Results for “food”
1940 found

Ben Casnocha on food procedures in Tokyo

  • No matter how many people sit at a table, generally only one menu will be put down at the table, for the group to share. What could explain this cultural norm?
  • There’s a bag container next to each table to put your briefcase or bag or jacket. Without fail — a bag container. Is it to keep your individual bag clean? Or to keep the floor clean and tidy for the collective aesthetic?
  • Even in meals where they offer western cutlery, I encountered multiple instances of forks eschewed in favor of spoons. Spoons to eat a salad, for example. Always few knives — not as dramatic as in Singapore (which never offered knives) but still scarce.
  • Too many tourists stress about finding “the best” ramen place, the best sushi, the best whatever. Don’t do that. Just wander around and walking into random restaurants that seem popular with locals and using Google Translate to scan the menu. Rolling the dice works in Tokyo.
  • Many casual restaurants have table dividers to allow single patrons to eat alone without having to make eye contact with anyone else at a shared table. There’s something a bit eerie about a restaurant full of people — mostly businessmen — slurping their noodles in otherwise silence, head down, talking to nobody, even as they all share a table.

Here is the full post, mostly about Tokyo more generally.

Claims about food allergies

I find it is very difficult to trust written material on this topic, nonetheless here is a hypothesis I had not heard before:

So why have our immune systems suddenly gone haywire? One theory notes that we (mostly) eradicated hookworms by the 1980s in the United States. And roundworms. And tapeworms. All the classic parasites are mostly kaput. Without those actual threats, our immune system downshifts to tackle the biggest possible threat on the horizon. Which, these days, might be cashew butter or Camembert.

“It’s looking for stuff to do and it’s staying busy,” Warren said. “But it’s busy doing stupid stuff like reacting to walnuts and birch pollen.”

Some support for this theory comes from anecdotes offered by experts who infected themselves with hookworms to distract their overactive immune systems. While this method achieved some success in curbing stubborn allergies and other conditions, it seems unlikely we’ll see a massive experiment anytime soon that randomly infects healthy Americans with hookworms. Still, this so-called hygiene hypothesis helps explain why allergies may be on the march: Back when they were more widespread, hookworms and their friends may actually have reined in our immune systems’ most aggressive tendencies.

Here is more from Andrew Van Dam.

Does America or France have better food?

Philippe Lemoine tweeted:

Americans *genuinely* believe they have better food than France. They really believe it. It’s truly extraordinary.

Twitter is full of opinions, I will give you mine.  First, I am pretty close to Nate Silver:

A person in the 90th percentile of giving a shit about food will generally eat better in the US than France. Median close, may lean France. 20th percentile more strongly France.

But I have a few more points to add:

1. It is important to distinguish between supermarket food and restaurant food.  If you are content with a limited number of quality supermarket items, France clearly has better food.

2. If you go to a French food market (“Marché”), and are willing to spend 25-30 euros, you can get something much better than what is available in the United States, given the kind of meal you are assembling, with bread, cheese, strawberries, sausage, etc.  And you all should do this if you are visiting France.  That said, America has been gaining in this department, and French quality is static (at a very high level).

3. If you prefer to eat Asian and Latino cuisines in restaurants, the American options are radically superior.  It is not even close.  France does have better North African options.

4. Too many French restaurants have limited hours, limited seating options, low quality service, and so on, relative to their American peers.  I am not sure if those variables count in this debate, but they do for me.  So often eating in France is a pain in the neck.

5. While Paris may have the best restaurants in France, the best actual dining options — price and availability taken into account — are very much outside of Paris.  I would rather spend five days dining in Toulouse, and furthermore many of your best individual meals will come in small towns that have single specialties, such as “roast chicken,” etc.  Parts of Texas and Louisiana and New Mexico excepted, America does not really have anything comparable to this phenomenon.

6. France has better desserts, though I do not count that for much, others might.

If you are wondering, I’ve spent maybe eight months of my life living in France, total?

Food in Kenya, and yes you should go

In Nairobi the best meals are to be had at the upscale Indian restaurants, and it seems all or most of them are quite good — choose what fits your location and traffic constraints.  The basic style usually is derived from Punjabi dishes.

The “British colonial” food is not bad, but I don’t think I would consume it repeatedly if I lived in Kenya.

Chapati and hummus are regularly interspersed amongst regular “Kenyan” food.

Ugali, a kind of corn meal that comes in many different forms, is the Kenyan national dish.  It is good, albeit predictable, and often you have to ask for it to get it.  I also like the dish with the sliced tomatoes and the chiles.

Blueberries are the fruit to try, and they are both sweeter and more tart than the U.S. product.

The food at the safari camp was very good, though it paid off to be asking all the time for more Kenyan dishes.

By the way, I can recommend the Naboisho Camp highly.  Very friendly staff, excellent guides, and the supposed “tents” are more like high-quality hotel rooms.  As comfortable as any place you could hope to stay at, the general weather usually is perfect, and you can sit and eat breakfast and watch the birds fly and the animals stroll by (at some distance).  At night the hyenas start chattering and sometimes there are lions too.  They do not allow you to walk to your room at night unless you are accompanied by a Masai man with a spear, but that only adds to the fun.  The guides typically consider the ill-tempered buffalo to, in practical terms, be the most dangerous animal around for the humans.  You won’t see rhinos there (Nairobi National Park suffices for that), but even cheetahs and leopards you are likely to come across, not to mention the certainty of numerous elephants, lions, hippos, giraffes, hyenas, wildebeest, warthogs, and much more.  Recommended!

Kenya Airways is about to start daily direct flights from New York to Nairobi, and I found flying with them (from London) to be perfectly fine, albeit not close to an Emirates standard.

Alaska food notes

There is salmon, halibut, and crab, the latter usually priced at $125 for the meal.  The salmon I liked but did not love, so the halibut is the standout order in Anchorage, noting that even fish and chips may cost you $45.  The vegetables were somewhat better than expected.  Many quite good restaurants (at least if you order halibut) look like they are somewhat less than quite good, so the usual visual cues do not apply.  Prices seem determined by ingredients, rather than restaurant location or status of the restaurant.  I enjoyed my reindeer bibimbap.  Chinese restaurants are not common, you will find many more Japanese and sushi places, which based on n = 2 are pretty good.  Namaste Shangri-La was excellent, it is one of three (!) Nepalese places in town.  The Mexican food I did not try.  There are several Polynesian locales.  Fresh blueberry and lingonberry jams are not to be neglected.  Lower your expectations for the supermarkets, not just the fruit but also the cheese.

Better predicting food crises

Anticipating food crisis outbreaks is crucial to efficiently allocate emergency relief and reduce human suffering. However, existing predictive models rely on risk measures that are often delayed, outdated, or incomplete. Using the text of 11.2 million news articles focused on food-insecure countries and published between 1980 and 2020, we leverage recent advances in deep learning to extract high-frequency precursors to food crises that are both interpretable and validated by traditional risk indicators. We demonstrate that over the period from July 2009 to July 2020 and across 21 food-insecure countries, news indicators substantially improve the district-level predictions of food insecurity up to 12 months ahead relative to baseline models that do not include text information. These results could have profound implications on how humanitarian aid gets allocated and open previously unexplored avenues for machine learning to improve decision-making in data-scarce environments.

Here is more from Ananth Balashankar, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Samuel P. Fraiberger.

Cat food markets in everything

Fancy Feast is expanding into feline-inspired human cuisine, with a New York City Italian restaurant designed to celebrate the company’s new line.

Gatto Bianco, which means “white cat,” is described by Fancy Feast as an “Italian-style trattoria,” and will be open for dinner reservations on August 11-12 only, according to a news release from Purina, which produces Fancy Feast.

The human-friendly dishes were inspired by Fancy Feast’s new “Medleys” cat food line, which feature options like “Beef Ragú Recipe With Tomatoes & Pasta in a Savory Sauce” for the cat with discerning taste.

Here is the full story, via Balding.

How good is the food in Cali?

The guidebooks say that Cali has worse food than Bogotá or Medellin.  Two people I know, both from Cali, wrote to tell me that Cali has worse food.  It is true that Cali does not have the fine dining culture of the two larger cities.  And yet…  When I visited the food market in Bogotá, about half of the stalls were serving Mexican food.  The rest seemed decent but uninspired.  The two meals I had in the food stalls in the Alameda market in Cali were perhaps the two best (and cheapest) meals of the whole trip, and original too, at least to me.

n = 2 does not suffice for inference.  And yet…

Food in Bogota

The best approach is to hunt down particular foodstuffs and consume them, rather than thinking in terms of restaurants.  That includes fruits (start with blueberries and blackberries and then move on to the stuff you have never heard of), cheeses, arepas, empanadas, other baked goods, all forms of corn (“choclo”), and whatever they happen to throw your way.

“Have I had this yet?” should be your starting question, and try to get to a full slate of yes’s!

Don’t obsess over finding the best restaurants.  You will end up with some excellent meals, but it is not the same as learning the local cuisine.  That said, the dining scene is much improved since my last visit eight years ago.  I didn’t have complete control over my time and meals, but can recommend Casa del Rey and Sauvage as both very good, without being convinced that they were the very best.

Bangladesh YouTube food facts of the day

The channel behind this operation is called AroundMeBD, and its success has created a whole new economy in Shimulia, which has since been dubbed the YouTube village of Bangladesh.

The YouTube village is a prominent example of a niche but is also part of a growing online trend across South Asia: As the internet reaches villages, rural societies are finding ways to showcase and monetize their unique food cultures to audiences across the world, using platforms like YouTube and Facebook. In India, Village Cooking Channel, which posts videos of large-scale traditional cooking, has over 15 million subscribers. In Pakistan, Village Food Secrets has 3.5 million subscribers. Villagers who previously had little presence in media are now using these platforms to take ownership of the way their culture is portrayed — and building businesses that support dozens, and occasionally hundreds, of individuals.

Here is the full story, via Zach Valenta.  The article is interesting throughout, and yes YouTube remains underrated.

Eating out for big occasions is correlated with a lower quality of food

This paper incorporates applied econometrics, causal machine learning and theories of reference-dependent preferences to test whether consuming in a restaurant on special occasions, such as one’s birthday, anniversary, commencement, etc., would increase people’s expectations and would make consumers rate their consumption experiences lower. Furthermore, our study is closely linked to the emerging literature of attribution bias in economics and psychology and provides a scenario where we can test two leading theories of attribution bias empirically. In our paper, we analyzed reviews from Yelp and combined the text analyses with regressions, matching techniques and causal machine learning. Through a series of models, we found evidence that consumers’ ratings for restaurants are lower when they went to the restaurants on special occasions. This result can be explained by one theory of attribution bias where people have higher expectations about restaurants on special occasions and then misattribute their disappointment to the quality of the restaurants. From the connection between our empirical analysis and theories of attribution bias, this paper provides another piece of evidence of how attribution bias influences people’s perceptions and behaviors.

Here is the full paper by Ying-Kai Huang, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.  I don’t think it is just about the expectations.  If you go out for a special occasion, you have to bring grandma and Uncle Joe share a bunch of bland dishes with them.  You are not choosing the crowd, and in any case the least common denominator effect kicks in (imagine instead choosing a dinner guest who knows all the best food at the place!).  Plus everyone is bickering.  You are also less likely to be eating at 5:00 p.m. when the food is best, and more likely to be eating at 8 p.m. when the food is at its worst, again a kind of least common denominator effect.

Don’t go out for special occasions is one obvious lesson here.  Really.  And choose your dining companions optimally.

*Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia*

That is the title of a new and excellent book by Alison K. Smith.  I have watched other people eat this food for eighteen years, and now I am beginning to understand:

The real shift in the world of Soviet salads, however, came in the Brezhnev era of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Then, named prepared salads started to appear, some initially associated with particular places but which soon spread out into the wider culinary world.  The salads often features mayonnaise — not a new ingredient, but one increasingly produced not at home but industrially for sale in shops.  Two of the most famous are layered salads that also featured another not new but newly prominent product: canned fish. ..In salad ‘Mimosa’, canned fish is layered with chopped boiled potatoes, hard-boiled eggs separated into whites and yolks, cooked carrots and mayonnaise.  Finely chopped hard-boiled yolks make up the top layer, giving the salad its name: the yolks mimic mimosa flowers.  Another salad, seld pod shuboi — literally herring under a fur coat — is similar, but uses herring instead of other canned fish and adds a layer of grated cooked beetroot under the topping of mayonnaise and chopped egg yolk.  The beetroot bleeds into the mayonnaise, making the salad one of the most vibrantly colored parts of the Russian table.

And:

In the Soviet era, the kotlet came to take precedent over whole roast pieces of meat.  It was economical and could be made so as to stretch out a small portion of meat with breadcrumbs or other starch, and it made tougher cuts more palatable.  It was also a challenge.

And:

The preference for mushrooms was extensive, and in a way that struck some as particularly Slavic.

And:

One thing that Russians did not have until relatively recently was cheese — at least, not cheese in the sense of aged or ripened cheese.

I can’t quite utter “recommended,” but the book is really good!

How to find the best food in Oaxaca

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

First, if you do it right, most of your best meals will be eaten before 3 p.m., sometimes even before 10 a.m. Most “comida popular,” as it is called, is sold in the earlier parts of the work day, as the evening meal is typically eaten at home with family. Those are the supply chains you wish to catch, because they will have the freshest food and ingredients. Treat your dinner as an afterthought, but plan the earlier part of your day carefully.

Start by getting up fairly early and avoiding the hotel breakfast, which is rarely excellent even in the fanciest places.

The best thing to do is to walk or take a cab to a food market around 8 or 9 a.m. Look for a lone woman selling tamales, and don’t be afraid to ask around for her, since her place in the market will not be so obvious. Everyone in the market, however, will know her station. In Oaxaca, you might try 20 de Noviembre market or Mercado de Abastos, but tamales can be found in other locations as well, sometimes also in the parks or in various neighborhoods, carried around in baskets.

Then order as many tamales as you can; you won’t find it easy to spend more than $5 on your meal. Of particular interest are the tamales de mole, tamales de amarillo (the word means yellow, but they’re actually orange), and the tamales de rana with tomatoes. In addition to the fillings, you can enjoy the thrilling experience of eating corn near the locations where corn was first bred and engineered by indigenous Mexicans before the Spanish conquest. You’ll feel like you’ve never tasted corn before.

…Don’t worry about sanitation; the tamales have been steamed at high temperatures and kept hot, and they are served promptly. They’re typically gone by 10 a.m., a sign of both their quality and their safety.

Recommended, there are further tips at the link, including about the world’s best barbecue, which is in Mexico, not Texas or North Carolina.

Las Gemelas, now the best Mexican food in the DC area

Las Gemelas, 1280 4th st. NE, 202-866-0550.

There are two places here, a restaurant and on the other side of the (small) mall is a tacqueria. The tacqueria is the best Mexican food this region has seen. Real blue corn tortillas, everything else authentic, could be mistaken for excellent real Mexican food in Mexico.  The morning green chile chorizo tacos are the must-get – one of the best dishes in town – but everything is very good.

The restaurant proper has a small number of truly excellent dishes, and a bunch of “quite good” dishes, noting the menu is pretty small. The first time I went the lamb Borrego soup was the knockout, the second time it was off the menu but the pork cheeks enchilada with mole was an A+, again one of the best dishes in town. I quite liked the toast with honey, though it hardly seemed Mexican (not a complaint, just a warning).  If you go to the restaurant, make sure you figure out what you really should be getting.  In addition, the visuals and décor are very nice in both, excellent places to sit and take in the crowd and surroundings.

Overall, this is a major advance for this region’s Mexican dining, and the prices are entirely reasonable.