Category: Food and Drink

Better predicting food crises

by  Tyler Cowen in

Anticipating food crisis outbreaks is crucial to efficiently allocate emergency relief and reduce human suffering. However, existing predictive models rely on risk measures that are often delayed, outdated, or incomplete. Using the text of 11.2 million news articles focused on food-insecure countries and published between 1980 and 2020, we leverage recent advances in deep learning to extract high-frequency precursors to food crises that are both interpretable and validated by traditional risk indicators. We demonstrate that over the period from July 2009 to July 2020 and across 21 food-insecure countries, news indicators substantially improve the district-level predictions of food insecurity up to 12 months ahead relative to baseline models that do not include text information. These results could have profound implications on how humanitarian aid gets allocated and open previously unexplored avenues for machine learning to improve decision-making in data-scarce environments.

Here is more from Ananth Balashankar, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, and Samuel P. Fraiberger.

Scalping Girl Scout cookies?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Samoas, Trefoils and Thin Mints, move over. A new Girl Scout cookie flavor, Raspberry Rally, is in such high demand that, after swiftly selling out online, boxes are now being peddled for far higher prices on resale websites.

Single boxes of the cookies, which have a crispy raspberry-flavored center coated in chocolate, cost from $4 to $7, but they are selling for as much as five times the usual price on the secondary market.

Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. has expressed dismay over the situation. The organization said in a statement that most local Girl Scout troops had sold out of the “extremely popular” Raspberry Rally cookies for the season and emphasized that it was “disappointed” to see unauthorized resales of the flavor…

The Raspberry Rally cookies, which first became available late last month, can be bought only online. The cookie is considered a “sister” to the Thin Mint, the top-selling Girl Scout cookie, according to the Girl Scouts website.

Here is more from the NYT, via a loyal MR reader.  How about teaching Girl Scouts how to raise the price?

The decline of Michelin-starred restaurants

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

And then there is the spread of the Michelin brand. There are now Michelin guides for many US cities, which has caused the brand to lose some exclusivity. Michelin has awarded stars to 24 restaurants in the Washington area, for instance. I like many of these places, but I suspect Michelin is grading on a curve.

Social media are another part of the market evolution. Instagramming your meal is a popular pastime, and it suits some restaurants better than others. A lot of people, understandably, are reluctant to pull out their camera phones in a haute Parisian establishment, whereas they will gladly do so in a creative and more casual spot for Indian nouvelle cuisine in London or Singapore. El Bulli (now closed) and Noma have been amazingly good at attracting publicity and inducing pilgrimages, but apart from the very top of the market, Michelin-starred restaurants are operating at a publicity disadvantage.

Another factor working against Michelin is growing time pressure — especially among its well-to-do customer base. Many Michelin-starred dining experiences are slow, and the fixed-price menus often are designed to take up the entire evening, especially if paired with wine. But people are increasingly busy, and the smart phone’s pull of texts and posts and tweets is only getting stronger. And maybe, because of the pandemic, we all want to stretch our legs more often. Speaking for myself, I am much less interested in the three-hour meal than I used to be.

The decline of alcohol consumption in many parts of the world may also be bad for the Michelin experience. Marijuana use, by contrast, is up, and that of course encourages snacking at home.

Here are some related remarks by Air Genius Gary Leff: “In Many Cities, The Michelin Guide Is Now Paid For By The Local Tourism Authority.”

Jiwa Singapura

by  Tyler Cowen in

The new restaurant at Tysons II, top floor near the movie theatre, currently there is no meaningful address or phone number.  Open dinner five days a week, soon lunch as well.

I take Singaporean food very seriously, and I have been numerous times, including a one-week trip where all I did was take the Singaporean “red book” around to hawker centres for the best dishes.  So my standards are high, but essentially this place delivered.  The highlights were the shrimp with salted duck egg sauce and the mackerel fish cake.  But everything else was somewhere between very good and excellent, including the carrot cake, the nasi lemak (you do need to mix it together properly), and a surprisingly soulful seafood laksa.

The prices are entirely reasonable, and currently this has to stand as one of northern Virginia’s best restaurants.  My primary complaint is simply that the music was too loud.

Here is a bit of their backstory, here is their home page, still evolving as you might say.

The economics of why Noma is closing

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the take of yours truly:

Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a devoted restaurant-goer, says that people are misinterpreting Redzepi’s intentions with the closure. Cowen doesn’t think the chef is arguing that he can’t make money with Noma and its grand artistic ambitions. It’s just that he can make more money doing other, perhaps less stressful, things.

“He’s so well-known now, he can just do private events, cook for billionaires, special weddings and work two months a year or whatever and make more than he’s making in the restaurant,” Cowen says. “He’s the one who’s going to earn from here on out. Why slave every night till like 2 a.m. in a restaurant when you can set your own schedule and price discriminate, charging the super wealthy?”

Here is the longer WaPo article by Emily Heil and Tim Carman, presenting other views as well.

Open Sesame!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The excellent Alec Stapp points us to an absolute classic in the law of unintended consequences:

APNews: A new federal law requiring that sesame be listed as an allergen on food labels is having unintended consequences — increasing the number of products with the ingredient.

Food industry experts said the requirements are so stringent that many manufacturers, especially bakers, find it simpler and less expensive to add sesame to a product — and to label it — than to try to keep it away from other foods or equipment with sesame.

As a result, several companies — including national restaurant chains like Olive Garden, Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A and bread makers that stock grocery shelves and serve schools — are adding sesame to products that didn’t have it before. While the practice is legal, consumers and advocates say it violates the spirit of the law aimed at making foods safer for people with allergies.

Canine Coaseanism

by  Tyler Cowen in

We are for a while caretakers for a dog, and so I have started thinking what kind of trades I might make with the beast.  Of course for Darwinian reasons dogs have co-evolved with humans to be fairly cooperative, at least for some breeds (and this is a very smart, easily trained breed, namely an Australian shepherd).  So the dog’s behavior (my behavior?) already mirrors some built-in trades, such as affection for food.  But what kinds of additional trades might one seek at the margin?

One thought comes to mind.  I would like to signal to the canine that, when I get up from the sofa, he does not need to follow me because there is no chance I will offer him a food treat.  It would be better if he would just stay sleeping.  And yet this equilibrium is impossible to achieve.  Nor does rising from the sofa quietly succeed in fooling him, he follows me nonetheless.

Overall, though, I conclude that the current (spayed) version of the dog is already fairly Coasean in his basic programming.

Bikers for Organ Donation

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In this cross-sectional study of 10 798 organ donors and 35 329 recipients of these organs from a national transplant registry from 2005 to 2021, there were 21% more organ donors and 26% more transplant recipients per day during motorcycle rallies in regions near those rallies compared with the 4 weeks before and after the rallies.

Both donors and transplants increase around the time of major motorcycle rallies.

Paper here.

*Edible Economics*

by  Tyler Cowen in

The author is Ha-Joon Chang, and the subtitle is A Hungry Economist Explains the World.  This is an economics of food book with a Korean emphasis, and arguing in favor of protectionism and industrial policy, in line with the author’s earlier works.  Here is one excerpt:

South Koreans went through a staggering 7.5kg of garlic per person per year between 2010 and 2017.  We hit a high in 2013 of 8.9kg.  That’s over ten times what the Italians consume (720g in 2013).  When it comes to garlic consumption, we Koreans make the Italians look like ‘dabblers’.  The French, ‘the’ garlic eaters to the British and the Americans, only manage a paltry 200g per year (in 2017) — not even 3% of that of the Koreans.

Chang does note that the Korean figure also includes a lot of garlic used to make stocks and then (in part) not consumed.

Lu Wei Peter Zhang

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you want to open a new Peter Chang restaurant in Fairfax, but not quite tell people it is Peter Chang…call it Peter Zhang!  (Isn’t that a bit like hiding the kid from Anakin Skywalker and calling him Luke Skywalker?)

This is the most casual outpost in the Chang empire, by far.  You order from a screen and there are only a few tables.  Many of the dishes are marinated meats from central China, with some hot pot, noodles, and semi-Sichuan options.  It is the “most Chinese” of the current Chang portfolio.  Here is some basic information.  I’ve only been once, and haven’t yet figured out the best dishes, but you should all know about this right away.  It is near the intersection of Rt.50 and 123, centrally located for Fairfax.

Self-recommending.

One reason why the Seoul dining scene still has so many nooks and crannies

by  Tyler Cowen in

There are so many places with dishes you’ve never tried before.  And they are deep into alleyways, or on the second or third floors of retail establishments.  In these places I never see people take out their cameras and photograph the food.  The establishments are not “very on-line,” as they say.

More likely than not, a large troupe(s) of middle-aged and older men suddenly come out of nowhere, and descend upon these eateries for dining and intense bouts of conversation.  The men don’t seem to want too many other people to know about their special hangouts.  English-language menus are hard to come by, so use the outdoor food photographs if you can, or otherwise just point.  “I would like your specialty,” translated into Korean on the iPad, works too.

Korea is an especially sexually segregated society, all the more relative to its high per capita income.  And so these restaurants are boys’ clubs of a sort, as much private as public.  Might that be one reason why the small restaurant food scene here has stayed so undercover?

How much is it the presence of women that drives the “Instagram this” trend in dining?

Plastic Might Be Making You Fat

by  Alex Tabarrok in

WashPost: An emerging view among scientists is that one major overlooked component in obesity is almost certainly our environment — in particular, the pervasive presence within it of chemicals which, even at very low doses, act to disturb the normal functioning of human metabolism, upsetting the body’s ability to regulate its intake and expenditure of energy.

Some of these chemicals, known as “obesogens,” directly boost the production of specific cell types and fatty tissues associated with obesity. Unfortunately, these chemicals are used in many of the most basic products of modern life including plastic packaging, clothes and furniture, cosmetics, food additives, herbicides and pesticides.

Ten years ago the idea of chemically induced obesity was something of a fringe hypothesis, but not anymore.

“Obesogens are certainly a contributing factor to the obesity epidemic,” is what Bruce Blumberg, an expert on obesity and endocrine-disrupting chemicals from the University of California, Irvine, told me by email. “The difficulty is determining what fraction of obesity is related to chemical exposure.”

An important piece of evidence is something I pointed to in my post The Animals are Also Getting Fat namely, cats and dogs are getting fatter and so are rats and so (very importantly) are control mice fed a very standard diet. I hadn’t realized there is also some experimental evidence.

 In particular, consequences of chemical exposure may not appear during the lifetime of an exposed organism but can be passed down through so-called epigenetic mechanisms to offspring even several generations away. A typical example is tributyltin or TBT, a chemical used in wood preservatives, among other things. In experiments exposing mice to low and supposedly safe levels of TBT, Blumberg and his colleagues found significantly increased fat accumulation in the next three generations.

Overall, I find the chemical story plausible–people in the past, even rich people, just didn’t get fat so easily–but my skepticism rises whenever I hear the word epigenetics.

Newfoundland notes, St. John’s and environs

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Canada’s youngest province and Britain’s oldest colony” is what some of them say.

About 60 percent of St. John’s is Irish in background, and most people in the city above age 45 have a noticeable Irish accent, albeit with some Canadianisms thrown in.  Those accents are close to those of Waterford, Ireland, and many Irish from the southeast of the country came over in the 1790-1820 period.  The younger residents of St. John’s sound like other Canadians.

If you walk into the various pubs and houses of music, of which there are quite a few, you are most likely to hear offshoot forms of acoustic Celtic folk music.

The scenery of St. John’s reminds me of the suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand.  On top of that, many of the homes are Victorian, as in the Wellington area.  In St. John’s the row homes are called “jellybeans” because of their bright colors.  They are in a uniform style because of a major fire in the city in 1892.  A jellybean house near center city now runs between 300k-400k Canadian, the result of a big price hike once some offshore oil was discovered.  The city is hilly and the major churches are Anglican, even though the Irish migrants were almost entirely Catholics.

Indians and Filipinos are playing some role in revitalizing the city.  Not long ago about one thousand Ukrainians arrived.

In the Sheraton hotel the old mailbox is still “Royal Mail Newfoundland” and not “Royal Mail Canada.”  Newfoundland of course was a dominion country of its own from 1907-1934, and a legally odd part of Britain 1934-1949, when it joined Canada through a 52% referendum result.  In 1890 a NAFTA-like trade agreement was negotiated with the United States, but Canada worked Great Britain to nix the whole thing.  A later agreement in 1902 was in essence vetoed by New England.  Newfoundland had earlier rejected confederation with Canada in 1860.

Newfoundland ran up major debts in WWI, and tried to relieve them by selling Labrador to Canada.  Canada refused.

Apart from the major museum (“The Rooms”), there are few signs of the indigenous.

Marconi received the first transatlantic wireless message on Signal Hill on December 12, 1901.  In the 1950s, Gander was the world’s busiest international airport, because of all the planes that could not cross the Atlantic directly.

As you might expect to find in a small country, but not in a small province, you regularly meet people who seem too smart or too attractive for their current jobs.  Many head to Calgary, but a lot of them don’t want to leave.

It has the warmest winter of any Canadian province.

Terre is the place to eat.  The scallops are excellent everywhere.  Fish and chips are a specialty too.

I would not say it is radically exciting here, but overall I would be long St. John’s.  If nothing else, it makes for an excellent three-day weekend or nature-oriented week-long trip, and I hardly know any Americans who have tried that.