Category: Food and Drink

Perhaps taking a page from the Pringles inventor who was recently buried
in a can of said dehydrated chips, a Ukrainian restaurant is shaped like
a coffin on the outside, and boasts a coffin theme inside.

Here is a photo and further explanation.  Many or perhaps all of the entries have themes of death.  Perhaps they should do an economic impact study:

The undertakers hope that their restaurant will be confirmed as the
world’s biggest coffin, attracting tourists to a region best known for
its mineral-rich bathing waters.

Here are even more photos of interest.

More than I had thought:

For instance, the
real price (in 1988 prices) for the basket of the entire Top 100 list [for the U.S.] was
$4,313 in 1988; $3,132 in 1993; $2,533 in 1999; and $2,421 in 2004. That is nearly a 44% decrease in prices
from 1988 to 2004. At the same time,
there was no significant change in the quality of the wines on the Top 100
list.

Here is much more information, from Karl Storchmann.

Ezra reports:

…two Carnegie Mellon researchers recently broke down
the carbon footprint of foods, and their findings were a bit
surprising. 83 percent of emissions came from the growth and production
of the food itself. Only 11 percent came from transportation, and even
then, only 4 percent came from the transportation between grower and
seller (which is the part that eating local helps cut).

In other words, when it comes to food the greenest things you can do, if that is your standard, is to eat less meat and have fewer kids.

Matsa and Anderson next looked at data on individual eating habits from
a survey conducted between 1994 and 1996. When eating out, people
reported consuming about 35 percent more calories on average than when
they ate at home. But importantly, respondents reduced their caloric
intake at home on days they ate out (that’s not to say that people were
watching their weight, since respondents who reported consuming more at
home also tended to eat more when going out). Overall, eating out
increased daily caloric intake by only 24 calories.

The researchers also find that greater access to fast food restaurants, as created by new highway construction, doesn’t much matter for weight.  Here is more, including a link to the original paper.

There is a new winner and yes it is Kobe Beef in Kobe, Japan.  It lives up to the hype, if you are in Kobe just try any of the better beef establishments in town.  My personal list now reads as follows (in order, of course):

1. Kobe Beef, Kobe, Japan.

2. Dry-aged beef in Hermosillo, Mexico.

3. Southern Brazil, near Curitiba.

4. Lockhart, Texas, most of all the brisket at Schmitty’s.

Maybe Argentina is next in line and it might place higher if I had consumed countryside barbecue there.

And yes, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman are right: you should eat less beef.  But Kobe is not the place to abstain.  The reality is that eating beef in Kobe will make it very hard for you to eat beef almost anywhere else again.

It’s very tasty, definitely gamy, extremely tender, and delicious but only in small quantities.  Eat it first in your sushi order, not last.  Here is more information.

Addendum: Do visit the comment left at 8:19 p.m.

French fry tempura; that’s in case they didn’t fry them right the first time around.  You might find it in the food basement of a Takeshimaya department store.

The "sushi pizza" (melted cheese on your sushi) is also delicious and it is served in very good restaurants.

Did I mention that Japan has arguably the world’s best baked desserts?

Here is a neat but somewhat foggy blog post on barbecue:

The word out of the 2008 World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest,
the world’s largest pork BBQ contest held last weekend in Memphis, is
that the globalization of barbecue is in the "embryonic" stages.

Why is this foggy?  Well, barbecue went global some time ago, whether it be Maori "Hangi," indigenous Mexican cooking under the ground,  or North African nomads roasting a lamb.  Slow cooking at low heat is the formula in each case and usually smoke plays a role too.  The author notes that soon the Chinese will be in on it but has he ever had traditional Chinese short ribs?  By the way, the best barbecue town in America — Lockhart, Texas — draws heavily on German techniques for smoking its meats.

The pointer is from Henry Farrell.

The popularization of other Chinese dishes in Japan dates further back than that of gyoza, however.  The influx of Westerners into Yokohama, Nagasaki and Kobe during the 1860s set the stage for the diffusion of Chinese cuisine in modern Japan.  Although the Chinese had no legal right to remain in Japan before the first Sino-Japanese treaty was concluded in 1871, they were brought in under the legal protection of Western powers.  Western merchants relied heavily on their Chinese staff — servants, clerks and middle-men — to run the households and enterprises that they relocated from the China coast.  During the 1870s and 80s independent Chinese merchants began to settle in Japan as well, so that the Chinese soon constituted the majority of the foreign population residing in the ports.

That is from Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity, by Katazyna J. Cwiertka.  One thing I learned from this book was how much Japanese wartime experience created the notion of a national cuisine in Japan.  Before the war, for instance, soy sauce and rice were not common foods in many parts of rural Japan.

Shaun, a loyal MR reader, asks:

I have something that is
bugging me: I have noticed that the small tuna fish cans are cheaper,
by the ounce, than the larger ones. This holds true with every brand
and supermarket. This seems very counterintuitive to me; nearly every
other food product gets cheaper as the quantity increases. I wondered
if you could tell me what’s going on here.

Could it be storage and spoilage costs, thereby making this the corollary of the vending machine question?  Or is it price discrimination against families and in favor of single people?  Or do single people never finish the can and thus they need a lower price as compensation, noting that you still have to cite storage costs to prevent arbitrage?  Those are my quick reactions, can you do better?

That Tokyo is the best food city in the world?  That’s by an order of magnitude; Paris and others aren’t close.  At this point my best guess is that Osaka is number two. 

I thank Yan Li for the pointer to the link, which is interesting on another topic as well.  We visited a quite amazing toilet shop here, which was impressive most of all for its seriousness, not just for its product.  It was I believe on the 26th floor (L-Building, Shinjuku), so there is no walk-in trade for them.  They play stormy Beethoven and offer talking toilets, toilets that perform lab tests on your ****, and toilets that can be programmed to do things I hadn’t even thought of before.

It seems to me odd to fault the World Bank for advice some 15 years ago
to eliminate import protection–so that domestic prices could come down
at the time–while at the same time complaining about high prices now,
even with the benefit of hindsight.  If developing countries had all
kept their import protection, the global supply of food would have been
lower today, not higher. (That is because import protection would have
led global production to be reallocated from efficient exporters to
inefficient importers.) If you are for self-sufficiency, you must be
willing to live with high prices.   

No, that’s not me, that’s from Dani Rodrik.

My story is about a world where…GDP growth yields fewer poor people who respond to higher wheat prices by purchasing less meat or wheat, i.e. we have less of a shock absorber. That generates a reduced elasticity of demand of wheat. So prices have to rise by more in order to clear a supply-demand imbalance than was required in the past when there were more poor people who would adjust.

Here is much more, interesting throughout.