Some time ago, we wondered if New York City’s new law requiring certain restaurants to post calorie counts might provide good material for academic researchers who careabout obesity.
The answer: yes!
Most of us must admit that in many cases we really haven’t a clue if the local farmers we support run sustainable systems.
Many of my more extroverted friends wouldn’t care if their farmer-friend was hawking shriveled turnips dusted in cow dung. They’re there to have a social experience. Their aim is to personalize shopping in a way unachievable at Wal-Mart. In this sense, I suppose, a farmers’ market can foster community ties in the ways conventional grocery stores cannot.
The winner of food writer Michael Ruhlman’s “BLT from Scratch Challenge,” Jared Dunnohew, harvested his own salt from sea water (25 liters for one kilo of salt), smoked his own bacon (with wood gathered from local parks), and made his own mustard and vinegar for homemade mayonnaise.
Denny’s breakfast menu in Provo, Utah, offers something that combines demand-based and cost-based price discrimination, but it’s neither.
The “French toast slam” is two pieces of toast and two eggs, two strips of bacon and two sausages for $6.99. The “senior French toast slam” is one piece of toast and one egg, and two strips of bacon or two sausages for $5.49, and you must be at least 55 years old to buy this.
Jeff Ruby, a food writer for Chicago Magazine, claims that eating only burgers for 65 days made him stupid. He says he experienced difficulty concentrating, confusion, and forgetfulness, and that “saturated fats had eroded the connections between neurons in my brain.”
The average American spends about one hour at meals, and about the same time grazing– eating as a secondary activity to something else (very often leisure). But how does this differ across the population? Those whose time is valuable — who have a high wage — have an incentive to multi-task, to graze rather than devote their full time to meals.
Brian Wansink and Collin Payne recently examined the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and eating behaviors at all-you-can-eat Chinese buffets.
I blogged last week about how progress in lowering the world record in the 100-meter dash has been extremely slow, even with the improvements in track surfaces, training techniques, steroids, etc. The world record has been lowered at an average of 0.1 percent per year over the last 40 years.
Slums are larger and more dense than two centuries ago — and they’re creating “causal chains that weren’t there before,” says urban historian Mike Davis.
A Slate article mentions that the annual price of a hot-dog stand license near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is $362,201. Licenses are very limited and are bought at auction. The price presumably reflects the economic rent associated with the particular site (the price would be a lot lower in the middle of Central Park). Yet at a fixed cost of $1,000 per day, how can a hot-dog vendor make enough money to cover his variable cost, including the value of his own time?
Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty offers some hypotheses as to why Chinese restaurants have “secret menus” that only Chinese people seem to know about.
The Economist reports that pork prices have plunged 24 percent in the past year, partly because the demand for U.S. pork exports has dropped sharply. I don’t eat pork, so how does this help me?
Detroit is practically a giant food desert, with no produce-carrying grocery chains left and its citizens resorting to local raccoon and pheasant meat. According to Mark Dowie in Guernica, that makes Detroit a prime candidate for the world’s first “100 percent food-self-sufficient city.”
Five years ago, Malcolm Gladwell pronounced ketchup ripe for the kind of diversity revolution that had already shattered the staid monotony of the spaghetti sauce and mustard markets. Now The Smart Set wonders why we’re still waiting for ketchup to storm the barricades.
For the past year, all government employees in Utah have had a four-day workweek. The results of the trial run are in, and they look good: the state says it saved $1.8 million in electrical bills, eliminating 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, while 82 percent of workers say they like the new scheme.
On his website Fancy Fast Food, designer and writer Erik Trinidad revamps fast-food meals to look like plates you’d see at a five-star restaurant.
His tagline: “Yeah, it’s still bad for you — but see how good it can look.”
To most people in the developed world, agricultural science is a bit of an afterthought. We go to the grocery store and decide between small, vibrantly red cherry tomatoes and charmingly misshapen heirloom tomatoes. We buy big, juicy oranges and know that when we peel them the juice will run over our fingers and the sticky scent will linger. We can choose between 10 different kinds of apples, no matter the season. At no point during our shopping do most of us stop to think about the technology used to produce this bounty. …
My demand is quite inelastic, and the near monopolist at this smaller airport is taking advantage of that. I know that the price in the main part of the airport is lower for the same quality food, and the average quality is better too. I wonder: is this generally true?
I’ve been eating a lot of kiwis lately. At the corner deli near my home, I can buy three for $1. They are delicious. Unless the stickers are lying, they come from New Zealand. At 33 cents apiece, a New Zealand kiwi costs less than the price of mailing a letter to the East Side. (And believe me, I consider a first-class stamp one of the greatest bargains ever.) How on earth can it cost so little to grow, pick, pack, and ship a piece of fruit across the world?
Implanting false memories of childhood tastes can affect adult food choices.
A group of us went out for dinner the other night at a reasonably fancy restaurant. As we looked over the menu, the waitress was kind enough to let us know that the salmon was particularly delicious. We might also want to try the artichoke dip, she told us. It was her personal favorite. Half-joking, one of us asked her if there was a particular reason why she wanted us to try the artichoke dip.
The OECD has released its Society at a Glance survey, which reveals some interesting social trends in OECD member countries. Floyd Norris points out that countries with fast eaters, including all of North America, have higher economic growth rates than slow-eating countries like France.
Is your pâté consumption wreaking havoc on your pocketbook? A food processor and some Newman’s Own dog food may solve your problem. Economists at The American Association of Wine Economists conducted double-blind taste tests of five unlabeled blended meat products, including dog food. Subjects were unable to identify the dog food. (HT: Marginal Revolution) [%comments]
All of Clara‘s recipes have the same ingredients: potatoes and onions. That’s because she was raised during the Great Depression, and her family was so poor, she says, she was forced to drop out of high school because she couldn’t afford socks. Now a great-grandmother, she wants to teach you to make delicious, nourishing depression cuisine, to help you through . . .
Susanne Freidberg, a professor of geography at Dartmouth, has been guest blogging here about the food supply. This is her final post; we thank her very much. You can thank her too by picking up a copy of her just-released book, “Fresh: A Perishable History.” Photo: Stephen Ausmus A White Leghorn hen. Last week’s post talked about early-20th-century “egg gamblers” . . .
| We can’t decide whether this blog is best before, during, or after lunch: delicious sandwiches, brought to your screen by an ordinary scanner. Naturally, it’s called scanwiches. (HT: Liz Bloomfield) [%comments]
I blogged yesterday about my theories as to why KFC seems to have bad customer service, even though the chain gives so much lip-service to customers. If you can’t provide good restaurant service, how about doing public service instead? As part of a new marketing campaign, KFC has offered to fill potholes in city streets in return for being allowed . . .
Ah, spring! You know it’s here when drugstore shelves fill up with marshmallow eggs and pink Peeps. But few people realize that real chicken eggs used to be as seasonal as their candy imitators. Even fewer know that the egg was once a speculative tool as controversial as credit default swaps are today. “Not even a quant, at first glance, . . .
Photo: emile I’ve loved the chicken at KFC ever since I was a kid. My parents were cheap, so KFC was splurging when I was growing up. About twice a year my pleading, perhaps in a combination with a well-timed TV advertisement, would convince my parents to bring the family to KFC. “What is so ironic about the poor service . . .