Category: Food and Drink

How much better is local food for the environment?

Local food can consume more energy, especially when it is shipped — even short distances — by truck.  Here is from The Boston Globe:

…a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes
consume more energy — and produce more greenhouse gases — than food
imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite
efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a
relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared
with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of
lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one
shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season
in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported
option. So while local food may have its benefits, helping with climate
change is not always one of them.

And more:

Judged by unit of weight, ship and rail transport in particular are
highly energy efficient. Financial considerations force shippers to
pack as much as they can into their cargo containers, whether they’re
being carried by ship, rail, or truck, and to ensure that they rarely
make a return trip empty. And because of their size, container ships
and trains enjoy impressive economies of scale. The marginal extra
energy it takes to transport a single bunch of bananas packed in with
60,000 tons of other cargo on a container ship is more than an order of
magnitude less than that required to move them with a couple hundred
pounds of cargo in a car or small truck.

Yes even grapes from Chile end up on a truck but perhaps on a more efficient truck.  Why is there no talk of how they are transported from the Chilean vine to the Chilean port?  Here is a previous post on this topic.

On being lost

I am in Turkey this week.  (Where else can you go where the secularists are protesting in the streets!  Awesome.)  Aside from seeing things, I like to travel for the challenge.

Getting to that interesting restaurant reviewed in the New York Times you have to find the ferry station, purchase the right ticket, get off at the right stop, find the restaurant on the streets with no names (ah there’s the bull statue! must be somewhere to the east!) and overall get lost many times.  It’s a bit like running a marathon but the honeyed pumpkin at the finish line tastes sweeter for all the running.

I don’t like being lost, but I like having been lost.

Why don’t we have real Chinese food in the United States?

We don’t — just believe me — outside of a few places such as Monterey Park or Flushing, Queens.

Dan Drezner poses the query, and considers immigration restrictions as a factor, though without endorsing that hypothesis.  Immigration can’t be the key reason, since I can learn to cook the stuff (really), there is plenty of excellent Chinese food in Tanzania (really), and most French food in America is cooked by Mexicans (that you already knew), albeit with instructions.  The main problems are simple:

1. Cantonese food requires super fresh ingredients, lots of vegetables, and amazing seafood.  That’s three strikes right there, especially below the gourmet price level.

2. Sichuan and Hunan foods are oily, often very spicy, and most of all use lots of animal fat.  Nor do they hesitate to serve up chicken kidneys, pig’s maw, and the like.  This is essential for these cuisines to taste good but it all goes against the American grain.  To cite one example, Mexican food cooked with fresh lard tastes much better than with vegetable oil, yet most Mexican families, within a generation and a half, make the switch to vegetable oil (que triste!).

3. Even today most Chinese cities are huge gardens with massive swathes of small-plot farmland, right within the city.  Shanghai too.  The short food supply chain makes many things tastier, as they are sold fresh in daily markets.  The cuisine is designed around that system, whereas mass-produced American cuisine meshes with long-distance trucking.  This clash of culinary civilizations penalizes true Chinese styles, though I’ll still predict that real Sichuan will be the next big food trend here in the U.S.  In my household, it already is.

Since there is excellent and reasonably authentic Chinese food in densely populated Chinese-American communities, consumer demand (see #2) is probably the major factor.

For the comments I’ll stipulate no rehashing of the usual immigration debates; you all have enough chances to do that.

p.s. On MR it’s China Day!

Markets in everything

Dutch students have developed powdered alcohol which they say can be sold legally to minors.  The latest innovation in inebriation, called Booz2Go, is available in 20-gramme packets that cost 1-1.5 euros ($1.35-$2).  Top it up with water and you have a bubbly, lime-colored and -flavored drink with just 3 percent alcohol content.

It also avoids the taxes, here is more information.

Why does America have tipping?

Back in the days of Fifty Questions, a loyal MR reader asked:

I am interested in the economics of tipping.  This seems appropriate, since you seem to eat out a lot.  Why in the United States is the pay of waitstaff structured as it is as compared to elsewhere, where tipping is less expected? 

The best way to understand tipping is to go to a restaurant you will never patronize again.  Once your meal is over, when she is not looking, leave your tip not on your table but rather on another table she served.  That way she still gets her money and you have in no way ripped her off.

That is psychologically tough to do.  You fear the waitress will think you are a lout and a deadbeat.  Of course in no-tipping countries, or for that matter non-tipping sectors, this dilemma does not arise.

The real question is why America is structured so that waiters and waitresses can sell feel-good services ("you are a generous tipper and a fine man") to strangers, in return for money.  In other words, how did waiters end up as fundraisers, noting that the final Marshallian incidence may lower their wages by the amount they receive in tips?  Most cross-cultural explanations of tipping start with the agency problem between diners and servers ("can you bring my drink now?"), but I believe that is the wrong approach.  I view tipping as correlated with effective fundraising in other areas, and Americans as being especially willing to set this additional fundraising arena in motion.

J. Galt’s provocation

A loyal MR visitor, J. Galt, asks:

I challenge you to write a blog post of decent length without the letter e

This woman might add: words of this woman don’t count, no spilling mistaiks aloud, and do it quickly, no agonizing with a dictionary.

This is not hard.  An author from a Gallic land — I can’t say who — has a total book in this fashion, so a short blog post is snap.  In Tanzania I find lots of corruption, lots of monopoly, lots of bargaining, but not much gross national product.  Just think what will occur.  (Tanzania is a cool word for my post; it is so good that I am not in a country of a dictator who runs Caracas.)

What about supply and purchasing?  In my location — you can just call this city "Dar" — many Arabs add to urban culinary options.  Spicy Sichuan food is also around, and Indian food is common.  Why not?  D falls downward to a rightward slant.  Spicy food in Dar costs not so much.  Transport of a spicy stuff or two costs virtually nothing.  Call it proximity, or is "spatial" a good word too?  "Marginal cost" also has not this bad sign, which again I must avoid in this blog post.

So, marginal cost is low for this spicy stuff.  Now, S can fly rightwards in an upward slant, almost flat, but low low low.

I can put two flying slants synchronously.  Right?  Labor cost is low also.  Monopoly is common in Dar but not for my mouth and stomach.  P is jointly with marginal cost and for moi this spicy stuff is a Traum, of which I gnaw, swallow, chow, finish, grub down, polish off, run through, put away, and dispatch.

Now you try!

One meal at Per Se

Many people consider Per Se the best restaurant in Manhattan, here are some trade-offs:

The single most caloric menu item was the foie gras, weighing in at
435.4 calories; followed by café Liégeois (basically a gourmet brownie
with ice cream), with 185.8 calories.  The single least caloric was the
buttermilk sorbet, owing in part to its spoon-size portion (23
calories).  All told, the nine courses tallied 1,230.8 calories, 59.7
grams of fat, and 101.7 grams of carbs.  The total rises to 2,416.2
calories, 107.8 grams of fat, and 203.7 grams of carbs if you include
the extras: a salmon amuse-bouche, wine, dinner rolls with
butter, and chocolate candies.  These might not seem like giant numbers,
but that one lunch has 60 percent more fat than the average adult, on a
2,000-calorie regimen, should eat in a day, according to the FDA.  To
work off that meal, a 155-pound person would have to walk the route of
the New York City Marathon, plus an additional five miles.  Or he could
swim round-trip from Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty nearly three
times, or do basic yoga for 13 hours and 42 minutes.  It’s also roughly
equal in calories to six slices of DiFara‘s cheese pizza, ten Gray’s Papaya‘s hot dogs, or, it seems appropriate to note, four and a half Big Macs.

If we can assume linearity, this $250 meal (plus wine and tax and tip) costs you about $9 worth of health.  In other words, don’t worry about it.  Here is more, via Jason Kottke.

Markets in everything, dining edition

Don’t take no for an answer:

New services that sell reservations are also cropping up.  Primetimetables.com, for example, books tables at top Manhattan restaurants and resells them.  Buyers pay a $450 annual membership fee plus about $30 per reservation.  The site, which specializes in last-minute reservations, was launched last year by Pascal Riffaud, a former concierge at the St. Regis in New York and the Ritz in Paris.  Mr. Riffaud says he won’t reveal his technique for getting tables.  When diners sign up they get a welcome email explaining that reservations are made under fake names.  This is so they can be secured in advance.

Here is the story, which also claims that four weeks’ out is the best time to get a table at a popular restaurant. 

Reservations are hard to get at top restaurants for at least two reasons: restaurant owners want a table to be seen as a status good, and the restaurant knows that who gets a table affects the long-run reputation of a restaurant.  Many restaurants, for instance, don’t want too many tourists, or too many ugly people.

Do non-market-clearing prices, in this instance, boost social welfare?  The reservations market, by allowing people to buy themselves into the queue, lowers the overall ability of restaurants to build up their images.  On the other hand, the queue-breaking may be limiting what is otherwise excess product differentiation for the purposes of increasing market power.

Or we could fall back on a simple libertarian rule: if the restaurants consider the practice (obtaining a reservation under false pretenses) fraudulent, don’t allow it.

Speaking of reservations, here is a new underwater restaurant.

The Sushi Economy

The centers of the sushi economy in the twenty-first century are sites of exchange and connection.  Today, the places with the freshest fish — and often, the telltale aroma that draws attention to such privileged locations — are airport cargo hangars and refrigerated storage facilities located near highway interchanges.

That is from the splendid The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy, by Sasha Issenberg.  Most people do not know how much sushi is shipped across borders, and how much the very "freshest" fish has in fact been frozen.

Corn prices in Mexico

A loyal MR reader asks:

[Please discuss] food prices in Mexico (especially in light of the recent corn/tortilla issue)

Tortilla prices have long been subsidized and controlled, though the market was liberalized in 1999.  Due largely to ethanol demand, corn prices in Mexico rose 14 percent last year.  There are now new price controls on tortillas, circa 2007.  Mexico also continues to restrict the importation of American corn.

Tortillas provide about half of the protein and calories of the Mexican poor.

Those looking for "optimal worlds" might argue that tortilla subsidies are an efficient means of transferring income.  Mexican governments aren’t honest or organized enough to administer a traditional welfare state with much effectiveness.  For instance Mexican bureaucrats may be too corrupt to stop the non-poor from claiming direct welfare payments.  But low tortilla prices select for poor consumers automatically, as tortillas are an inferior good.

Note that tortilla price controls require, in the long run, subsidies for tortilla producers.  The low price transfers real income and the subsidy ensures that supply continues and that quality does not fall apart. 

American corn ethanol policy seems like a bad idea for sure.  Let’s open up our markets to superior Brazilian sugar-based ethanol.  That would lower American and also Mexican corn prices.

And Mexico?  My head knows what is right but my heart is torn.  Can Mexico can afford the protectionism which keeps local producers going and gives it the world’s best and most diverse corn, the world’s best tortillas, and supports a major part of its national identity, most of all for its most oppressed and politically sensitive groups?  I am emotionally torn and will not proceed with the question any further.

I might add that the flour tortillas of northern Mexico are, slowly but surely, gaining ground on the corn tortillas of the Mexican interior.  Flour tortillas are in any case cheaper and easier to transport and store.

#37 in a series of 50.

7-11 vs. gas stations

I try to avoid shopping anywhere but Whole Foods, Wegmans, Shoppers FoodWarehouse, and ethnic groceries.  But several times lately I’ve stopped at food marts at gas stations.  Each time I’ve noticed how much better they are than the average 7-11, most of all for selection.  There are plenty of such marts, so I’m wondering why I should ever go to a 7-11 again.

Are the prices at the gas station food marts so much higher?  Are my data points too few?  Or is the rest of the world discovering this same truth?