Category: Food and Drink

A Chinese policeman who died after drinking too much at a banquet he was made to attend has been deemed a martyr who died in the line of duty, in an apparent attempt to meet his family's demands for compensation, a state-run newspaper said.

The story is here, via Daniel Lippman.  If you're looking for China estimate of the day, it is this:

Chinese academics have estimated that government officials spend about 500 billion yuan ($73 billion) in public funds each year on official banquets, nearly one-third of the nation's expenses on dining out.

This one is not so easily excerptable, but it's one of the best pieces-with-graphics I've seen all year.  It's about all the "nudge" tricks which go into designing menus, and how to avoid being fooled by them.

You really do need the image with it (best is to buy the New York issue), but if you insist on an excerpt, here's one:

5. Columns Are Killers
According to Brandon O’Dell, one of the consultants Poundstone quotes in Priceless, it’s a big mistake to list prices in a straight column. “Customers will go down and choose from the cheapest items,” he says. At least the Balthazar menu doesn’t use leader dots to connect the dish to the price; that draws the diner’s gaze right to the numbers. Consultant Gregg Rapp tells clients to “omit dollar signs, decimal points, and cents†‰…†‰It’s not that customers can’t check prices, but most will follow whatever subtle cues are provided.”

You'll find it here, namely on my home page (you may need to scroll down).  This version of the guide has more revisions than any other new edition, mostly because there has been a lot of quality turnover.  More than half of the "Top 20" list has changed in the course of a year.  Currently my two favorite places are Sichuan Pavilion and Abay Market (you now can and indeed have to order vegetables in advance), with Thai X-ing a perennial.  Komi is the "finest" dining and Bourbon Steak is the place most likely to be better than you think.

I should note that if you've been following the blog version of my dining guide, the html version is simply a print-it-all-out-at-once compendium, rather than a source of new information.

Sébastian Turben writes to me:

It's about a restaurant where at the end of your meal, you roll 3 dice, and if you get the combination 4-3-1 you don't have to pay…I guess what makes it work is that people will tend to eat more/more expensive that what they usually do, thinking that the proba[bility] of not paying is not that small…

The link, in French, is here.  I take this as evidence against the view that people systematically miscalculate expected utility in repeated, real market settings.  If they did, you would expect to see commercial lures like this much more often.  Maybe in mortgage markets, or credit card markets, people are overoptimistic about the bad (too many floating rate mortgages or too many people accepting the risk of high default fees), but I don't think in pizza markets they are overoptimistic about the good.  A restaurant which makes this kind of offer, of course, has to charge systematically higher prices, the greater the customer's chance of winning the lottery,

Addendum: Jeff Ely considers a related example.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

That's from a discussion of the future of in-vitro meat.  The pointer is from The Browser.

The rhythm of the nation’s kitchens can also be parsed, on an hour-by-hour basis.

At Allrecipes.com, pie searches got the most action on Wednesday morning. But by 10 a.m., people began earnest hunts for sweet potato casserole and stuffing recipes. By noon, 100,000 people had searched for mashed potato recipes.

The real outlier is gravy. If this Thanksgiving Day is anything like last year’s, most searches will slow by 10 a.m. But not gravy. That vexing cook’s kryptonite should peak about 3 p.m.

Search data are also a way to track the Thanksgiving trends, which cycle through the years like hemlines. Curiosity about deep-fried turkey is growing faster than questions about brining, with Allrecipes.com reporting a 188 percent jump in people viewing information on the technique this year over 2008.

Here is much more information, interesting throughout.

Ezra Klein asked Dan Ariely for Thanksgiving advice:

"Move to chopsticks!" he exclaimed, making bites smaller and harder to take. If the chopsticks are a bit extreme, smaller plates and utensils might work the same way. Study after study shows that people eat more when they have more in front of them. It's one of our predictable irrationalities: We judge portions by how much is left rather than how full we feel. Smaller portions lead us to eat less, even if we can refill the plate.

Speaking of which, Ariely suggests placing the food "far away." In this case, serve from the kitchen rather than the table. If people have to get up to add another scoop of mashed potatoes, they're less likely to take their fifth serving than if they simply have to reach in front of them.

"Start with a soup course," he says. That is what economists refer to as a default: Rather than putting everything on the table for people to choose, you begin by making the choice for your guests. If the first course is relatively filling and relatively low in calories, everyone will eat less during the rest of the meal.

Indeed, it's not a bad idea to limit the total number of courses. Variety stimulates appetite. As evidence, Ariely brings up a study conducted on mice. A male mouse and a female mouse will soon tire of mating with each other. But put new partners into the cage, and it turns out they weren't tired at all. They were just bored. So, too, with food. "Imagine you only had one dish," he says. "How much could you eat?"

What you eat, of course, is also important. Studies show that people aren't very consistent in the amount of calories they eat each day, but they're very consistent in the volume of food they eat each day. Thanksgiving is an exception to that consistency, but probably not to the underlying rule. Satisfaction doesn't depend on caloric intake; low-calorie, high-fiber foods and foods high in water content are filling. Thus, the more broccoli rabe there is at the table, the better.

I have many favorite topics which I don't blog much or at all.  One of these, taken from my time in Mexico, is the history of corn.  I very much enjoyed this recent article on the topic.  There is this good bit:

The sequencing revealed that an astonishing 85 percent of the corn
genome is made up of "transposable elements" — short stretches of DNA,
some perhaps descended from viral invaders — that show evidence of
having moved around in corn's 10 chromosomes at some point in
evolution. Their peregrinations provided the basis for new genes, or
the on-and-off regulation of existing ones…

And this:

Corn's diversity of traits has been largely maintained, despite a
century of intensive breeding. Modern corn produces cobs that range
from the familiar farm-stand variety to lopsided baseballs and fat
pencils and have a rainbow of kernel colors. Varieties of corn can have
a greater genetic difference between them than what exists between
human beings and chimpanzees.

And this:

Walbot, the Stanford geneticist, speculates that this unusual diversity
survived because corn cultivation spread along a north-south axis. That
exposed the species to a much greater variety of environmental
conditions — temperature, day length, rainfall, altitude — than if it
had spread along an east-west axis, as did wheat.

There is extraordinary genetic information and power in corn.  I am always willing to read another book on the history of corn and its breeding.

I've been trying to find out what Obama ate in China and this is the closest I can come:

"We're also hosting a 'Stars and Stripes' week featuring iconic
American cuisine," said a hotel spokesperson, who declined to give her
name due to company policy.

"The White House guests may want to enjoy New Orleans flavors, American steak BBQs and Jack Daniel's cocktails," she added.

That was the Marriott but I suspect the Chinese government had a say in things or at the very least it was negotiated.  It's an interesting question which side is signaling the dominance with that choice; I say the Chinese.  Fortunately in Beijing it seems he had:

Obama-Hu 90 min
meal feat. prawns, soups and lamb chops, plus a presentation of Chinese
noodle making, which the Americans enjoyed.

This topic has been knocking around the blogosphere as of late:

I am a longtime reader of MR and there is a question I have been wondering about for a long time.  I was hoping you could share your thoughts on meatball heterogeneity.  My girlfriend made dinner for me and the entree was Swedish meatballs.  I never knew how small their meatballs are.  It seems inefficient to roll all that meat into such tiny balls.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to roll them into big balls like we do in the US?

First, history + hysteresis play a role.  According to Mathistorisk Uppslagsbok by Jan-Ojvind Swahn, the Swedish concept of meatball first appeared in Cajsa Warg's 1754 cookbook.  Yet as late as the early 20th century, beef was still a luxury in Swedish culture, whereas meat was plentiful in the United States.  America had greater access to game in the more moderate climate and also greater grass resources for supporting cows.  The Swedes were also late in benefiting from the refrigerated transport revolution, which started elsewhere in the 1920s and brought more meat to many households.  (This tardiness was due to the concentration of population in a small number of cities, combined with rail isolation from Europe.)  The end result was smaller meatballs, a tradition which has persisted to this day.

On the plane of pure theory, standing behind the lock-in effect is the Ricardian (or should I say Solowian?  Solow is the modern Ricardian when you think through the underlying asymmetries in his model, which ultimately make "capital" non-productive at some margin) fixed factor explanation.  A Swedish meatball recipe usually involves much more dairy than a non-Swedish meatball recipe.  Constant returns to scale do not in general hold for recipes, much less for loosely packed spherical items involving fluids.

Oddly, the extant literature does not seem to have considered these factors.

From the comments: Lennart writes: "Swedish meatballs, having loads of surface that are fried crispy, are much better than other forms of meatballs for that reason alone. Norwegians and Danish have big meatballs, but that's because they are boiled, so there is no crispy-fried surface to maximize (and hence nowhere near as good)."

Iceland’s McDonald’s Corp.
restaurants will be closed at the end of the month after the
collapse of the krona eroded profits at the fast-food chain,
McDonald’s franchise holder Lyst ehf said.

Here is the full story and how about that name "Lyst ehf"?  (It does check out.)  Is it silly for me to say I find this story just a wee bit scary?

I thank Jason Brennan and Daniel Lippman for the pointers.