Results for “food”
2044 found

Nova Scotia markets, not in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Maple syrup curry, which I have now seen on three restaurant menus in so many days.

Amateur crafts are extremely common, as in New Zealand.  It is a plausible claim that the blueberries here are the world's best.  Natives claim it has Canada's warmest winter.

At Peggy's Cove a ragged Scot-looking woman blew loudly into bagpipes, thereby competing for donor attention with a ragged Scot-looking woman punching an accordion and wailing, all to the detriment of the Coase theorem.

For a while George Washington held out hope that Nova Scotia would join in the rebellion against the British crown.  Later American ships attacked Lunenberg several times, starting in 1782, mostly for reasons of plunder.

In 1790 black Nova Scotians were strongly encouraged to move to what is now Sierra Leone.  There was a second "purge" of black residents in the 1960s, when the neighborhood of Africville was torn down and its residents were encouraged to leave.  Black residents were prominent in the history of Nova Scotia although it seems this is being forgotten.

Overall this is an underrated tourist destination (it is an easy direct flight from Dulles) and I recommend Lesley Choyce's Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea.

Don Boudreau is prominently represented in the Halifax museum collection.

They don't do much with it (avoid the cream sauce), but arguably Nova Scotia has the best seafood in all of NAFTA.  No way do they ship the good lobsters out.

What I’ve been reading

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, by Nick Reding.  Maybe I should define a new category: "Good enough to finish."  This is one of the better recent books on the economics of culture.

2. The Great Contraction, Friedman and Schwartz.  Classic economics books like this are almost always worth a reread.  I had forgotten just how bad was the year 1931.

3. Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe.  There is way too much well-known diplomatic history in this book, but the best fifty pages are good enough to make it worthwhile.  That said, I could have saved a lot of time, by flipping rapidly through the boring pages. had I not been reading it on my Kindle.

4. A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece, collated and edited by Jane Jacobs.  A reasonably interesting look at Alaskan, Aleut, and Russian culture around the turn of the century, as told through the eyes of a settler woman and edited by Jacobs (with how much intervention I am not sure).  This makes for a good contrast with Jacob's work on urban economies.  It's not thrilling all the time but overall I would recommend it.

5. Middlemarch, by George Eliot.  No other book I have tried so profits by a reread on Kindle.  Given its density of information, it's simply much better when there is less on each page.

The economics of the secret Chinese menu

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jason Kuznicki asks why do they do it?  Why don't they make the "secret menu" common knowledge?  He gives some answers, including:

Americans have some very set though inaccurate ideas about what
“Chinese food” really is. They will generally balk at anything else.
More people will break this way, and avoid the restaurants, than will
break my way, and go to them more often, if they are offered something
new and different.

I would add that perhaps many Chinese restaurants do not want too many non-Chinese customers.  Especially for immigrants, restaurant life is often about ambience, social contacts, and feeling you have a space to call your own.  A restaurant cannot be all things to all people and the #1 best way of judging a restaurant is to look at its customers.  The "beef with broccoli" menu will attract a certain kind of American customer, but without breaking down the sense of segregation and the basic Chineseness of the place.

That said, there is also the fear that the American customers will order from the secret menu and then not like the chicken feet, etc. and give a bad report to their friends.

Thai restaurants don't have secret menus per se, but often you can talk a so-so restaurant into, for your sake, becoming a very good restaurant with real Thai food.

What’s a vending spot worth?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sherpa agreed late last year to pay almost $643,000 annually for the
right to sell food and drinks from carts on either side of the Met's
entrance.

That's in New York City of course; here is the link, which offers a longer story, involving professional licensing, rate-busting, and default.  I like that the guy's name is Sherpa.  Hat tip goes to the ever-valuable www.artsjournal.com.

Palermo notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

I had been expecting "Naples squared" when it comes to raucous, but it's peaceful.  The best dishes apply flavors of mint, orange, and pistachio to pasta and seafood.  Wrapping pumpkin in a fish slice is yummy.  How about sardines pasta, with raisin, pine nuts, and bread crumbs; capers are optional?  Imagine a counterfactual retracing of food history, piling New World ingredients on top of Arabic and medieval roots — without the French culinary interventions of the eighteenth century and beyond — and you get some notion of dining in Sicily.  Imagine Moroccan bistillah but with a fruit jam inside.

The remaining traces of Norman Sicily are mingled with Roman, Arabic and Catalonian architectural influences.  There are numerous seventeenth-century baroque oratorios.  All over you see photocopy shops, which I suppose means few homes or workplaces have printers.

The young people look like they're from Rome, the old people look like they're from New Jersey. 

When there is a traffic dispute, people yell back at the cops. 

At least two-thirds of all restaurants are closed for August, including most of the best-known places.  Yet even random eating in major public squares (usually a no-no) reveals a food culture which has to rank among the world's best, up there with Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, Bombay, and the Puebla/Oaxaca axis, among a few select others.

How did ADHD evolve and survive?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Michelle Dawson (without endorsing it) directs my attention to this paper:

The evolutionary status of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is central to assessments of whether modern society has created it, either physically or socially; and is potentially useful in understanding its neurobiological basis and treatment. The high prevalence of ADHD (5–10%) and its association with the seven-repeat allele of DRD4, which is positively selected in evolution, raise the possibility that ADHD increases the reproductive fitness of the individual, and/or the group. However, previous suggestions of evolutionary roles for ADHD have not accounted for its confinement to a substantial minority. Because one of the key features of ADHD is its diversity, and many benefits of population diversity are well recognized (as in immunity), we study the impact of groups’ behavioural diversity on their fitness. Diversity occurs along many dimensions, and for simplicity we choose unpredictability (or variability), excess of which is a well-established characteristic of ADHD. Simulations of the Changing Food group task show that unpredictable behaviour by a minority optimizes results for the group. Characteristics of such group exploration tasks are risk-taking, in which costs are borne mainly by the individual; and information-sharing, in which benefits accrue to the entire group. Hence, this work is closely linked to previous studies of evolved altruism.

We conclude that even individually impairing combinations of genes, such as ADHD, can carry specific benefits for society, which can be selected for at that level, rather than being merely genetic coincidences with effects confined to the individual. The social benefits conferred by diversity occur both inside and outside the ‘normal’ range, and these may be distinct. This view has the additional merit of offering explanations for the prevalence, sex and age distribution, severity distribution and heterogeneity of ADHD.

Overall the argument is weak because it relies too much on group selection.  An alternative tack is to admit that ADHD, and correlated traits, can have cognitive advantages and thus survival and mating advantages.  One simple story is that many people with ADHD can use their "jumpiness" to propel themselves to sample and learn extra new pieces of information.  The current distribution of identified cases from the ADHD population likely suffers from selection bias, namely that it identifies ADHD cases associated with greater life problems.

Addendum: Jerry Fodor has a recent paper challenging common applications of evolutionary psychology; Razib defends Darwin.

The mass sterilization of half of humanity

by  Tyler Cowen in

Bill, a loyal MR reader, asks:

A freak solar event "sterilizes" the half of the planet (people, animals, etc) facing the sun. What happens?

Putting aside, the "which half" question, I would predict the collapse of many fiat currencies and the immediate insolvency of most financial institutions.  Who could meet all those margin calls?  Unemployment would exceed 20 percent and martial law would be declared, food rationing and guys with rifles on street corners.  The affected countries would take in larger numbers of immigrants, especially young immigrants from poorer countries, to keep their societies going and to use and maintain the still-standing capital stock.  Many of those immigrants might be better off in the longer run, especially if they could internalize the norms of the host country by the time the original inhabitants perished.  If you let me "cheat," I'll postulate that genetic engineering is used to perpetuate the genes of the original inhabitants.

If a poor country were hit by this blast the eventual result probably would be mass starvation.  There is a chance that social order would collapse across the entire globe, due mostly to contagion effects, multiple equilibria, and bad expectations.

To some of you these mental exercises may seem silly.  Indeed they are silly.  But what's wrong with silly?  Such questions get at the stability of social order, the sources of that stability, and the general importance of demography and intergenerational relations.  Those are all topics we don't think enough about.  Because we're not silly enough.