Category: Food and Drink

This one is from Jacqueline:

"Tap water?" said Alison Szeli, 26, picking up the clear plastic bottle
with orange letters: "Tap'd NY. Purified New York City tap water."

She studied the description: "No glaciers were harmed in making this
water." She compared prices: Smartwater cost $1.85. Tap'd NY was 35
cents less.

I suspect this will seem odder to you, the older you are.

…the restaurant is designed from top to bottom in a medical theme.
wheelchairs, hospital beds, operating lights, test tubes and more, the
design is completely off the wall. The interior is far more subtle than
the al fresco seating out front.

It's called The Clinic and here is more information, and photos, including information on one of its tastiest dishes.  Here is their imaginative website.  Here is a floor plan with two excellent photos.  You sit in wheelchairs and drink out of IV bags. 

Sadly, I've never been to Iran, though I would love to go.  Here are a few tips for the Iranian food I've had elsewhere:

1. A good koresh (stew) almost always beats a good kabob.  Ghormeh sabzi and bademjan are national treasures.

2. The choice of rice is a central decision.  Get zereshk polo — barberry rice — as much as you can.  Or get cherry rice, rice with pistachio, etc.  All those choices are winners.

3. Lamb shank can end up being dull in a Persian restaurant.  If served with dill the dish is often too dry.

4. Fesanjan, fesanjan, fesanjan.  In Iceland I once ate fesenjan guillemot.  The fesenjan in a can that you find in Persian groceries is actually pretty good.

5. Don't be afraid to smear mast-o-moseer (or musir; the spellings and transliterations vary, as with many of these dishes) into your rice.  Always order mast-o-moseer.

6. Soups are excellent, especially if they are fragrant and have noodle-like entities.  Soups without barley are usually better than soups with barley.

7. In this country Westwood, Los Angeles has the best Iranian food overall.  Check out Westwood Ave. and also Pico.

8. If you are in a country where you do not expect to see Persian food, and you see Persian food, it is usually very good.  As a partial exception to a rule of good eating, a single Persian restaurant can be very good even if there are not other Persian restaurants around.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Catherine Rampell at Economix posts this interesting chart showing the relationship between the "time the average person in a given country spends eating and that country’s obesity rate (as measured by the percentage of the national population with a body mass index higher than 30)."

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.