Category: Food and Drink

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.

From Amazon:

Here is a positive (five star) review:

At first, the idea of buying this milk online for hundreds of dollars
seemed absurd. Then I started thinking about the Romans. What would the
Romans think of this? Never mind the milk – the milk is common,
pedestrian, it's just milk. Even Romans had milk. No, it's the plastic
packaging. It is transparent, flexible, seals tightly and lasts
forever. The Romans would have never seen anything like it. So based on
this, I decided to buy something that the Romans would have paid any
amount for. Compared to Romans, I got it for a steal.

The Romans had legions and controlled a wide swath of the Earth.
They were the foundation of western civilization. But they never had a
Tuscan milk jug.

Here is a negative (one star) review:

If you have no weapons, I don't recommend Tuscan Milk. Instead, I
recommend getting a set of nunchucks or a club. A broom stick or a
brick are good too. If you can't find anything at all, you can buy the
book Combat Without Weapons available on Amazon. Tuscan Milk does not
work well as a weapon because it is hard to swing and difficult to
throw. It also can't be used to stop any bullets. I read on a website
that it can stop a knife, once. That's not really worth it to me.
Unless you are attacked by cats, and need a distraction, you probably
don't need Tuscan Milk. I wish someone had written a review like this
before I bought the milk. I hope this review is helpful.

The gallon costs $69.99 on Amazon.  I thank Eric H for the pointer.

Addendum: Eric also points me to this review:

"Pros: Inexpensive, easy set up.
Cons: Short product lifecycle. No instruction manual. No optical/coax sound
output."

For every newly converted vegetarian, four poor humans start earning enough money to put beef on the table.  In the past three decades, the earth's dominant carnivores have tripled our average per capita consumption; in the next four decades global meat production will double to 465 million tons.

That is from the new book Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, by James G. Workman.

In Bayesian terms, how should I evaluate this book?  I cracked it open to one page (never start with the table of contents) and found something interesting and blogworthy.  For the random review copy I am sent, the odds of that happening for a single page sample are below 1 in 50.

Matt asks this question and the answers in his comments section cite sugar policy and the VAT.  (Matt's comment, at #62, is the best of the lot.)  USA Coke also competes with free tap water, which is a no-no in Deutschland.  Here is a German site, GuteFrage.net, which asks "Wieso ist Coca-Cola so teuer?" but the answers do not impress.  Here is further German language discussion but again Armen Alchian it ain't.  This German Yahoo post considers the marginal cost of production.

I am more inclined to cite the elasticity of demand.  Here in the US of A people will drink three or four cokes in a row, maybe more.  Or they will buy many cans of coke for the whole family along with hot dogs, Twinkies, Hellmann's mayonnaise, and other utility-maximizing commodities.  But those high-volume strategies require a fairly low price.  I haven't lived in Germany for over twenty years, but my impression at the time was that you would drink one coke at a main meal with your food and that was it.  (You also didn't get very much in the Glas, but that's another story.)  They're weren't aiming for volume sales by lowering the price, so instead they would focus on the upper left part of the demand curve.

I don't know if Matt is referring to restaurants or vending machines.  In restaurants drink prices are arguably a proxy for enjoying the amenities, the table and the service of the wait staff.  If the wait staff have higher wages and benefits, due to European labor market regulation, the drink price might be reflecting that higher marginal cost, even if the MC of the drink itself is low relative to price.

People, can you help out on this one?

Fatty acids derived from pork bone fat are used as a hardening agent in crayons and also gives them their distinctive smell.

Here is more, including a comparison to Leonard Read.

Andrew, a loyal MR reader, has a request:

Tyler, why don't more people like spicy food? What prevents them from trying spicy dishes?

Mexicans acculturate their small children to spicy food gradually, by mixing increasing amounts of chilies into the meal.  It takes a while before the kids enjoy it and at first they don't like it.  If this has never been done to you, you need to make the leap yourself, usually later in life.  The whole point of spicy food is that at first it is painful, causing the release of endorphins to the brain.  With time the pain goes away and you still get the endorphins, although you may seek out an increasingly strong dose to boost the endorphin response.

Not all Americans think this is a good deal.  Older people are less likely to make this initial investment and endure the initial pain.  The same is true for uneducated people (adjusting for ethnicity), who both are less likely to know it will end up being a source of pleasure and who on average have higher discount rates.  What other predictions can be made?  If you and your country are too obsessed with dairy you will be led away from spicy food, one way or the other.  Milk usually counteracts the pleasing effects of chilies.

Jason Kuznicki asks why do they do it?  Why don't they make the "secret menu" common knowledge?  He gives some answers, including:

Americans have some very set though inaccurate ideas about what
“Chinese food” really is. They will generally balk at anything else.
More people will break this way, and avoid the restaurants, than will
break my way, and go to them more often, if they are offered something
new and different.

I would add that perhaps many Chinese restaurants do not want too many non-Chinese customers.  Especially for immigrants, restaurant life is often about ambience, social contacts, and feeling you have a space to call your own.  A restaurant cannot be all things to all people and the #1 best way of judging a restaurant is to look at its customers.  The "beef with broccoli" menu will attract a certain kind of American customer, but without breaking down the sense of segregation and the basic Chineseness of the place.

That said, there is also the fear that the American customers will order from the secret menu and then not like the chicken feet, etc. and give a bad report to their friends.

Thai restaurants don't have secret menus per se, but often you can talk a so-so restaurant into, for your sake, becoming a very good restaurant with real Thai food.

1. Rant about agriculture, hat tip goes to Ezra Klein.