Results for “food” 2044 found
Why are Swedish meatballs so much smaller than their American counterparts?
This topic has been knocking around the blogosphere as of late:
I am a longtime reader of MR and there is a question I have been wondering about for a long time. I was hoping you could share your thoughts on meatball heterogeneity. My girlfriend made dinner for me and the entree was Swedish meatballs. I never knew how small their meatballs are. It seems inefficient to roll all that meat into such tiny balls. Wouldn’t it make more sense to roll them into big balls like we do in the US?
First, history + hysteresis play a role. According to Mathistorisk Uppslagsbok by Jan-Ojvind Swahn, the Swedish concept of meatball first appeared in Cajsa Warg's 1754 cookbook. Yet as late as the early 20th century, beef was still a luxury in Swedish culture, whereas meat was plentiful in the United States. America had greater access to game in the more moderate climate and also greater grass resources for supporting cows. The Swedes were also late in benefiting from the refrigerated transport revolution, which started elsewhere in the 1920s and brought more meat to many households. (This tardiness was due to the concentration of population in a small number of cities, combined with rail isolation from Europe.) The end result was smaller meatballs, a tradition which has persisted to this day.
On the plane of pure theory, standing behind the lock-in effect is the Ricardian (or should I say Solowian? Solow is the modern Ricardian when you think through the underlying asymmetries in his model, which ultimately make "capital" non-productive at some margin) fixed factor explanation. A Swedish meatball recipe usually involves much more dairy than a non-Swedish meatball recipe. Constant returns to scale do not in general hold for recipes, much less for loosely packed spherical items involving fluids.
Oddly, the extant literature does not seem to have considered these factors.
From the comments: Lennart writes: "Swedish meatballs, having loads of surface that are fried crispy, are much better than other forms of meatballs for that reason alone. Norwegians and Danish have big meatballs, but that's because they are boiled, so there is no crispy-fried surface to maximize (and hence nowhere near as good)."
Assorted links
1. Greg Mankiw's very good column on health insurance and marginal tax rates; Greg adds comment.
2. Somerset Maugham: the perfect traveler?
3. Ten smelly foods from Asia.
5. The Lehman failure really was at fault; Arnold Kling adds comment.
6. MR is a start-up, as is Modern Principles.
Assorted links
1. The cognitive benefits of dyslexia.
2. Free up bone marrow markets!
3. What's the most widely distributed, pro-poor product in the Third World? Other than food, of course.
4. The composer John Adams has a blog.
Exit decisions: no more Big Mac for Iceland
Iceland’s McDonald’s Corp.
restaurants will be closed at the end of the month after the
collapse of the krona eroded profits at the fast-food chain,
McDonald’s franchise holder Lyst ehf said.
Here is the full story and how about that name "Lyst ehf"? (It does check out.) Is it silly for me to say I find this story just a wee bit scary?
I thank Jason Brennan and Daniel Lippman for the pointers.
Dining tips for Manhattan
JonSanders, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I read "Discover Your Inner Economist" (as well as "Create Your Own
Economy") and I want a little more help with the Manhattan dining tips
you covered. Care to help someone on a serious budget, like say, an
undergrad at NYU? Staying off the main avenues is useful, but it is
still hard to find dirt cheap authentic food from most cultures. More
advice?
I'm was in New York yesterday and I despaired. Short of dropping $50-$70 or more for lunch, it's hard to get a good meal in most of Manhattan. Greenwich Village went mainstream long ago and the overall problems in Manhattan are high rents, rising tourism, and the importation of growing numbers of people from U.S. regions with lesser food taste (can you guess where?). That's a triple whammy. I recommend the following:
1. Eat on the far west or far east side, like 9th Ave. or The Bowery. The East Village hasn't been ruined. The West Village still has some quirky places near The Village Vanguard, usually further west off the main paths. There are good places near Hudson St., the neighborhood Jane Jacobs wrote about.
2. Eat on the way to or from LaGuardia in Flushing, Queens, in superb Chinatown. If you try the Chinatown in Manhattan, go for breakfast — not dinner — for the best chance at quality.
3. Look for obscure ethnic places in the mid 30s, on the streets, not the avenues.
4. The best food reviews are in New York magazine, by far.
5. Two of my reliable stand-bys are Ess-a-Bagel and Shun Lee Palace, both in East/Midtown. They're both pretty tired in terms of concept but the quality still is excellent. I enjoy them every time I go. Shun Lee Palace would not count as dirt cheap, however.
6. Get to Brooklyn or Queens. Or (gasp) New Jersey.
What advice can you give this poor fellow?
Sentences to ponder
Experts are more
persuasive when they seem tentative about their conclusions, a study
soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests. But
the opposite is true of novices, who grow more persuasive with
increasing certainty. In one experiment, college students were
randomly assigned one of four variations of a restaurant review,
praising a local Italian spot. In some versions, the reviewer was
described as a famous food critic; in others, he was a technology
worker at a local college with a penchant for fast food. Each of the
critics expressed positive certainty about the restaurant's virtues in
one variation, and tentative praise in another. Asked to evaluate the
restaurant, the students who read the expert's review liked it much
better when he seemed tentative; the opposite was true of the novice…
The story is here. Of course I'm not sure you should ponder these sentences. Maybe you should, maybe you shouldn't. If that.
I thank John De Palma for the pointer.
Facts about airline water
Fact 1:
In the United States, drinking water safety on airlines is jointly
regulated by the EPA, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA). EPA regulates the public water systems
that supply water to the airports and the drinking water once it is
onboard the aircraft. FDA has jurisdiction over culinary water (e.g.,
ice) and the points where aircraft obtain water (e.g., pipes or
tankers) at the airport. In addition, air carriers must have
FAA-accepted operation and maintenance programs for all aircraft, this
includes the potable water system. (EPA)
Fact 2:
…the news carried stories that the US EPA had determined that 15% of
water on a sample of 327 aircraft flunked the total coliform standards
and inspections showed that all aircraft were out of compliance with
the national drinking water standards.
Rest assured, the EPA has crafted new rules to address the problem.
Assorted links
1. Bailouts worsen state-level finances in Germany, by Thomas Stratmann and Alexander Fink.
2. The same thought had occurred to me. Here is Paul Romer on Elinor Ostrom; a perceptive appreciation. Here is David Henderson on the prize and also Williamson's theory of mergers.
4. Galen Strawson on "No Ownership of the Future," courtesy of The Browser.
5. Podcast with Andrew Hazlett on Create Your Own Economy and also aesthetics.
Greg Mankiw hot off the presses
Jim Capretta looks
at the Baucus healthcare bill and concludes that, because the subsidies
phase out as income rises, it imposes an effective marginal tax rate on
income of about 30 percent for many families. Add that figure to the
income tax, the payroll tax, and the phase-out of the EITC and "the
effective, implicit tax rate for workers between 100 and 200 percent of
the federal poverty line would quickly approach 70 percent – not even
counting food stamps and housing vouchers."
Link here. I await further updates on these estimates…
The one nagging thing you still don’t understand about yourself
This is one of the best "time wasters" I've come across in some time. Here is the upshot:
The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research
Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue…To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.
Here is Paul Rozin's answer:
I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study
I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell,
that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change
for a new product (in our case, two new foods and two new body
products) after using it for a week. We predicted that the parents of
our college undergraduates would be better than their children at
predicting their hedonic trajectory, but 25 more years of self
experience did nothing for them. Nor for me. Every night, I bring home
a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning. I have been
doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get
through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I
keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.
Here is Norbert Schwarz on incidental feelings:
One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still
fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied
how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad — unless one
becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the
gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that
lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still
get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts
– I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such
influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the
immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing
until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?
For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson. By the way, I wonder if those are their real answers; I wouldn't tell you mine.
If air travel worked like health care
By the excellent Jonathan Rauch, this unexcerptable piece is very funny (and sad).
I wonder what it would be like to extend this series: if Whole Foods worked like health care, if the internet worked like health care, if higher education worked like health care…wait…higher education does work a bit like health care.
Why is coca-cola so expensive in Germany?
Matt asks this question and the answers in his comments section cite sugar policy and the VAT. (Matt's comment, at #62, is the best of the lot.) USA Coke also competes with free tap water, which is a no-no in Deutschland. Here is a German site, GuteFrage.net, which asks "Wieso ist Coca-Cola so teuer?" but the answers do not impress. Here is further German language discussion but again Armen Alchian it ain't. This German Yahoo post considers the marginal cost of production.
I am more inclined to cite the elasticity of demand. Here in the US of A people will drink three or four cokes in a row, maybe more. Or they will buy many cans of coke for the whole family along with hot dogs, Twinkies, Hellmann's mayonnaise, and other utility-maximizing commodities. But those high-volume strategies require a fairly low price. I haven't lived in Germany for over twenty years, but my impression at the time was that you would drink one coke at a main meal with your food and that was it. (You also didn't get very much in the Glas, but that's another story.) They're weren't aiming for volume sales by lowering the price, so instead they would focus on the upper left part of the demand curve.
I don't know if Matt is referring to restaurants or vending machines. In restaurants drink prices are arguably a proxy for enjoying the amenities, the table and the service of the wait staff. If the wait staff have higher wages and benefits, due to European labor market regulation, the drink price might be reflecting that higher marginal cost, even if the MC of the drink itself is low relative to price.
People, can you help out on this one?
What’s the chance the financial crisis was welfare-improving?
The price of corn, for example, is down 56 percent since July 2008 on the Chicago Board of Trade.
Here is more. I don't in fact think that the financial crisis has improved global welfare. But we are trained to think probabilistically. What is the chance that the gains from lower commodity prices — most of all for poor people who buy food — outweigh the losses from the collapse of world trade and lower overall growth?
Just wondering.
Addendum: Here are some related queries.
Assorted links
1. The complicated legacy of Norman Borlaug.
2. Elton John is denied a Ukrainian adoptee; so much for Pareto improvements.
3. Via Jim Swofford, the internal politics of journal editing.
4. Best foods in the world, in fifty categories.
In praise of Annandale
It's one of the smaller NoVa communities and it has a coherent downtown. For me it has a useful frame shop, tennis club, dentist, a Western Union branch, Giant (easy in and out), and it has one of the best public libraries around, all within walking distance on a single strip and one side road. Natasha gets her massage there. There are plenty of small shops, ethnic and otherwise. It has the best food of any single locale in the D.C. area, including a Korean porridge shop, Korean barbecue, gloopy, disgusting Korean noodles, Korean fried chicken, a Korean tofu restaurant, a Korean bakery (the best hangout around, period, plus the best bakery around), a Korean restaurant specializing in pumpkin dishes, non-disgusting noodle houses, a Korean crab and fish and chips place (with kimchee too), at least two restaurants with "Korean-Chinese" food, and a bunch of 24-7 Korean restaurants, with varying emphases but with Yechon as having the best late night or early morning crowd. Many of the other places stay open until 2 or 3 a.m. (you'll find many reviewed here). The town has over 900 small businesses run by Koreans and catering mostly to Koreans.
On the strip is also the area's best Afghan restaurant, a good Peruvian chicken place, and just off the strip is an excellent Manchurian restaurant, A&J. There is a decent community of antique shops, including a place with some good Afghan textiles. South of 236 you can find a colony of contemporary homes, rare in most parts of Fairfax County. Annandale has the central branch of a 60,000 student community college. The traffic is bearable for the most part, the rents are reasonable by NoVa standards, and you have easy access to the major arteries of 495 and 395. The schools are well above the national average.
Exxon/Mobile has a base on the edge of town. The first (third, according to some sources) toll road in America, ever, ran through Annandale. Mark Hamill once lived there. It has a lovely Civil War church and a rustic barn. Its history dates back to 1685 and it is named after a Scottish village. Many of the people in Annandale are very physically attractive.
What's not to like?
West Annandale is more of a cultural desert than is East Annandale, though it has some Korean cafes and billiard shops. All of Annandale is ugly, with a vague hint of unjustified pastel in the central downtown area. The Into the Wild guy grew up there. They did fight on the wrong side in the Civil War but that has little relevance to the current town. The used CD shop has closed up.
The pluses outweight the minuses. You get all that — and more — for only 50,000 people or so. Boo to Annandale naysayers. Hail Annandale.
From the comments:
I was thinking about the interesting contrast between Annandale which is ugly but is very livable and has wonderful services, vs. some small towns abroad I've visited which had a beautiful town square but limited and overpriced services and few really good or interesting restaurants, with everything being very expensive. Undoubtedly, some tourist visiting the latter towns and spending "summer money" in the busy clubs and cafes would feel the latter superior, and might think Annandale a wasteland. But they may not want to live in said quaint town, especially if salaries were below Virginia standard.