Category: Food and Drink
The Turku food hall
This is perhaps my favorite food hall. Dating from 1896, the basic building is notable, the displays are lovely and suitably Nordic, and for lunch you can try a wide variety of cuisines, including excellent Mexican food, a rarity in Europe. (They told me they buy their tortillas from other Mexicans in Czechia.) From separate stalls I bought some salami and also black bread, and both were as good as any I have tried, ever.
Many food halls are overrated. They create an illusion of plenitude, while not offering many items you actually wish to buy and consume. The Turku food hall, however, is a real winner.
Overall, Turku felt more Swedish and also more stylish than Helsinki. The Swedish name for the city — Åbo — you see all over, and one of the universities still teaches in Swedish. It is much more of a college town. That said, at population 202,000 it is slower and there is much less to do there. You can see some of Alvar Aalto’s early buildings.
I was told that 77 Mexicans live in Turku.
Helsinki notes
Most of all, I like the city for its visual complexity, and for its recurring architectural surprises. It is the best Art Nouveau city in the world, with only Brussels as a rival, and also a top tier modernist city. Public buildings are excellent, and unlike in Stockholm you are never quite sure what is coming next.
The Finns are amazing at building out lovely, cozy rooms. In a used bookstore you might find a room for sitting on a comfortable chair and reading. It will look and feel perfect. I even saw one men’s room with this flavor, and yes it had a comfy chair.
It is striking, and instructive, that the Japanese have such a strong presence in tourism in Finland. Their groups dominate visits to the underground rock church, for instance. Japan and Finland both have something inscrutable in common? And they both share an obsession with design and with small detail.
One nice thing about Helsinki is you can find a good restaurant in almost any part of town. Unlike say Paris, New York, or London, they do not have “dining deserts” where tasty places are absent for reasons of rent or zoning. Similarly, Helsinki also has a very high quality of small shop, in areas such as jewelry, used clothing, and design. Again, as with the restaurants, you can find these in almost any part of town. Helsinki has avoided the trap of looking and feeling like the other global cities, as the price-rent gradients simply are not that oppressive.
Along related lines, you will see non-white immigrants in great numbers in the center of town. In Stockholm, in contrast, non-white immigrants are priced out of the center to a considerable degree, though of course you can see them working in service jobs there,
The spaces in the new public library are remarkably inviting for sitting and reading. The interior is also an example of an institution that has leapt into being retro, without ever having managed to be fashionable in the interim (the opposite of mobile money in Kenya leapfrogging more antiquated money and banking institutions). In an act of supreme wisdom, they have stacked the library with “technology,” most of all 3-D printers and advanced sewing machines. It now looks quaint and charming, much like the older buildings around town. It is the smart phones that hold the attention of the library visitors, even in this relatively reading-sympathetic culture.
In Nordic countries, Thai food usually is better than Chinese. Georgian food is something you also might try in Helsinki. Salmon soup is good, but you don’t need to have it more than once. The whitefish and small river fish I enjoyed.
The Finns are interesting to speak to, especially about Finland. One woman said (paraphrased): “We can talk to each other for hours, and still not understand, so how do you expect the immigrants to understand us?” Multiple meanings can be assigned to that remark.
Another said something like: “No, the Finns are not the happiest people in the world. Once foreigners stop asking us how happy we are, we go back to complaining at each other about everything.” Was she complaining about that?
Everywhere you go, you see Finns doing things with each other.
In my view, Helsinki is one of Europe’s great cities, information-rich and out of the ordinary. It should be noted, however, that hardly anyone else agrees with this assessment, least of all the residents here.
Tallinn bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome, thank you in advance…
Eating well in Stockholm
Yes, the fancy expensive places are great. But more generally, I recommend that you order the dishes with game and lingonberries, most of all lingonberries. Soups here are above average, and I do not generally love soups. The pizza is surprisingly good, make sure you order it with “pizza salad,” which turns out to be cabbage. If you are craving non-Western food, I would try Persian before Indian or Chinese. At breakfast, butter is consistently good. Overall, Stockholm is a quality food city, though it is not superb when it comes to breadth.
Finland bleg
Helsinki, Turku, and Tampere — what please are your recommendations? I thank you in advance for your sage counsel.
Denmark recalls Korean ramen for being too spicy
Three fiery flavours of the Samyang instant ramen line are being withdrawn: Buldak 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken and Hot Chicken Stew.
Denmark’s food agency issued the recall and warning on Tuesday, urging consumers to abandon the product.
But the maker Samyang says there’s no problem with the quality of the food.
“We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy,” the firm said in a statement to the BBC.
“The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason.”
It’s unknown if any specific incidents in Denmark had prompted authorities there to take action.
The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration said it had assessed the levels of capsaicin in a single packet to be “so high that they pose a risk of the consumer developing acute poisoning”.
“If you have the products, you should discard them or return them to the store where they were purchased,” it said in a statement.
It also emphasised the warning for children, for whom extremely spicy food can cause harm.
The notice has sparked heated discussion online with many amused reactions from lovers of spicy food. Many have made assertions about the Danes’ low tolerance for spice.
Here is more from Frances Mao. Via Sam Mendelsohn.
Where and how to eat in Cape Town, South Africa
Don’t laugh, but basically you want to eat in the restaurants with the beautiful women. And with the views of the waterfront.
You may recall those are usually the opposite of the correct recommendations. But in Cape Town, there is no coherent “mom and pop” restaurant sector, based on either recent Asian or Latino immigrants, or based on an existing middle class. You simply want to go to the nice, fancy places. And you don’t need my list, many sources can tell you which ones those are.
The economics of that are simple. There is a well-defined class of people with a lot of money, and the best restaurants do everything they can to target them, including seaside views. That is by far the best way to get good food here, arguably the only way. You cannot in fact “arbitrage against the inequality,” even if you think you might wish to.
Usually you should order seafood, and (as in Chile) be suspicious of any menu item with a cream sauce, which will be overdone on the creamy side. You may see batches of Afrikaans words on the English-language menus, don’t worry just pull out your ChatGPT app and enjoy the feeling of strangeness.
I did have one meal of grilled meats and bbq in a black township, and it was not bad. But I would say you are going for the sociological experience more than for the food. You’ll also get some South African side dishes, such as the corn meal, that may not pop up in the fancier restaurants. So do that if you can, I also found the experience to be safe and not stressful.
Prices here are very low, and an excellent meal can be well under half of the comparable cost in the United States or Europe, maybe even 3x lower. Wherever you go, make sure they give you a seat looking out on the water!
Santa Marta, Colombia notes
The Santa Marta region of northern Colombia has, within a ninety minute radius, the Caribbean, the snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada, desert with plentiful cactus, and rain forest. The diversity of birds is remarkable, which is what induced my sister to suggest this locale for our trip. We showed up wondering “how to find the birds,” but before that sentence was finished, some birds swooped down and stole part of our breakfast.
The “Tower” is a wonderful lookout point in Minca, a small town about thirty minutes away from Santa Marta. You stand in an elevated gazebo, surrounded by beautiful mountains, and watch various birds go by. The host family doesn’t even charge you for the drink of water. Until not too long ago, Minca was a “no go” zone, ruled by drug lords and guerrillas. Now there is a very peaceful revenue-generating compromise, with a lid on all the violence. British women visit and order avocado toast, before setting off on their birding tours.
My sister has seen dozens of “lifers” on this trip, namely birds she had not seen before. For me they are almost all lifers, except the pigeons.
You can take a several hour small boat trip to see a village on stilts, Pueblo Palafito. The locale supports 1000 or so people, all using water taxis to get around and mostly working as fishermen. It is not near anything else, and their power source is solar, due to a gift from the Italian government. This was the highlight of the trip. I am told families there typically average five children, and the schools were indeed full of enthusiastic young people. Best is this video, you don’t need to understand the Spanish.
In the city of Santa Marta there are two (!) separate monuments to the 1958 Smith-Corona typewriter, both at major intersections. They are intended as a tribute to the region’s best-known author Gabriel García Márquez.
The local economy is too dependent on coal export, but overall it feels bustling and reasonably prosperous.
The best food there is seafood, most of all fish and shrimp, in addition to coconut rice and various forms of plantains. You can eat very well here but I would not stray from the area’s basic strengths. Maracuya juice is consistently good. I don’t usually order desserts, but here they are consistently interesting and original, often using honey, or sometimes waffles.
I would strongly recommend the Marriott hotel there, the one on the beach. It is essentially an $800 a night quality place, with very direct beach access, but at far, far lower prices. And you end up with the ocean and also the three swimming pools pretty much to yourself. (Where is everyone?) For the entire trip, and for the hotel, safety levels are just fine.
This is what the Caribbean should be, but rarely is. Visiting Santa Marta, as a trip, is so far ahead of most better-known beach outings it isn’t funny. From Virginia I can fly to Colombia in about five hours, and then Santa Marta from Bogotá is a mere 90-minute extra flight.
It is a common trope that genetic influences on individual behavior strengthen as people age. If you take a trip with your sibling, you will see further evidence that this is true.
It is rare for me to get on a plane for reasons that have basically no work components. That said, it is also easy to get work done here.
AI passes the restaurant review Turing test
Surprisingly easy, it turned out. In a series of experiments for a new study, Kovács found that a panel of human testers was unable to distinguish between reviews written by humans and those written by GPT-4, the LLM powering the latest iteration of ChatGPT. In fact, they were more confident about the authenticity of AI-written reviews than they were about human-written reviews.
Here is the full story, via Sarah Jenislawski.
What should I do in Cape Town, South Africa?
I won’t be there for long, but what should I see and what should I eat? How is the general level of safety these days?
I thank you all in advance.
The Screwworm
The Atlantic: Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C. hominivorax or “man eater”—so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.
For untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In the 1950s, however, U.S. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico and Central America—all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. The eradication was a resounding success. But the story does not end there. Containing a disease is one thing. Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating.
To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.
A reminder that civilization takes work. Excellent piece by Sarah Zhang. Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Stone Age Herbalist.
The Fiscal Impact of Low-Skill Immigration
Low-skill immigrants have low wages and thus don’t pay much in taxes but they do use some government services, especially education for their children. What’s the net fiscal impact? The National Academy of Sciences did a detailed scenario analysis looking at the impact over 75 years, thus including second and third generations. Overall the NAS concluded that the net fiscal impact of the average immigrant was positive. The impact was negative, however, for immigrants with just a high school education and even more so for immigrants with less than a high-school education.
Two recent papers qualify this conclusion. The NAS study estimated the direct fiscal effects of an immigrant–what do they pay in taxes and what do they take out in services? Immigration, however, has indirect effects on the native born population. In the The Case for Getting Rid of Borders I wrote:
The immigrant who mows the lawn of the nuclear physicist indirectly helps to unlock the secrets of the universe.
More prosaically, low-skill immigrants can complement higher-skilled native labor, increasing native productivity. Go to any fine restaurant in DC, for example, and you will typically see a native-born front of the house and a Mexican born back-of-the house. As Tyler quipped at lunch recently, all restaurants in the United States are Mexican restaurants only the type of food they are cooking changes. The opportunity to hire Mexican cooks increases the number of restaurants and the opportunities and wages of the native-born front of the house. Higher native wages mean higher taxes so there is a beneficial indirect fiscal effect of low-skill immigration.
A recent paper by Colas and Sachs, The Indirect Benefits of Low-Skilled Immigration finds that under plausible assumptions the indirect effects are large enough to make the net effects of immigration positive for almost all US immigrants.
My excellent colleague Michael Clemens makes another similar point about capital. When a profit-maximizing firm hires more labor it also hires more capital. Capital pays taxes. Thus, immigration raises the taxes paid by capital and when you add that indirect effect to the calculation it also shows that the net fiscal impacts of low-skilled immigration are plausibly positive.
The fiscal benefits of low-skilled immigration aren’t a big reason to support low-skill immigration but the new literature on the indirect effects should take one worry off the table.
As a takeaway, it’s important to recognize that the fiscal benefits arise because low-skilled immigrants are gainfully employed. The U.S. excels at integrating people into the workforce. We need to keep this in mind when thinking about labor policy including minimum wages, occupational licensing, E-Verify, access to banking, education, and driver’s licenses and so forth. We could easily turn fiscal benefits into fiscal costs by making it more difficult to employ immigrants (and workers more generally). Employing immigrants benefits both them and native citizens. America’s open markets play a pivotal role in this success. Let’s keep it going.
The world of labor shortages, the culture that is alcohol
Drunken-driving deaths in the U.S. have risen to levels not seen in nearly two decades, federal data show, a major setback to long-running road-safety efforts.
At the same time, arrests for driving under the influence have plummeted, as police grapple with challenges like hiring woes and heightened concern around traffic stops.
Here is more from the WSJ. “About 13,500 people died in alcohol-impairment crashes in 2022…” Here is my earlier post on the culture of guns and the cultural of alcohol.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What I am nostalgic about
With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America. Battle of the Ancients and Moderns! I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally. So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past. To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims about net social value. I’ll also offer comments on features from the past that many miss, but I do not. Here goes:
1. Visiting Borders in its heyday. Nowadays I have to go to London to have comparable experiences.
2. That you could just show up at various venues, pay modest prices, and see incredible performers. For instance I saw Horowitz and also McCartney at his peak. Leo Kottke at his peak. Pierre Boulez. Many more. Such experiences are hardly gone, but in terms of cultural resonance the earlier times were much better. How did I fail to go see Miles Davis!?
Similarly, you could just go see Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Derek Parfit, and many other famous figures. No current economist or philosopher is comparable in this regard.
2b. Note that in some areas, such as NBA basketball, there are more “must see” players today than in any earlier era. Or say tech titans. So I am not favoring the nostalgic perspective per se, but for music, economics, and philosophy the nostalgic perspective on live performance is correct.
3. There were more and better museum art exhibits to see before 9/11. Much of that has to do with insurance rates and the ease of international agreements.
4. Good seafood was cheap and readily available.
5. Reading the Far Eastern Economic Review in its heyday.
6. Awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the Journal of Political Economy, knowing it would have exciting new ideas.
7. Many, many locations were better to travel to and visit. Amsterdam is one obvious example. But by no means is this true for all places, India for instance is better to visit today than before.
8. Hollywood movies used to be better, though global cinema overall is doing fine.
9. Very recently there are too many parts of the world you really just can’t visit, Iran and Russia most notably.
10. Mainstream media was much better, noting I nonetheless would rather have the internet. Still, I miss the quality of cultural reviews, local news, and several other features of normal newspapers.
11. San Francisco of the 1980s and Miami Beach of the 1990s.
12. So many intellectuals could afford to live in New York City, and indeed Manhattan. The city was overall more interesting, though worse to live in or to have to deal with.
13. Parking was much easier, even in Manhattan. I used to just get parking spots, even in the Village or Midtown. Now I would never bother to look.
14. The emphasis on personal freedom in American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
15. Paperback editions of the classics were so often far superior in earlier times. Nowadays most of them look and feel like crap.
A few things I have no nostalgia for:
1. I feel America today is overall a higher-trust society, admittedly with the picture being somewhat complex. American cities certainly are much safer, and most of them look much better.
2. I prefer current airport procedures to those before 9/11.
3. Young people are overall smarter, and arguably more moral.
4. Just seeing white (and sometimes black) people everywhere, except a few cities on the coasts.
5. The seafood issue aside, food in America is obviously much much better.
6. I can’t think of anything in the category of “how people interacted with each other” that I preferred in earlier times.
7. I don’t miss having more snow, quite the contrary.
8. Medical and dental care are far superior, obviously.
What else should be on these lists?
Samuelson-Stolper, writ anew
At Sansan Chicken in Long Island City, Queens, the cashier beamed a wide smile and recommended the fried chicken sandwich.
Or maybe she suggested the tonkatsu — it was hard to tell, because the internet connection from her home in the Philippines was spotty.
Romy, who declined to give her last name, is one of 12 virtual assistants greeting customers at a handful of restaurants in New York City, from halfway across the world.
The virtual hosts could be the vanguard of a rapidly changing restaurant industry, as small-business owners seek relief from rising commercial rents and high inflation. Others see a model ripe for abuse: The remote workers are paid $3 an hour, according to their management company, while the minimum wage in the city is $16.
Here is more from the NYT, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.