Category: Food and Drink

Actually, the Shangri-La Diet is engineering, not science.

Natasha is now taking flaxseed oil, and I tell her it will make her smarter.  Someone once asked me, isn’t Seth’s proposal based on a placebo effect?  I wonder — when the individual is genetically special and also the basic unit of analysis — how exactly is a placebo effect defined?  It either works or it doesn’t.

Here is Seth buying Planet Earth, as all wise men should.

There are entire companies which do nothing but break eggs open for other companies; the largest such egg-breaking company is based in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

That is from Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats, by Steve Ettlinger.  So far this is my pick for the best food book of the year.

I also learned that a twinkie is about half sugar, sulfuric acid is the most produced chemical in the world, sugar is used to clean out cement mixers, phosphate rock and limestone make Twinkies light and airy, Twinkies’ butter flavor is created out of gas, Twinkies contain only one preservative (sorbic acid), and the original 1930 Twinkies were filled with banana flavor, not vanilla.

The bottom line is that I ordered bought two more of the guy’s books.

Here is the website, yes there are four in Cambodia and one in Laos.  Even better, here is their list of unusual restaurants, some examples:

Auction-like sale of dishes (Malaga, Spain)
All staff are midgets (Cairo, Egypt)
Three robots greet guests and take orders (Hong Kong)
Restaurant for anorexics (Berlin, Germany, now closed, more information here)

The same link lists the world’s best (supposedly) 24 restaurants.

Here is restaurant trivia in Russian.

Tomorrow, 6:30, 18th St. Lounge, I am a guest of honor, details here, come out and meet everyone.  They also (seriously) have lots of beautiful women at these events, not like when I was a young libertarian.

Cowen also cowrites a less food-driven–and equally popular–blog called Marginal Revolution, which chews on a wide range of cultural concepts.

Here is more, including my kitchen favorites.  Like this:

Favorite dumpling filling: “Pork, ginger, and scallions. And don’t forget the hot chili oil on top with a bit of soy sauce.”

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.

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!

The idea is to have an elegant, multitiered pretend cake for
show while serving guests slices from a real but inexpensive sheet
cake.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Bill Griffiths for the pointer.

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.

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.

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!

Mexican coke at the Costco, at least in San Francisco.  This superior product is made with cane sugar, not that junky syrup.  The pointer is from Jason Kottke.  Only 75 cents per bottle.  Here is another post on Mexican coke.

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.

[Kevin] Murphy reckons the delicious
cheeseburger I ate before interviewing him only cost me $2 worth of
health.

That is Tim Harford, and I would like to see a broader table of such accounts.  Do not forget that Tim’s The Undercover Economist is now out in paperback.