Category: Food and Drink

Yummy yum yum at Krispy Kreme doughnuts

Since I live in a county dedicated to the rule of law, I was not surprised to read this:

You know Krispy Kreme doughnuts are bad for your arteries. But the
delectable sugar-bombs are apparently lousy for sewer pipes as well,
according to Fairfax County.

In a lawsuit filed this month against the company, the county says
that doughnut grease and other waste from a plant in Lorton have
clogged up the county's sewage system, causing $2 million in damage.
The county is seeking to recoup the cost of the repairs and another $17
million in civil penalties.

The problems began in 2004, shortly after the plant opened, when the
county's public works inspectors began noticing "deposits of doughnut
grease and slime emanating from Krispy Kreme's doughnut production
plant," according to the suit, which was first reported by the
Examiner.

The muck got so bad that a nearby pumping station began reeking of
doughnuts, and a camera inserted into one of the pipes "got stuck in
the grease, preventing inspection of the remainder of the line,"
according to the suit.

One of these days, maybe when the economic crisis is over, I will spend a week blogging Fairfax County rather than the nation at large.

Robin Goldstein is excellent

He writes to me:

Also wanted to let you know that I've just started a new blog, "Blind Taste" (http://blindtaste.com),
which covers the food and wine worlds from an edgy, unusual
 perspective that draws from neuroscience, economics, and, of course,
gonzo journalism.

If you will recall, he is one of the guys who wrote the paper about pâté and dog food.  Robin Goldstein and I once sat down over pescado saltado to compare notes on D.C. (and global) food and, while you cannot take me as speaking for him in any formal sense, we agreed to an astonishing degree.  Here is his critique of molecular gastronomy.

Defining Fat Down

Americans are more overweight than ever but Burke, Heiland and Nadler find:

…that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly
lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling
for objective weight status and other factors….The shifts in self classification are not explained by differences between
surveys in body fatness or waist circumference, nor by shifting demographics. We
interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms
related to body weight, and propose various mechanisms to explain such a shift,
including: (1) higher average adult BMI and adult obesity rates in the later
survey cohort, (2) higher childhood obesity rates in the later survey cohort,
and (3) public education campaigns promoting healthy body image. The welfare
implications of the observed trends in self-classification are mixed.

The decline of chewing

According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.

That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.  This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic.  It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date.  I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.

Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:

Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces,
determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette
pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot
impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the
notion that food should melt in the mouth .

Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any
more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their
carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not
collaborating in their own cultural demise?”

…According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time – usually
between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C – by 60 seconds or more in
search of a less crusty crust.

The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process
occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness,
that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.

Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.

Standard dishes for testing the quality of a restaurant

Joshua Johnson, a loyal MR (and TCEDG) reader, asks:

If you are going to a new ethnic
restaurant, what staple items do you order that for you, let you know
if the restaurant is worth coming back to and trying more of their
offerings? It would be nice if you could make some sort of list for
Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Thai, Turkish, etc.

Here goes:

Japanese: One bite of the tempura tells all.

Chinese: Ma Po Tofu, or for some kinds of Chinese places Hainan Chicken with Rice.

Thai: Almost any dish shows the true colors of a Thai restaurant immediately.

Turkish: Doner Kebab, taking special care to ponder the tanginess of the yogurt and how it interacts with the meat.

Vietnamese: Anything with lemon grass, which is hard to use well.

Ethiopian: Kitfo or barring that lamb tibs.

Peruvian: Lomo saltado, taking special care to check for the right amount of cilantro in the sauce and the correct sogginess of the french fries.

Bolivian: Silpancho, and check the liquidity and consistency of the egg on top.

Afghan: Kadu (pumpkin) and is it too sweet?

Korean: Seafood pancake and in general the quality of their kimchees.

Indian: Most dishes will do (see "Thai"), although avoid the Butter Chicken as a metric of quality.  Lamb with spinach is my do-or-die default judgment dish for an Indian restaurant, if only because you get to taste both the lamb (less likely to be tender than the chicken) and the spinach.

Restaurant, general: How's their chili crab?  If it's not outstanding, or not on the menu, press eject immediately and get yourself to a different country.

Can you think of others?

Why is it so hard to hug?

Gretchen Rubin reports:

After I looked at my list, however, I realized that I’d never made a
specific resolution to “Kiss more, hug more, touch more.” So I’ve added
that to my ever-growing list of resolutions.

This is intriguing, precisely because it strikes a chord with so many people.  Why exactly do so many people need a "nudge" to hug more?  There is evidence that hugging is both fun and good for us.  What is it about hugging that is so often resisted?

Oddly, many people wish to be hugged by Florence Henderson.

I am reminded of my old post on why people don't have more sex with each other than they do.  Fortunately, I have solved this problem and if you keep on reading MR for enough years you will learn my answer.

Advertising markets in everything

I wonder if this idea will last:

A new hot dog stand is being built on the West Side, and when it opens, the people behind the counter could be ex-convicts.

As CBS 2's Vince Gerasole reports, the restaurant is controversial, not because of the felons, but the two words on the outside of the building.

Felony Franks is Jim Andrews' new hot dog stand, currently under construction on a busy West Side corner, decorated with freshly painted wieners donning prison garb and a ball and chain, proclaiming "food so good it's criminal."

The full story is here and I thank John de Palma for the pointer.

What do they eat in La Gloria?

Of course this Mexican village is known as a possible source for the current bout of swine flu, and also for its proximity to a large Smithfield factory farm, but I feel it ought to be known for something else as well. 

So I consulted my fifty-volume Mexican food compendium, the indispensable Cocina Indigena y Popular.  (Alas I can find only forty-nine of the fifty volumes despite a quest lasting years and I also wonder if more volumes have come out.)  Sadly I had to skip over the tract on Nahua cuisine in northern Veracruz (La Gloria is more southern in the state), and the treatment of Afromestizo cuisine, but El sabor de las plantas de Veracruz proved useful.  Here is one good recipe (translation and interpretation by this author):

Bean soup

Two servings of black beans

One white onion, chopped

2 or 3 leaves of hoja santa; the dried version of these leaves is available in Mexican groceries

"queso fresco" [fresh cheese, but this has a specific meaning and you can find it in the U.S.]

You grind up the beans and onion after cooking them together for a while in some olive oil.  You reheat them, the cheese gets sprinkled on top, and you can make the dish as moist as you wish by adding water.

Serve with tortillas, totopos if possible.  It's one good example of a real Mexican meal.

Can people distinguish pâté from dog food?

The forward march of science continues:

Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

The title of the paper is, appropriately: Can
People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?

Why does the music from Cape Verde sound so sad?

Might one reason be recurring famine?:

Despite its name, Cape Verde is an arid landmass with minimal agricultural potential.  The excess mortality associated with its major famines in unparalleled in relative terms.  A famine in 1773-76 is said to have removed 44 percent of the population; a second in 1830-33 is claimed to have killed 42 percent of the population of seventy thousand or so; and a third in 1854-56 to have killed 25 percent.  In 1860 the population was ninety thousand; 40 percent of Cape Verdeans were reported to have died of famine in 1863-67.  Despite a population loss of thirty thousand, the population was put at eighty thousand in 1870.  Twentieth-century famines in Cape Verde were less deadly, but still extreme relative to most contemporaneous ones elsewhere: 15 percent of the population (or twenty thousand) in 1900-1903; 16 percent (twenty-five thousand) in 1920-22; 15 percent (twenty thousand) in 1940-43; and 18 percent (thirty thousand) in 1946-48…

…such death tolls imply extraordinary noncrisis population growth.  For instance, if the population estimates for 1830 and 1860 are credited, making good the damage inflicted by the famine of 1830-33 would have required an annual population growth rate of about 4 percent between 1833 and 1860 — despite the loss of a quarter or so of the population in 1854-56.

That is all from the new and noteworthy Famine: A Short History, by Cormac O Grada.  Here is the book's home page.

Here are the author's working papers on famine.

Is it a good sign to see cops eating at a restaurant?

Kevin Burke, a loyal MR reader, asks me:

Are dining policemen a good sign that the restaurant/takeout place you've chosen is a good place to get quick, cheap food?

Arguments in favor:
1) cops patrol a specific beat, which means they'll eat most of their meals in one area

2) police work naturally entails lots of downtime, some of which, I imagine, cops spend discussing where to eat or what they just ate;

3) as frequent diners, cops will remember and avoid places that gave them or a patrol mate food poisoning (although I developed this theory in a "B" grade restaurant in LA)

Against:
1) Cops' dining preferences may simply mirror the public's, in which case it wouldn't be a very reliable signal.

My take: I have to vote against the cops, if only because I don't see them at the places I frequent.  Maybe the problem is the least common denominator effect, namely that the cops won't go to places that disgust or turn off some members of the group.  I once (asking for directions) entered a Maryland Dunkin' Donuts and lo and behold, the cliche seemed to be true as the place was full of cops.  Maybe cops require sugary foods to regulate their moods.

A related problem is that, as far as I can tell, not so many Asian immigrants become cops.  When it comes to the United States, apart from the wealthy, they are the people most likely to be eating good food.

What do you all think about this question?

Making dining complicated

Here is Grant Achatz, now blogging:

Each guest at a table gets a card with four rows of six words. The rows
are defined by characteristics. In the example below, from left to
right: Row one is flavor, two is texture, three is emotionally driven,
and four is temperature. As a group, the diners have to select one word
from each category or row. Once the group has made a decision, they
turn in their choices to the waiter. The waiter hands the choices to
the kitchen, where we create a dish based on the guests' four choices.
Soon after, the result of their choice–their exercise in limited free
will–is served. Or will be.

As Arnold Kling has noted, I am interested in the issue of the efficient delegation of choice.  So very often the theatrical presentation of "the feeling of being in control" conflicts with the efficient delegation of choice.  If I ran a restaurant I would be embarassed by this practice, not proud of it.

Food in Portugal notes

Many of you recommended the pasteis in Belem, so when we were picked up at the airport we were immediately whisked there: "We know already that you wish to go" was the explanation.   

The white asparagus is in season and they stack ham on top of many things, including trout.  No other cuisine can make the blend of rabbit and clam seem so natural.  A good rule of thumb here is to order game, beans, and any combination of ingredients which sounds like a mistake.  The biggest mistake here is to try to replicate the kind of seafood meal you might enjoy in the U.S.

If you prefer Michelin "two-fork restaurants" to their starred alternatives, Portugal is the eating country for you.  I haven't seen a single Chinese restaurant.  It is Lusaphone eating: for your foreign options, you can find Brazilian, Mozambiquean (good chicken), Cape Verdean, and excellent Goan.  French and Italian are rare.

If I had a thousand dissertations to research, one of them would be: "The historical interconnections between the Portuguese dessert and the Calcutta sweets shop."

The fact that I found this post interesting to write makes me fear that Western Europe is not yet an optimum currency area.