Category: Food and Drink
Markets in everything
Established in 1704, Saruya is the only shop in Japan specializing in toothpicks. Of course our toothpicks are not the machine-made, mass-produced items you find anywhere, but hand-crafted, quality toothpicks made from “kuromoji” or spicewood (lindera). Kuromoji is a member of the camphor (linden) family, and besides its fine aroma, it is flexible and hard to break, making it an ideal material for toothpicks.
In addition to regular-use toothpicks, we also make toothpicks to use like a fork for eating slices of fruit or Japanese sweets. Depending on the product, toothpicks might be packaged in a wooden box, or individually wrapped in paper, etc.
At five dollars a box, they are cheaper than artisanal pencil sharpenings.
Corn tamale home recipe
Here is another reader request:
more tyler cowen home recipes. previous installments have been helpful thanks.
Lately I have been buying frozen corn tamales ("tamale de elote") from a Latin supermarket or Shoppers Food Warehouse. Steam them, wrapped, for ten to twelve minutes. Serve with El Salvadoran white sour cream on top or to the side. (Honduran or Guatemalan white sour cream will do in a pinch.) You also can heat up some Goya small red beans, with a bit of freshly ground cumin and ideally some fresh stock. For the ambitious, make the stock from celery, black pepper, salt, onion slices, pork neck, and one ancho chile, but the beans taste fine on their own.
It's one of the easiest good meals I know and its a way to bring some deflation into your life.
Unusual questions from loyal blog readers
To what extent can someone who is starving cannibalize his/her self to stay alive? My logic in asking you this question was not, "I'm curious about cannibalism, let me ask the food critic." It was more along the lines of "This is a really obscure and somewhat far-fetched idea and question, Dr. Cowen would probably be the best person to present it to because of his wide range of knowledge and access to an intelligent readership."
That's from M.E. My answer is: "to a limited extent." By the way, I am giving a talk tonight, and there is a (substantial) prize being offered for the best question from the audience.
Weight Loss and Incentives
Ted Frank reports on his 60k weight-loss bet with Ray Lehmann:
In late 2008, Ray Lehmann and I made an audacious bet: we would put up $60,000 that we would lose 60 pounds in nine months, and pay each other $1,000 for each pound the other lost.
…I lost 32 pounds, Ray lost 41, and we were on pace to lose 60 each. StickK.com was offering to make us their official spokespeople.
Then things fell apart. We couldn't negotiate an appropriate contract with StickK, which wanted exclusive rights to our story without any compensation. The delay caused us to stop writing about the diet while we had false dreams of fame and glory from StickK promotion, and then we both got distracted with starting new jobs and the disappointment of shattered expectations when StickK stopped returning our calls.
Alex Tabarrok correctly predicted that the danger of the two-person bet was that we would collude not to enforce it.
And, indeed that was what happened. We started gaining weight, and started pushing back the goal-line for the end of the bet…neither of us held the other's feet to the fire….
Professor Tabarrok's solution was to create a third-party Leviathan to enforce the bet: he facetiously offered to pay us $500 to be the collector [not facetious, Ted!, AT]. Of course, that was a negative-expectation transaction for each of us, unless we thought we had a 90%+ chance of succeeding…Even the threat of public humiliation on Marginal Revolution wasn't enough to stop us from colluding.
But Ted isn't giving up. He is looking for other people to take the bet to reduce the possibility of collusion or he would like to auction off leviathan rights.
Are there three other people out there willing to wager that they can lose 50 pounds over a reasonable amount of time? (Forty? Sixty?) Who's in, and under what conditions?
…In the alternative, how much is someone willing to pay to be Leviathan and have the opportunity to collect tens of thousands of dollars from me or Ray for failing to lose weight? I suppose I could put Leviathan rights up on eBay; if Marginal Revolution and a few other blogs publicized it, we could reach a good solid equilibrium price. What do people think?
I see this is as a good case study in the difficult of setting up an appropriate incentive scheme and also the difficulty of losing weight. When I put on my Tyler hat, however, I have to wonder whether all this effort put into clever incentive schemes is not a way of avoiding the real issues. "Less blogging, more jogging," my friends.
What Ted and Ray are trying to do is to sail between Scylla and Charybdis by offsetting the pull of food with the pull of lost money. Carrot cake versus stick. But in this tug of war, how long will the balance last? How permanent will the weight loss be?
The real trick in weight loss, as in other areas of life, is to change wants not oppose them. Unfortunately, Seth Roberts nothwithstanding, this is a struggle with no easy solutions.
Nevertheless, I have proudly helped others to lose weight with unusual incentives, and my $500 bid for leviathan rights over Ted and Ray still stands. Good luck guys.
The culture that is Japan, markets in everything
There is much more at the link, including more photos, and I thank Michael Mullen for the pointer.
Elephant Jumps, Thai food in Merrifield
8110 A Arlington Blvd, Falls Church, 22042, (703) 942-6600, in the Yorktowne Center, more on Gallows than Route 50, home page here.
Home-style Thai food, with four levels of spicy, culminating in “Thai spicy.” It’s not as good as Thai X-ing, but it’s probably better than any other local Thai competitor. They will watch you sweat and they will giggle.
Here is one good review of the restaurant. Here is a short bit on how elephants were viewed in antiquity. Here is my favorite book on elephants.
After we exchanged impressions of the other local Thai restaurants, the proprietor said to me: “You know a lot about food and you get around — you should be a food critic. You could write up what you think about all these places!”
If we’re not going to have much more economic growth, we can at least have a few locales like this.
From the Korean taco story
“The meat makes it Korean,” said Mr. Ban, who marinates chuck roll in a soy and garlic sauce that is traditionally used with Korean barbecue dishes. “The tortilla and the toppings are a way to tell our customers that this food is O.K., that this food is American.”
The link is here and I thank Roland Stephen for the pointer. I had read right over that passage and didn't even notice anything funny.
Does Beer Make Bud Wiser?
Here from Razib Khan at Gene Expression is a chart of percentage alcohol drinkers against score on the Wordsum test (0-10 score; a quick and dirty correlate .71 of adult IQ.). I will let you debate causality.
Close substitutes vs. perfect substitutes
For me, pluots and grapes are close substitutes, though not perfect substitutes.
Let's say a house visitor brings a big bag of pluots as a gift. That distorts my optimum pluot-grape ratio. But I don't eat all the pluots at once, simply to restore the preferred ratio. That would be an unbalanced meal. Instead, I dig into the pluot bag at a higher rate than I would normally eat pluots. Over a longer period of time the proper ratio is restored, pluot by pluot.
The closer pluots and grapes are as substitutes, the longer it takes for equilibrium restoration. But the closeness of substitution is not always the major factor determining the speed of adjustment. It may be just as important, or more important, how hungry I am, how much of a glutton I am, and how much I like pluots. It also matters whether I am fearing a large shock, requiring a major pluot reserve, such as when a bevy of pluot-devouring guests might suddenly visit the house.
In any case, equilibrium restoration eventually comes. Those pluots will clear my refrigerator, sooner or later.
Apply a similar analysis to cash and T-Bills. At low nominal interest rates they are close substitutes but not perfect substitutes. T-Bills are of greater use for clearinghouse collateral, and yield a bit more, but they are not liquid in exactly the same ways. Even if cash and T-Bills are close substitutes, monetary policy will change the banks' mix and so banks eventually will reequilibrate, converting extra cash into AD, one way or another. But as with the pluot adjustment, this won't happen all at once.
Equilibration (and the accompanying AD boost) may be slow, maybe too slow for comfort. But the degree of substitutability is not the only factor determining the speed of this adjustment, just as with the pluots. The degree of bank and business confidence may be the most important factor. Other factors will be the cues from the Fed, the corporate cultures of the banks, possible uncertainty, transactional frictions (the difference in returns is small but perhaps the cost of adjusting is small too), and so on. The degree of substitutability is one factor determining the speed of adjustment but not necessarily a major factor. I am not sure it should be put in the top three most important factors.
The zero bound argument assumes that the degree of substitutability is, at current margins, the major factor which matters. You are being "sold" a model of portfolio adjustment with one dominant factor.
Monetary policy is not working well today, but perhaps bank and business confidence is a bigger reason than the degree of substitutability. From those who promote the relevance of the "zero bound" argument, you will see it implicitly assumed that we have a case of perfect substitutes and that substitutability is the major factor hindering portfolio adjustment, as would lead to an expansion of the broader money supply aggregates.
In many models "close substitutes" and "perfect substitutes" have very different properties. Current discussions of the liquidity trap usually neglect this point.
Addendum: This is also a framework for thinking about ceasing to pay interest on reserves. If it creates perfect substitutes, stop the policy immediately. If it creates closer substitutes, it may matter much less.
*Steak*, by Mark Schatzker
Roughly 98 percent of cattle do live to see the day the truck from the packing plant pulls up because antibiotics are mixed in with the feed to keep livers and guts from failing. A certain number are fated to die, however. Feedlot nutritionists, Williams explained, actually want to see a small percentage get sick, as "that way, they know they're pushing the feed to the edge." The ones that aren't dying are getting fat fast."
That is from the new and notable book Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef. This book is interesting and substantive on virtually every page and it is one of the best food books I have read in some time.
If you are wondering, the best steaks I have had were (in no order):
1. Kobe Beef in Kobe, Japan.
2. Dry-aged, in Hermosillo, Mexico.
3. Southern Brazil, in small towns outside of Curitiba.
It is rare that I end up eating steak in the United States; I just don't see a good reason to do it. I also think a lot of steak in B.A. is overrated, as does Schatzker.
Sentences to ponder
Picky eaters tend to gravitate to certain foods, including blander products that are often white or pale colored, like plain pasta or cheese pizza. For reasons that aren't clear, almost all adult picky eaters like French fries and often chicken fingers, health experts say.
This article gets at some deep questions as to the differences (or possible lack thereof) between disorders, differing capabilities, and differing tastes. The stories are interesting, but it doesn't get far on developing a good conceptual framework…
Last Call
Daniel Okrent's Last Call, a history of the rise and fall of alcohol prohibition, is a masterpiece. Of course the writing is great but Okrent is also very good at building the history on a framework of analysis and social science.
Here is Okrent on Prohibition and the income tax:
By 1875 fully one-third of federal revenues came from the beer keg and the whiskey bottle, a proportion that would increase in the years ahead and that would come to be described by a temperance leader in 1913, not inaccurately, as "a bribe on the public conscience."
…it would be hard enough to fund the cost of government without the tariff and impossible without a liquor tax. Given that you wouldn't collect much revenue from a liquor tax in a nation where there was no liquor, this might have seemed like an insurmountable problem for the Prohibition movement. Unless, that is, you could weld the drive for Prohibition to the campaign for another reform, the creation of a tax on incomes.
And here is Okrent on voting law and prohibition. I'd always understood that prohibition was, in part, an attack by rural WASPs against urban, (often) Catholic, immigrants but I had not realized how much the drys were helped by malapportionment in the state legislatures which gave rural voters greater power than their numbers alone would have suggested.
Statewide wet majorities were rendered irrelevant by the rotten-borough legislatures. The very same day the citizens of Missouri rejected a dry amendment to the state constitution by a margin of 47 percent dry to 53 percent wet, they elected a legislature that just two months later would ratify the Eighteenth Amendment by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. In Ohio, the sacred cradle of the ASL, legislative districting and assiduous politicking put ratification over by a combined legislative vote of 105-42; however, when left to their own devices, Ohio voters rejected the very same measure in a referendum.
See also Tyler's review for more.
Robin Hanson responds on cryonics
Does Tyler think the world would be equally better off if foodies were to act contrary to type, express less via buying less fancy food, and give the difference to charity? If so, why has he never mentioned it in his hundreds of food posts?
Could it be Tyler knows that tech nerds are low status in our society and fair game for criticism? Is this really any different than rich folks complaining about inner city kids who buy $100 sneakers instead of saving their money or giving it to charity, even while they buy $1000 suits and dresses instead of saving their money or giving it to charity?
There is much more here. This is not essential to the points under discussion, but I should add that I consider tech nerds to be a relatively high status group in American society, at least above the age of thirty.
How to eat well in Berlin
Paris has dozens of restaurants which are better than any in Berlin, and then hundreds more better than the rest. Yet it may be the case that you have, overall, a better food life in Berlin than in Paris.
Berlin has a weak reputation among foodies, but culinary life in the city is much improved. Here are my tips for a good eating life in Berlin:
1. Find a steady source of innovative rolls, buns, and dark breads. These are the glories of Berlin and in many parts of town there will be at least one such source per residential block. The more irregular the colors, seeds, and topologies of the breads, the more enthusiastically you should buy them. Do not treat this as the French bread buying experience.
2. Find a source for good spreads, such as cherry, raspberry, etc. and stock up. Repeatedly apply the spreads to the breads, until death of the researcher intervenes. This procedure is the basis for everything else you will do. It ensures that all of your food days will be good ones.
3. Seek out mid-level German restaurants, of the kind promoted in the Time Out Guide; Renger-Patzsch is a good example. The vegetables in such places will be consistently excellent.
4. The speed and service quality of most meals will be much better if you arrive before 7 p.m.
5. Don't obsess over German food. It's underrated, but still a lot of it isn't that good. In Berlin, and many other parts of Germany, you have first-class delicatessens or stores with foodstuffs from France, Italy, and many other parts of the world. Use them. Berlin offers one of the best overall selections in this regard, better than New York City or Paris, for instance, in terms of real access. You can eat first-rate French cheese every day.
6. When it comes to Berlin German food, don't eat anything in a sauce. It will be either boring or disgusting. Sorry.
7. The sausage spread at the KaDeWe (make sure you live near that place) is probably the best in the entire world. Go there regularly. They also have first-rate sausages from France, Spain, and other countries, as well as an unparalleled selection of sausages from the different regions of Germany, organized one region per case. This food source, like #1, insures that each of your food days will be a splendid one.
8. Go to Berlin's numerous and varied ethnic restaurants, especially in the slightly lower rent districts. If the food is supposed to be spicy, you must repeat the following incantation several times: "Ich will es essen, genau wie Sie es zu Hause essen. Ich bin kein deutscher." [I want to eat it exactly as you eat it at home. I am not a German."] Repeat especially that last part: "Ich bin kein deutscher." Repeat it even if you are a German. This will usually work and typically your Chinese or Thai or Indian server will smile and laugh in response. If they view you as a German, you are screwed no matter what. Simply asking for the food to be "spicy" or even "very spicy" is laughable. It is showing yourself to be a fool and a sucker.
9. Food here is much cheaper than in Paris, and it is much easier to get into virtually any restaurant. Take advantage of both features.
10. Italian food here is almost always reasonably good, and reasonably cheap, but it is rarely great. Lots of cream sauces. It's a good enough fall back and you find it virtually everywhere. A quite good pasta for $6 or even less is a common experience. Sometimes it's actually German food in disguise, or not in disguise, such as when you get Carpaccio with Pfifferlinge.
11. For ethnic food, I recommend the following: Tian Fu in Wilmersdorf (very good Sichuan), Suriya-Kanthi (Sri Lankan in Prenzlauer Berg), Genazvale (Georgian food in Charlottenburg), Degirman is one good Turkish place of many, a slew of authentic Mexican restaurants (more than in Virginia), DAO restaurant in Charlottenburg (Thai food, best papaya salad I've had, all-around excellent), and Schneeweiss has first-rate Wiener Schnitzel.
Overall Sri Lankan and Nepalese and East bloc cuisines are better here, or more available, than in the USA.
If you visit for one day, you won't be so impressed with culinary life in Berlin. If you stay for a month, you won't want to go back to what you had before.
Interview with Tyler Cowen, pay-as-you-wish restaurants
To find out if the pay-what-you-can model could work for a restaurant, Salon spoke with Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University (and food writer), from Berlin, Germany.
Do you think this pay-what-you-can model could actually work for restaurants?
You can have a small number of restaurants that use it, but if every restaurant were like that, it would never work. It gets people talking. It's like Radiohead — for the first group that does it, it's a good idea, but is it a good model for the industry? Not really. Imagine McDonald's at Times Square working on this principle. If you kept on going or eating they would discourage you from coming.
Do you think it could work on a small scale — two or three restaurants in a city?
I'm not even sure it can in the long run. I'm not sure if these places will still be going in three years' time. Part of the problem is if you're a customer and what you pay is voluntary, you're under pressure to pay a lot of money. You do it once to prove to yourself and others how charitable you are, but how many people go back 17 times? I would find it a burden — my reputation is on the line. What if I only pay $ 27 instead of $ 34? What does my date think? What does my wife think? You end up wanting to feel liberated and just paying a listed cash price. I think there's no way to solve that problem.
But Radiohead's experiment was fairly succesful. What's the difference between it and a restaurant?
With Radiohead, there's a focal price of about $10, which is pretty cheap. If you download an album and send in $10, you feel you've done your bit, and it's not a question of repeat business. You download the album once. Radiohead makes most of its income by touring, so even if they lose money on the album, but get more popular, they can just go on tour. A restaurant has no other way to get that money back. They count on the people to pay for their food.
Is there anything that these restaurants can do to encourage people to pay more?
You have to feel like you're being watched. You have to feel that other people are paying. You have to feel like you're part of a cool experiment. Even with Radiohead. it's wrong to call them neighborly, but their fans pretend they're a tight-knit pool of cool people. That's an illusion, but you're still relying on a peer effect. It's a way to feel you're better — that you're so committed to the band you paid for something out of your own pocket.
Are some sectors of the economy better suited to this kind of pay-what-you-can model?
It depends on what you mean by giving things away for free. There's plenty of stuff that gets given away for free, like NPR. But once NPR's content is produced, it doesn't cost them extra to have additional listeners. With restaurants, if somebody eats another plate of veal, it costs them money. It'll keep this strategy limited. There may be some niche on a small level for these kinds of restaurants, but it's hard to imagine people saying that they've been to six of these restaurant and they're about to go to their seventh.
Why are these restaurants popping up now?
I'm actually not surprised you see them in down economic times. You let some people pay less that can't pay more — it's part of the charm. But these days there's a restaurant for every possible cuisine, and so many marketing tricks. Restaurateurs are exploring every last possible idea. If you were opening a restaurant in 1957, you could do almost anything beyond steak and potatoes and be considered new, but if it's 2010 and you're across the street from the Malaysian place with roller skates, it makes some sense.