Category: Food and Drink

Branding — some results which appear temporary to me

by  Tyler Cowen in

Findings from Sesame Workshop’s initial “Elmo/ Broccoli” study indicated that intake of a particular food increased if it carried a sticker of a Sesame Street character. For example, in the control group (no characters on either food) 78 percent of children participating in the study chose a chocolate bar over broccoli, whereas 22 percent chose the broccoli. However, when an Elmo sticker was placed on the broccoli and an unknown character was placed on the chocolate bar, 50 percent chose the chocolate bar and 50 percent chose the broccoli. Such outcomes suggest that the Sesame Street characters could play a strong role in increasing the appeal of healthy foods.

There is more here and I thank Dan Lewis for the pointer.

Questions that are rarely asked

by  Tyler Cowen in

Why is it that nobody’s marketing broccoli and bananas? This stuff is sold in stores, in exchange for money. Presumably there are for-profit enterprises out there with a vested interest in selling more.

That's from Matt Yglesias.  I suspect the core reason is the absence of branding.  "Got Milk?" only gets you so far.  Most promotional campaigns ("green, and really good for you") will benefit all broccoli sellers, rather than any particular brand of broccoli, plus the profit margin on broccoli probably isn't so high anyway.  (By the way, "Got Milk?" has statist origins.)

Here's one broccoli commercial, it's — dare I say — really stupid yet it is #1 on YouTube for "broccoli commercial."  Here is Bill Cosby's "tribute to broccoli" — it remains unaired.  If you watch it through to the end, you'll see it's actually a Jell-O commercial.

You could spend quite a bit of time watching ineffective broccoli promotions on the internet.  At least this one appeals to some Hansonian impulses. 

Freak-onomics

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here, courtesy of Adam Ozimek at Modeled Behavior, is a picture of Chauncy Morlan (1869-1906) who, because of his “freakish” weight, people once paid good money to see as he toured Europe and America with the Barnum & Bailey circus.  Although a tinge of freakishness still attaches to shows like The Biggest Loser the dominant theme is a feeling
of camaraderie and the hope that if the contestants can lose weight then so can anyone
with similar problem and goals.

What would the circus goers of 1890 have thought if they were told that in the America of 2010 Chauncy Morlan would be unremarkable?

Chauncy

Markets in everything: vanquished empires edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here's one I actually wish to buy:

A 2,000-year-old snack-bar in the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii will 'open for business' once more this Sunday, with a special one-off event marking its restoration. A limited number of visitors to the Campanian archaeological site will be taken on a 45-minute guided tour of the Thermopolium (snack-bar) of Vetutius Placidus, which was previously closed to members of the public. Once inside the thermopolium, participants will also be treated to a typical Roman snack of the type once served to customers. The shop takes its name from electoral graffiti engraved on the outside of the shop, calling on passersby to vote for the candidate Vetutius Placidus, and on three amphorae found inside the premises.

Hat tip goes to Brad DeLong.

Auction markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Daniel Lippman sends me notice of the following:

The Exchange Bar & Grill, set amid the bustling shops and pubs of the Grammercy Park neighborhood, is replete with a ticker tape flashing menu prices in red lettering as demand forces them to fluctuate.

Customers can move prices for all beverages and bar snacks such as hot wings ($7 for 6 pieces) or fried calamari ($9). The prices will fluctuate in $.25 cent increments, but will most likely plateau at a $2 change in either direction.

A glass of Guinness starts at $6 but could be pushed to a high of $8 or a low of $4, depending on popularity.

So if one drink is in heavy demand, its price will rise, causing the cost of other equivalent drinks to drop. A rush on a particular beer would increase its price, and cause other beers to drop.

It is, of course, a marketing gimmick.  Daniel also sends along a link on the new idea of eco-sex.

*The New Yorker* writes up Peter Chang and *China Star*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes I know the article is gated but I wanted to blog the link anyway, out of sheer enthusiasm.  It's a superb piece.  China Star is my favorite Fairfax restaurant and it's the #1 restaurant for GMU blogger lunches and debates (though one of us hates it; can you guess which one?  We make him go nonetheless).  It's also where we take job candidates, at least the ones we respect.  Even though Chang is now gone, the restaurant remains superb in the hands of his successors, who have kept many of his original recipes.  Some people claim they get better meals when I go there to eat with them.  It's so close to our house that sometimes Natasha and I walk there.  They know us well and are rarely surprised by our order.  For two, our default is the braised fish and Sichuan chili chicken, on the bone of course.  Scallion fried fish is a must for larger groups.  John Nye likes General Kwan's Spicy Beef there.  They have real kung pao shrimp.  Kudos to Calvin Trillin for covering Chang and his mobile culinary empire.

The culture that is Japan

by  Tyler Cowen in

“The concept of this restaurant is that Robot No. 1 is the manager, which boils the noodles, and Robot No. 2 is the deputy manager, which prepares for soup and puts toppings,” said Famen’s owner, Kenji Nagaya. “Human staffs are working for the two robots.”

Here is much more, interesting throughout.  Here is one more bit:

One entry, Beerbot, detects approaching people and asks for beer money. When it acquires enough, it “buys” itself a beer. Bystanders can watch it flow into a transparent bladder. As for other humanizing behaviors, “like a robot that doesn’t stop short at lighting a cigarette but actually goes ahead and smokes it?” Mr. Wurzer says, “We had that.”

The laws of New York City (not from *The Onion*)

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a new one:

Months after it barred schools from holding most food fundraisers, the city says bake sales can go on–as long as no homemade treats with undisclosed calorie counts grace the fold-out tables. The new regulation, designed to combat ever-increasing childhood obesity, limits bake sales to "fresh fruits and vegetables, or one of 27 specific packaged items" that include low-fat Doritos, Nutri-Grain Cereal Bars (blackberry only) and Linden’s Cookies (butter crunch, chocolate chip or fudge chip cookies in two cookie packs) among other things.

The article is here and hat tip goes to Elmira Bayrasli.

Do imperatives in the past tense exist?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Douglas Krupka refers me to the following:

Although in discussion of the imperative clause type it is routinely denied that it could ever feature a past tense, imperatives in the past tense do exist. Specifically, past imperatives can be found in (Northern) Dutch and Frisian, many speakers of which can produce and understand sentences like (1) and (2).

(1) At liever eens wat minder! (Dutch)

ate rather once somewhat less

The English equivalent seems odd to me, but you would think it is hard to translate into a language which does not have imperatives in the past tense.  Best to put the English out of your mind and focus on the:

At liever eens wat minder!

You can do a Google search on the concept here.

The One Day a Week Restaurant

by  Tyler Cowen in

Eric Crampton emails me:

Why don't we see more of this?  I went to the only Ethiopian restaurant in New Zealand last night.  It runs one day a week – Mondays – in a Burmese restaurant that otherwise was closed on Mondays.
 
http://offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com/2010/02/one-day-week-restaurant.html
 
I can understand that this kind of arrangements would have risks for the host restaurant.  Ideally, you'd want it from a non-competing cuisine style.  But this is the first instance of it I've ever seen.  Have I just not been paying attention?  The story from the Dominion Post on how the place opened is very nice.  The woman running the Burmese restaurant was an immigrant from Burma who later started volunteering with an NGO that helped new migrants acclimatize.  She met a guy there who wanted to open an Ethiopean restaurant but had no capital; her restaurant was closed Mondays.
 
The other 6 days a week the Ethiopean restauranteur drives a cab. 

Alcohol Poisoning

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Deborah Blum writes about the Federal program to poison alcohol during prohibition:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

What Blum fails to mention is that the Federal program to poison alcohol continues to this day.  Drinking-alcohol is heavily taxed but ethanol is heavily subsidized so poisoning or denaturing is used to prevent arbitrage.  Even today some people occasionally go blind or die when they try to drink some form of denatured ethanol but this is rare since safe, drinking alcohol is readily available, even if expensive.

(FYI, Tyler and I mention this unusual method of preventing arbitrage in our chapter on price discrimination in Modern Principles.)