Category: Food and Drink

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the
cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to
grow.

That is Michael Pollan, here is much more.

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.

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.

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?

Check out the photos.  My vote goes to Schmitty’s, in Lockhart, Texas.  Lexington Barbecue wins "most overrated."  Thanks to Arnold Kling for the pointer.

Several of you might have heard of this excellent philosophical time waster before, but it’s new to me (apparently it was first devised by Wilfrid Sellars):

Identify three foods A, B, and C such that any two of these are complementary (taste good in combination) but the trio does not.  So A and B must be complementary, B and C must be complementary, and A and C must be complementary, but A, B, and C must be foul when combined together.  (It’s harder than I thought!)

Here are some possible answers.  I opt for Coke, Merlot, and Chicken.  The pointer is from Ananda Gupta.

Addendum: In the comments, Stephen Dubner nails it.

A loyal MR reader wants to hear about:

’08 elections. where Kurzweil and company are most right and most wrong. veganism/vegetarianism/cave man diet/pescatarianism/organic.

1. Yes it does matter who wins but my gut reaction is to compare candidates to soap commercials.  At the end of the day there is a soap bar in your hand, but interest in the topic is driven mostly by our irrational side, programmed to respond emotionally to human faces and characters.  Candidate blogging usually bores me.  If you are figuring out who to vote for, try to predict a politician’s ruling coalition.  The current political question is whether the bad tendencies of Bush 43 are one-time or represent a shift in the political equilibrium and what it takes to govern; I think it is about 50-50 in each direction.

2. Here is my earlier post on the singularity, try to spot the facetious sentence.

3. I have nothing against eating animals per se, even live ones, but I think it is immoral to eat animals raised under awful conditions, such as factory farming.  Personally, I often try to be good but I often fail as well.  I never feel bad eating meat in Europe, and animal welfare is the best argument for European farm subsidies.  I will pay more for humanely-raised food, but I won’t drive through ten minutes of extra traffic to get it. 

4. For a diet I recommend fish, nuts, fruit, green vegetables, and lots of braised pork belly.  At least that’s what tastes good.  Few processed foods are worth buying; I come close to the caveman diet view without being dogmatic.  A good bread is not to be rejected and come on, can rice really be that bad for you?  Just avoid all junk foods.

#26 in a series of 50.

Cook some fatty bacon just enough to be slightly done, then chop it a bit and mix it with equal parts smoked trout, chopped into comparably sized pieces, in a bowl.  Mix in three tablespoons Chinese wine.  Mix in two tablespoons of chili flakes or chili oil with flakes.  Mix in two tablespoons black bean sauce.  Steam for at least forty minutes, or until the stock market drops, more is better, in a heatproof bowl, at relatively high heat.  Mix in a little bit of sesame oil at the end.  Serve with rice and a green vegetable.

It’s the sort of place where a group of people will battle to save cats being made into meatballs or hats, but you can pay $75 to feed a sheep to a tiger. (This clip could be a little much for sensitive folk.) [TC: please don’t watch, I didn’t]

Here is the link, the pointer is from Yan Li.

Four chairs, one table, A+ decor, and the best Asian food in D.C.  Nothing nearby comes close.  Staff = 1, so you must call not only for reservations, but indeed hours in advance with an actual order so he can start making your food.  I loved the salmon in red curry sauce, the pad thai, the larb, and some amazing chicken dish with the guy’s last name on it; the drunken noodles are recommended as well.  But I am not not not saying the other dishes are worse.  515 Florida Avenue, NW.

I’ll never view the theory of the firm in the same light again.  Monitoring doesn’t work, and who needs division of labor anyway?  The coolest place in DC right now, by far.  Here is the menu.

Not as bad as some people say:

A Swedish researcher put 18 volunteers on the same diet that filmmaker Morgan Spurlock went on while filming "Super Size Me."

The result?

While
one volunteer gained 15 percent body weight after following the
high-choleric diet for a month, several others experienced only minimal
weight gain.  [He] was thus forced to conclude that "some people are
just more susceptible to obesity than others."

Also: The 12 men and six women were banned from exercising.

While all gained weight, none reported mood swings or liver damage like Spurlock did in the movie.

Michael Pollan has a somewhat different take:

I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of
the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do – that and human nature.  By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by
burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular
food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982
dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. 
And that is what we did.  We’re always happy to receive a dispensation
to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and
one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such
dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now.  It’s hard to
imagine the low-fat craze taking off as it did if McGovern’s original
food-based recommendations had stood: eat fewer meat and dairy products.

Many people eat healthy foods to assuage their consciences, and then they proceed to eat bad foods to satisfy their cravings.  Start by boycotting the healthy stuff that doesn’t do you much good, like fruit, and you’ll munch on fewer pastries.  You will feel the need for more conscience in your dietary portfolio, and maybe you’ll cut meat, dairy, and processed foods, which is what you should be doing.  Do keep on eating those plants, though.

Hot Coke with Ginger, A Possibly Magical Elixir. 

In older times the recipe was made with brown sugar water, but now the traditionalists prefer Coke; the recipe, however, is "cola-neutral."  The pointer is from Yan Li.

No, I don’t want to eat another arepas or tamale, I am too full.  It won’t taste good.  I won’t enjoy it, I can’t stand any more.  But I will eat it, because I know the memory of it will be superb.