Tom Glickman sent us this photo at a Nathan’s restaurant. One hot dog will cost you $1.99. But two will cost you $3.99 — and four will cost you $5.99. As Tom writes: “Not the most egregious mistake in pricing, but most curious that one is overcharged by a penny for every additional hot dog you purchase.”
Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with Trader Joe’s unexpected owners: a German discount-grocery chain. A new article in Fortune aims to reveal a few more Trader Joe’s secrets.
For several years our local grocery story carried a brand of coconut sorbet, Ciao Bella, which we had for dessert several times a week. It was $5 per pint-pretty expensive-but worth much more than every penny. In the last month it hasn’t been on the store’s shelves. The manager informs me that they will not be stocking it…
The three major dietary sources of sodium are grains; meat, poultry, fish, mixtures; and vegetables. Surprised? So was Dubner. The explanation lies in the daily sodium density metric.
Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman on copyright in the food industry. The story of Mark Manguera’s Kogi “Korean taco” truck.
Planet Money and Frontline report on the distorting effects of foreign food aid on local food economies, particularly in Haiti. People don’t buy rice when they can get it for free.
Agricultural economist Patrick Westhoff on food prices and China.
Americans are currently embracing a strange sort of primitivism. Bicycles are losing gears, runners are afoot in shoes designed to create a barefoot sensation (some are even running barefoot), and men are growing bushy Will Oldham-like beards. It’s all very curious and entertaining.
Food packaging seems like a straightforward problem with a straightforward solution: there’s too much of it; it piles up in landfill; we should reduce it. These opinions are standard among environmentalists, many of whom have undertaken impassioned campaigns to shroud consumer goods-including food-in less and less plastic, cardboard, and aluminum.
On the PBS website for the muckraking documentary King Corn-a film that roundly attacks industrial agriculture-the following declaration is made: “Before WW II, most Americans had never eaten corn-fed beef.” This claim, which has become a mantra in sustainable agriculture, is more often than not dispatched to rally support for grass-fed beef-a supposedly healthier and more environmentally sound way to feed cattle-which is to say, in accordance with the rhythms of nature rather than the time clock of industry.
The price offered to coffee growers who turn in their “cherries”-ripe coffee beans-at Greenwell Farms in Kona, Hawaii, is $.90 per pound if they are paid weekly and $1.05 if paid monthly.
Food is fiction, after all, and there are many advantages to keep telling beautiful stories that brighten our day by enriching our palette. Plus, the moment we might start thinking about the culinary implications of a riot, things can become pretty tasteless.
Australian mothers pay up to $1,000 for it on the Internet due to the country’s shortage of breast-milk banks, the Courier Mail reports.
A lot of industries are obviously weather-dependent — agriculture, tourism, etc. — but I hadn’t known that the traditional production of roofing slate in the U.K. was also at the mercy of the weather. Here is but one of many fascinating things you can learn from Simon Winchester’s excellent book The Map That Changed the World, about the proto-geologist William Smith:
Americans ate an estimated 3 billion bagels at home last year, an average of about 11 per person (this doesn’t include bagels eaten at work, where a not-completely-insignificant number are delivered by bagel economist Paul Feldman). And in the course of slicing up all those bagels, 1,979 people cut their fingers so badly that they ended up in an emergency room.
‘Tis the season for turkey shopping, and the price is right. According to this Wall Street Journal squib, the price of whole frozen turkeys has fallen from 94 cents per pound last year to just 66 cents per pound, with Wal-Mart leading the way, selling turkeys for just 40 cents per pound. (Note: price estimates vary.)
Nathan Myhrvold is the Intellectual Ventures chieftain we wrote about in SuperFreakonomics; I.V. has plans to thwart, inter alia, hurricanes, malaria, and global warming. (He has also written for this blog occasionally.) Now he has let The N.Y. Times into his kitchen. It is not like any other kitchen you’ve ever seen; nor is the cookbook he is producing like any other that’s been published:
We blogged about musical stairs in Stockholm that try to encourage stair-climbing rather than escalator-riding. One of the issues with this “nudge,” as Dubner wrote, is that it’s probably more fun for people to descend them than to ascend.
These stairs in Lisbon, however, address that problem by appealing to the calorie conscious.
Architect Carolyn Steel’s TED talk, posted this week, discusses how ancient food routes shaped the cities we live in today and the future of food in our world. Steel believes we can “use food as a really powerful tool, a conceptual tool, a design tool to shape the world differently.”