good” (read: not good). If it is that easy, why didn’t they degrade the quality in the first place, until reaching a margin where framing effects won’t make up most of the difference?
Caveat emptor! Ask an expert instead.
I am pleased to have shared a meal at A&J Manchurian restaurant, in Rockville with the charming Fuchsia Dunlop. You may recall that Fuchsia has written what I consider to be the very best Chinese cookbooks in English and indeed some of my favorite books of all time. She was in town to speak at Georgetown University and to promote her new book Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking.
Here were a few topics of conversation and related points:
1. To what extent did excellent Chinese food, in China, go underground during the 1960s and 70s, or to what extent did those traditions need to be reconstructed?
2. Why is there good Chinese food in Panama and Tanzania (my claim not hers), but not in most of Europe, least of all Italy? Why does Latin America have so little good Chinese food?
3. Should the advanced state of Chinese food in the 18th century, relative to European food, cause economists — including Adam Smith– to revise upward their estimates of Chinese standards of living?
4. Her books are effectively written, in part, because the points are continually reduced to their simplest elements, yet those simple bits are woven together to construct and reveal multiple layers of complexity.
5. The Chinese servers seemed unsurprised by her effortless fluency in Mandarin.
6. When speaking in the United States she is often taken to some local’s idea of a good Chinese restaurant. A&J was her proposal. She was surprised that northern Virginia has restaurants which are exclusively or in significant part Peruvian-Chinese, Indo-Chinese, and Korean-Chinese.
7. To what extent do we live in an unusual temporary bubble of easy foreign access to China?
8. I consider her Hunan book to be her most significant and original achievement, but Every Grain of Rice is the most useful single all-purpose Chinese cookbook she has written. It is especially good on the vegetarian side.
9. Each of us wished to defer dictatorial ordering rights to the other.
10. At what age do people learn or discover the determination to carve out a life of (relative) freedom for themselves? To what extent is their ability to achieve such a life the result of luck or of skill?
11. The cucumber salad in hot garlic sauce was very good. No cookies.
Simply Orange juice is actually not all that simple. The taste of the the Coca-Cola-owned brand is governed by a complex algorithm that allows for the 600+ juice flavors to be tweaked throughout the year to ensure consistency.
From Jason Kottke, here is more. And from The Atlantic, here is further explanation:
The algorithm is designed to accept any contingency that might affect manufacturing, from weather patterns to shifts in the global economy, and make adjustments to the manufacturing process accordingly. Built into the model is a breakdown of the 600-plus flavors that are in orange juice that are tweaked throughout the year to keep flavor consistent and in line with consumer tastes. Coke even sucks the oxygen out of the juice when they send it to be mixed so that they can keep it around for a year or more to balance out other batches. Doug Bippert, Coke’s vice president of business acceleration, calls it “a flight simulator for [Coke's] juice business.” (Funnily enough Delta uses the same algorithm to balance its books.) “If we have a hurricane or a freeze,” Bippert added, “we can quickly replan the business in 5 or 10 minutes just because we’ve mathematically modeled it.”
That is the new book by Fuchsia Dunlop and the subtitle is Simple Chinese Home Cooking. The first recipe I tried (tonight), the vegetarian tofu, was an absolute knockout.
Two of Fuchsia’s previous books Revolutionary Chinese Cooking: Recipes from Hunan Province and Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking, are two of my favorite books of all time. Not just two of my favorite cookbooks, but two of my favorite books period. They offer much more than just a series of recipes.
I will buy everything she writes, forever.
I am pleased to have been invited to a small group session in New York City to meet Gates and hear him present his new letter. My observations are these:
1. Gates has a command of data and analytics in development economics better than that of most development economists, or for that matter aid professionals. He also expects everyone at the meeting to know everything about what he is talking about, or at least is willing to proceed on that basis. That said, when it comes to answering questions he sometimes assumes a stupider version of the question than what is actually being asked.
2. He is smart enough, and health-savvy enough, not to waste time with handshakes at the beginning of meetings. People as productive as Gates should not be required to shake hands, and the same can be said for people less productive than Gates.
3. He does not go on and on. His opening remarks were about two minutes long, with no notes, and all of his answers were to the point.
4. We were served water, at exactly the right cool temperature, yet without ice cubes. No cookies.
5. Unlike Gates, I am not convinced that “health” is the key breakthrough area for economic development, but there is enough low-hanging fruit out there that it doesn’t have to be. That said, when questioned on this his answers were closer to tautology than they needed to be. Much of their emphasis on measurement seemed to me to track absolute movement toward goals, rather than relative efficacies of different project investments.
6. Gates suggested that if he had been more careful tracking and organizing his AP credits, he might have been able to receive his undergraduate degree. That is one sense, in his words, in which he is barely a college drop out. In another sense, it makes him a very extreme college drop out.
7. He mentioned that he is an extremely eager consumer (and not just funder) of on-line education and The Teaching Company. And this is a man who could receive free (or paid) lectures from almost anyone he wants.
8. Empellon Tacqueria, in the West Village, has an excellent mackerel ceviche and I recommend also the quail eggs.
9. I have now run into Reihan Salam twice in the last two years, in random public places in Manhattan, without any reason for expecting to see him there. This should cause me to revise my prior on something or other, but I am not sure what. When changing/surfing the channels, which I do occasionally to “keep in touch,” I also run into him on TV a lot.
10. Gates understands the very high returns from better governance, but also sees it is not trivial to reap them.
11. In the context of U.S. education, he does not worry that teacher cheating will bias test results very much at the macro level.
12. He is more optimistic about charter schools than I am (though I favor them), and more optimistic about the results from giving teachers feedback about their performance. In my view, bad teachers don’t very much want to improve and it is not so much a matter of knowledge. Undergraduate college teachers are evaluated all the time, and it does help, but it hardly brings the rotten apples up to par and I don’t see it as the key to moving the system forward at lower levels.
Here is Jason Kottke’s account. Here is Dana Goldstein’s account.
Gates’s annual letter, which was released earlier this week, is here.
The city of Dijon has just sold off half of its prized municipal wine cellar to help fund local social spending – including a bottle of 1999 Burgundy knocked down at auction for €4,800 to a Chinese buyer.
In total, the capital of the Burgundy region raised €151,620 from the “historic sale” of 3,500 bottles that were part of a collection built up since the 1960s, it announced in a statement on Monday.
François Rebsamen, the Socialist mayor who ordered Sunday’s auction, explained: “We have overall a good budget this year, but the social action spending of the city just keeps going up. There are more and more of our co-citizens who are appealing for social aid.”
From the FT, here is more. Apparently they are listening to Alex.
