Marginal Revolution

Just-in-time search

The rhythm of the nation’s kitchens can also be parsed, on an hour-by-hour basis.

At Allrecipes.com, pie searches got the most action on Wednesday morning. But by 10 a.m., people began earnest hunts for sweet potato casserole and stuffing recipes. By noon, 100,000 people had searched for mashed potato recipes.

The real outlier is gravy. If this Thanksgiving Day is anything like last year’s, most searches will slow by 10 a.m. But not gravy. That vexing cook’s kryptonite should peak about 3 p.m.

Search data are also a way to track the Thanksgiving trends, which cycle through the years like hemlines. Curiosity about deep-fried turkey is growing faster than questions about brining, with Allrecipes.com reporting a 188 percent jump in people viewing information on the technique this year over 2008.

Here is much more information, interesting throughout.

Ariely on Thanksgiving

Ezra Klein asked Dan Ariely for Thanksgiving advice:

"Move to chopsticks!" he exclaimed, making bites smaller and harder to take. If the chopsticks are a bit extreme, smaller plates and utensils might work the same way. Study after study shows that people eat more when they have more in front of them. It's one of our predictable irrationalities: We judge portions by how much is left rather than how full we feel. Smaller portions lead us to eat less, even if we can refill the plate.

Speaking of which, Ariely suggests placing the food "far away." In this case, serve from the kitchen rather than the table. If people have to get up to add another scoop of mashed potatoes, they're less likely to take their fifth serving than if they simply have to reach in front of them.

"Start with a soup course," he says. That is what economists refer to as a default: Rather than putting everything on the table for people to choose, you begin by making the choice for your guests. If the first course is relatively filling and relatively low in calories, everyone will eat less during the rest of the meal.

Indeed, it's not a bad idea to limit the total number of courses. Variety stimulates appetite. As evidence, Ariely brings up a study conducted on mice. A male mouse and a female mouse will soon tire of mating with each other. But put new partners into the cage, and it turns out they weren't tired at all. They were just bored. So, too, with food. "Imagine you only had one dish," he says. "How much could you eat?"

What you eat, of course, is also important. Studies show that people aren't very consistent in the amount of calories they eat each day, but they're very consistent in the volume of food they eat each day. Thanksgiving is an exception to that consistency, but probably not to the underlying rule. Satisfaction doesn't depend on caloric intake; low-calorie, high-fiber foods and foods high in water content are filling. Thus, the more broccoli rabe there is at the table, the better.

Benton's smoky ham and bacon

It's equal to the best I've had, including what I've sampled in Spain.  (I've also had especially fine ham in Slovenia.)  You can read about it and order it here.  It ships without incident or loss of value.  It's what David Chang uses in Momofuku and its affiliated restaurants, by the way.  It's not even very expensive.

Speaking of animal products, a few of you asked me a while ago how the eating of animals could possibly be morally justified.  My primary objection is to how we treat animals while they are alive, especially in factory farms.  The very rise and continuing existence of humanity is based on the widespread slaughter and extinction of other large mammals, not to mention other animals as well.  I'm not saying we should feel entirely comfortable with that, but rather a "non-aggression" stance toward other animals simply isn't possible, short of repudiating all of human civilization, even in its more primitive versions.  Everyone favors the murder of animals for human purposes, although different people draw the lines at different places.  I don't know of any good foundationalist approach to these issues, but at the very least we should be nicer to non-human animals at the margin and less willing to torture them.

At the policy level we should tax meat more heavily and regulate farms more strictly, for both environmental reasons and reasons of animal welfare.  I draw a line at where the life of the animal is "not worth living," but for me animal slaughter is not immoral per se. 

There are a few things you can do personally, including:

1. Buy less from factory farms.

2. Eat better meat and in turn eat less meat, substituting quality for quantity.  This is a common demographic pattern, so it shouldn't be too hard to mimic.

If you are a vegetarian, I think that is excellent.  If you're not, Benton's is a step toward both #1 and #2.

The corn genome

I have many favorite topics which I don't blog much or at all.  One of these, taken from my time in Mexico, is the history of corn.  I very much enjoyed this recent article on the topic.  There is this good bit:

The sequencing revealed that an astonishing 85 percent of the corn genome is made up of "transposable elements" -- short stretches of DNA, some perhaps descended from viral invaders -- that show evidence of having moved around in corn's 10 chromosomes at some point in evolution. Their peregrinations provided the basis for new genes, or the on-and-off regulation of existing ones...

And this:

Corn's diversity of traits has been largely maintained, despite a century of intensive breeding. Modern corn produces cobs that range from the familiar farm-stand variety to lopsided baseballs and fat pencils and have a rainbow of kernel colors. Varieties of corn can have a greater genetic difference between them than what exists between human beings and chimpanzees.

And this:

Walbot, the Stanford geneticist, speculates that this unusual diversity survived because corn cultivation spread along a north-south axis. That exposed the species to a much greater variety of environmental conditions -- temperature, day length, rainfall, altitude -- than if it had spread along an east-west axis, as did wheat.

There is extraordinary genetic information and power in corn.  I am always willing to read another book on the history of corn and its breeding.

What did Obama eat in China?

I've been trying to find out what Obama ate in China and this is the closest I can come:

"We're also hosting a 'Stars and Stripes' week featuring iconic American cuisine," said a hotel spokesperson, who declined to give her name due to company policy.

"The White House guests may want to enjoy New Orleans flavors, American steak BBQs and Jack Daniel's cocktails," she added.

That was the Marriott but I suspect the Chinese government had a say in things or at the very least it was negotiated.  It's an interesting question which side is signaling the dominance with that choice; I say the Chinese.  Fortunately in Beijing it seems he had:

Obama-Hu 90 min meal feat. prawns, soups and lamb chops, plus a presentation of Chinese noodle making, which the Americans enjoyed.

What I've been reading

1. Momofuku, by David Chang and Peter Meehan.  This Nelson/Winter treatise on industrial organization teaches you the evolution of recipes and restaurants and (most of all) the mistakes made along the way.  Smokiness is an important concept in Japanese food, pickling and fermentation are underrated cooking techniques, a cook can learn from a heart surgeon, people will pay $80 for a ribeye steak without fancy decor, and you can cook semi-safe sous vide at home (suck the air out with a straw).  Recommended.

2. Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, by William Grimes.  A book like this has to have something interesting and indeed this one does.  There is an excellent chapter on how oysters once were "New York City food," akin to lobster in Maine or crab in Maryland.  No more.  The rest of the book remains oddly distant from the eating experiences of real people and overall I was disappointed.

3. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta.  In the abstract this is quite a good book and if someone woke up from a time capsule from 1969 you would start him with this.  Too much of it was familiar to me, though.

4. Timothy Egan, Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  Impeccably written and well-researched, but it bored me.  Spellbinding portraits of characters, etc. Not enough of a point and of course the fire was not what saved America.  Many people like it, though, so don't let me put you off.

5. The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind, by John S. Allen.  A very good Belknap Press introduction to recent research on cognition, especially cognition and language.  An antidote to many things you have read in Pinker.  It's a bit of a "tweener" book: it doesn't take you "by the hand" through the results but it also doesn't assume that you are a research scientist.  It was written at a good level for me, but some readers may wish for more explanation of the results.

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)."

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?

Leningrad during the Nazi siege

In 2002 secret police records were released.  They reveal that during the siege at least 300 people were executed for cannibalism and over 1,400 imprisoned for it.

That is from Michael Jones's compelling Leningrad: State of Siege.