Category: Food and Drink

The
company, part of the Corporación Multi Inversiones, a diversified
privately owned group with interests including finance, real estate,
construction and agriculture, does not post earnings. But, according to
reliable sources, total income last year was between $380m and $400m (£199m) (€254m). That is about 1.2 per cent of Guatemala’s gross domestic product [emphasis added].

…the best example of how it has adapted its image is China,
where the company used its heritage to appeal to the local crowd – even
though Guatemala is not usually associated with things most foreigners
identify as Latin American, such as soccer and Salsa.

“Chinese
people are obsessed with Latin pop culture but they don’t really
distinguish between countries,” says Mr Weaver. “So we tried to
associate ourselves with figures such as Ricky Martin as well as with
Latin American and Spanish football,” he says.

So far, thanks
also in part to a new “extra crisp” line of chicken, sales are
reportedly strong. Juan José Gutiérrez, Pollo Campero’s chief
executive, recently told La Opinión, the US Spanish language daily
newspaper, that: “The Latin concept is well received and they loved our
chicken.”

Here is more.  It is very good chicken, I like the branch in Falls Church, on Colombia Pike.  I might add that there is a notable trend of successful Latino multinationals.  If Pollo Campero shows nothing else, it is too early to pronounce the Latino market-oriented reforms to be failures.

There are some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States — more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.

That is from the often quite interesting The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, by Jennifer 8. Lee (yes, readers, her middle initial is the number "8").  Of course arguably most of these restaurants do not count as Chinese food at all.

At the end of the book the author undertakes a global pilgrimage to discover the very best Chinese restaurant outside of China.  The winner?: Zen Fine Chinese Cuisine, just outside of Vancouver.  The number two choice came — justly — in Mumbai (Nelson Wang’s China Garden).  I’ve never been to Richmond but I believe all of my top picks would come in India.  Hunan, in London, deserves consideration as well.  The author is correct that Chinese chefs, for whatever reason, do not flourish in France.  Recommended.   

Jason Kottke relates:

The Riverdale Garden Restaurant in the Bronx is trying out a novel way of staying in business: they’re asking for their regulars to pledge $5000 in exchange for a year of free dinners.

The problem of course is obvious.  First, you probably won’t get your money back.  Second, if everyone paid up, the restaurant has a weaker incentive to serve good food.  And which customers do you think will receive the best treatment?  The ones who put up nothing per each meal?

Cheeseburger in a can.  On the brighter side, it sure beats dirt cookies.

Behavioral economics in action, or call it voluntary paternalism:

Students ran a test last semester showing that on two days when trays
weren’t offered, food and beverage waste dropped between 30 and 50
percent, according to Kathy Woughter, vice president for student
affairs at Alfred. That amounts to about 1,000 pounds of solid waste
and 112 gallons of liquid waste saved on a weekly basis, according to
the college.

And why?:

Think back to your undergraduate days eating in the dorm dining hall.
When you moved through the buffet line, did you ever get a little too
ambitious with portions just because you had extra room on that plastic
tray?

If I ran a cafeteria I would consider abolishing utensils, thereby encouraging South Indian and Ethiopian food, but I don’t expect that would be popular with all patrons.

At the market in the La Saline slum, two cups of rice now sell for 60 cents, up 10 cents from December and 50 percent from a year ago. Beans, condensed milk and fruit have gone up at a similar rate, and even the price of the edible clay has risen over the past year by almost $1.50. Dirt to make 100 cookies now costs $5, the cookie makers say.

Here is more information.  Here is one review:

A reporter sampling a [mud] cookie found that it had a smooth consistency and
sucked all the moisture out of the mouth as soon as it touched the
tongue. For hours, an unpleasant taste of dirt lingered.

Thanks to William Griffiths for the pointer.

In this excellent piece, I was most struck by the following passage:

But pigs and chickens, which convert grain to meat far more efficiently
than beef, are increasingly the meats of choice for producers,
accounting for 70 percent of total meat production, with industrialized
systems producing half that pork and three-quarters of the chicken.

Let’s say you want to protect the environment, and you are going to eat some meat, should you eat cows or pigs?  Pigs.  Let’s say you care about animal cruelty.  Pigs are smarter and more social than cows.  A pig (or chicken) also seems to yield less meat per unit of animal suffering.  That would imply it is better for animal welfare to eat cows rather than pigs.  The conflict between environmental goals and animal welfare goals is one of the most significant underreported stories in this area.

Most of all, the growth of markets has
made food in India more Indian. The major regional cuisines are now available in
many different parts of India, not just in their original regions. The most
important globalization, if we can call it that, has occurred within India
itself and it has spread Indian diversity around the country. But that
development feels like it should have been the case all along, even though it
wasn’t, and so it is discounted in importance. The fast food outlets are simply
more noticeable and thus create many objections. A more dispassionate view would
realize that the growth of food markets, viewed as a whole, has disseminated and
supported India’s many cultures.

Here is more, by me, in the Indian newspaper Mint.  Here is the conclusion:

The good news is this: cultural
globalization will, with time, become less of a polarizing issue in India and in
other developing countries. The first Martian to arrive is the biggest news
story, but at some point change becomes commonplace and ceases to attract much
notice. At the subjective level, people eventually realize that globalization
has preserved or enhanced many parts of India’s heritage. The bad news, however,
is closely connected to the good. While cultural evolution in India is hardly
over, it is possible that the exciting and heady feelings of change have already
peaked.

Neuroeconomics has promise but many of the early results leave me cold.  A forthcoming paper in PNAS, Marketing
actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness (subs. required), has all the usual cute pictures of brain scans (see here, if you care) which are used to make the following conclusion. 

Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases
subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as
blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex
[mOFC], an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced
pleasantness during experiential tasks.

In short, a $90 bottle of wine tastes better than a $10 bottle of wine even when it is the same wine.  But why not just ask people which wine they like best, as many previous studies have done?  How exactly does a picture of the wine-addled brain add to our knowledge?  Are we really so concerned that people would lie about their experiences that we need to put them into a 3 million dollar fMRI scanner to read their brains?   (I wonder if this paper was NSF funded.)

Moreover, the lessons that people are drawing from this study are absurd.  One common response, for example, is "It’s a marketing expert’s dream; if you want people to like your product more, charge a higher price."  Uh huh.  And what happens when every winery raises its price, will we all purchase more wine?

Living in a market economy the association in the brain between price and quality is constantly reinforced so it’s not surprising that sometimes the brain can "jump the gun" in expectation.  But don’t imagine that the association can be easily exploited for long.  Why do you think these sorts of studies always use wine?  Could it possibly be because most people can’t tell the difference between a cabernet and a merlot let alone between higher and lower quality wine?   But try telling people that a $5,000 car is $45,000 and let’s see if the medial orbitofrontal cortex
lights up with experienced
pleasantness.

Thanks to Ted Frank for the pointer.

I finally crawled out from under the rock I was hiding and visited my first Costco last week, albeit in Veracruz, Mexico.  Their business model seems to focus on stocking only profitable items that can be bought and stored in bulk.  They do not relish the idea of the loss leader or the cross subsidy, but instead they evaluate items in stand-alone terms and look for high turnover.  Inventory costs are low because what they have is right there in the store on pallets.  They don’t seem to stock much in the way of competing brands and you see "Kirkland" — their house label — frequently; presumably buying from a single vendor lowers their costs further.  As for the store I visited, two thirds of the stuff was hard to find and half of it was hard to reach.  There was a surfeit of cranberry juice, which is otherwise uncommon in Mexico.  There was lots of U.S. Grade A beef and canned goods.  No one asked me to become a member.  It would be a good place to stock up for a party but I can’t imagine shopping there regularly: too many of my favorite items are missing and they don’t have the hardcore best of Mexican foodstuffs, which are found in the traditional markets.  Since they have over thirty stores in Mexico perhaps the formula is working.

Here is an NYT article about the U.S. phenomenon of Costco chic.

Yes sir, I know what is best, and I will bring it to you.

That was what I heard in The Source, the new Wolfgang Puck restaurant, which is now one of the two best fine dining establishments in an otherwise food-starved Washington D.C.

Base: one to two cups coconut milk, four cups chicken stock, a tablespoon of achiote [Annatto] paste, the seed is available in Latino markets.

Take some robust fish pieces, cod or monkfish will do, and roll them in beaten eggs, along with minced garlic, freshly minced ginger, coriander, cumin, chili powder, and Mexican oregano, maybe a bit of salt and pepper too.  Fry the fish in vegetable oil until cooked, making sure the oil is properly hot.  Put the resulting fish chunks into the soup.

Or something like that.  Serve with a baguette.  Very yummy.