May 26, 2006

The Prodigal Son and Summer Blogging

It’s been a while...

and by ‘a while’ I mean over two months since my last post. Rest assured, I do not return to the proverbial table empty handed. Over the past eight weeks I’ve traveled East twice, passing through seven states and four major cities in what was, ultimately, a blessedly successful quest for employment. Between marathon-long “official visits” (eight hour ordeals of candidate evaluation that bear striking resemblance to Baka Pygmy manhood rituals) I actually managed to see a great deal of the cities and countryside I thought I knew so well. Much to reflect on, especially with regards to Mid-Atlantic wetlands, African Americans in Washington D.C. and the wanton depravity of the 20-something New York City financial scene.

In any event, our astute readers are no doubt already wondering what my personal “success” means for the future of this thriving forum. Though John and I have yet to discuss the issue at hand, I dare say that my return east actually augments both the spirit and, of course, formal title of East Meets West. Let us also acknowledge reality for a moment: the prolific bedrock of this page (John) remains west in Palo Alto indefinitely. Thus, I am optimistic, and I urge our readers to be as well.

That aside, in the coming weeks I hope to post a gratuitously critical response to John’s First (And Probably Last) Artistic Inspiration (stick to your rocks, shameless imposter!%!), an expose on sidewalk graffiti and latent class contempt in my Western Addition neighborhood as well as bits and pieces on the corporeal experience of instrumental performance, how I found myself dressed as a lobster and entered in their years Bay to Breakers and a few questions to John regarding financial markets and their effect on domestic and global oil prices. Thanks for all of your emails of support while I’ve been gone - it’s good to get back into the fray!

May 24, 2006

Wanderlust

The social networking on Facebook + the feedback mechanism on eBay + the adventure of the Lonely Planet guides = one of the coolest social phenomenons (phenomena?) I've ever seen on the web, CouchSurfing.

Basically, CouchSurfing enables you to get in touch with people who will let you crash at their place while you travel if you let others in the network crash at your place when they travel. Coverage around the world is pretty good. The feedback, vouching, and verification mechanisms are designed to assuage people's fears of staying with or accommodating strangers.

A quick Wikipedia search reveals that CouchSurfing is one of several such Hospitality Services, including a few that were paper-based before the advent of the internet.

Travel sites like these give me a wanderlust that I find hard to shake. Is this why I read less travel writing than I'd like? (Or do I just have no time given everything else I'm trying to read?)

To my co-blogger Ned (who will soon be reappearing on this site in a blaze of written glory after his own cross-country travel related absence), might you recommend some of the classics in travel writing so I can begin to delve into the genre?

(Came across CouchSurfing via the "Frugal Traveler" at the New York Times, who is embarking on a trip around the world.)

May 18, 2006

A Depressing Thought

I will never read more than .02% of the books written in my lifetime.

How do I know this? Approximately 300,000 books are written worldwide every year. I expect I will read, at most, 60 books a year over my lifetime. That's about a book a week (which is the typical college course load), plus a few extra for when I'm on vacation or sick. So if I treat pleasure reading like an extra year round college course (in addition to job, family, housework, exercise, etc.) and focus on the most recent books, I'll only read about 2 out of every 10,000 published books each year.

Does it matter that I will absorb so little of the world's knowledge over my lifetime? Perhaps I should simply focus on the best literature and be satisfied with that. But since I secretly desire to be the first person to know everything since the last person who knew everything (see candidates here and here), it is depressing how little I will ever be able to read.

On the bright side, perhaps this will be overcome by combining the complete digitization of all books ever written with some upgrades to my hardware. But my guess is that if any of this ever comes to pass, Google will likely become self-aware much sooner, making my eventual omniscience much more ordinary.

First they came for the salami...

On Monday inspectors destroyed all the cured meats at Il Buco restaurant in NoHo. They did so, according to the owner, Donna Lennard, not because of any evidence of contamination but because the temperature in the curing room was six degrees higher than it should have been.

"These are pigs that were raised for us," Ms. Lennard said. "We knew their names. We were trying to do something sustainable and traditional, and this is what happens."
From the New York Times on Wednesday, here.

The New York City Health Department is doing a great job recruiting for the libertarian chef movement.

May 14, 2006

Trader Joe's Defeats the Tyranny of Mustard

Continuing my interest in food-blogging (see posts on libertarian chefs, smelly foods, and taquerias) I thought I'd write a bit about Trader Joe's, which I've become positively obsessed with since moving to California.

I came across an essay by Jesse Friedman called "Knowing its Audience: Trader Joe'’s and the Reenchantment of Food Shopping". Key quote:
"With Trader Joe's, predictability does not mean the bland comfort of identical experiences, but rather the reliable quality of every product offered...To establish the consistent quality of new products, founder Joe Coulombe instituted "“a winning concept…born of necessity": a good, old-fashioned tasting panel composed of store employees. A whimsical hand-painted sign in one store describes the panel'’s philosophy as, "“If we don't lick our plate, we won't sell it,"” a statement in no uncertain terms of the company'’s commitment to selling delicious products...If all this quality assurance fails, customers are assured of a no-hassle refund on any product they don't love, encouraging forays into new, yet safely delineated, territories of culinaria...Today'’s Balsamic-Marinated Portabella Mushroom Strips have replaced the Bagel Pizzas of the previous decade, yet are predictably healthy and, most likely, delicious, and satisfy the clientele'’s desire for some adventure."
For someone who is adventurous yet budget-conscious when it comes to food, Trader Joe's is perfect. I find myself grabbing food items I never thought I wanted and just trying them for the heck of it. More often than not what I've tried is awesome, and I trust Trader Joe's to sell delicious products at a good price.

So what does this have to do with mustard? Psychologists have pretty much nailed down in recent years that we are lazy, irrational, and easily-scared when it comes to the choices we confront every day. One psychologist, Barry Schwartz, has argued that we'd all be better off if we had fewer choices. We'd be less stressed, less anxious, less paralyzed by the dizzying array of options and choices that confront us everyday, and just generally happier. Radley Balko has facetiously called this argument the Tyranny of Mustard, in reference to the 100+ mustard choices we face at the local mega-mart.

An article in Reason last year by Virginia Postrel reviewed the recent criticisms of choice. She gives good reasons why the arguments may be overblown, but also lists ways that we can successfully reap the benefits of nearly unlimited choice while avoiding the debilitating side effects:
"Yet free individuals voluntarily limit their options all the time. They decide to be vegan, to write strictly metered poetry, to wear natural fibers, to date born-again Christians, to buy Japanese cars. They happily shop at boutiques, use blogs to guide their reading, and hire interior designers. They let expert gatekeepers narrow down their alternatives.

These choices about what and how to choose are not only voluntary but meaningful. They help define who we are. And they preserve the essential value of abundant choice. Most people, most of the time, are less interested in choice per se than they are in the benefits of variety. They want to find what truly suits them.

Hiring an interior designer or wedding consultant is not, as The Washington Post’s Mallaby suggests, a way of “deliberately avoiding choice.” To the contrary, these specialists are valuable because they don’t simply limit the number of options. They limit those options to ones you’re likely to like. They do not hand you a one-size-fits-all solution à la Social Security. Unlike the Schwartz prescription for “less choice” overall, these gatekeepers do not reduce your chance of finding what’s right for you. They increase it."
By "outsourcing" some of my food choices to Trader Joe's, shopping is more fun, more productive, and more successful.

Interestingly, the dijon mustard at Trader Joe's sucks. I guess I can't have everything.

May 13, 2006

The End of Plagiarism

Well, not really, but this article in the New York Times gives a good summary of how the digitization, linking, and searching of books might change the production and consumption of knowledge in the future. Key quote:
"Once a book has been integrated into the new expanded library by means of this linking, its text will no longer be separate from the text in other books. For instance, today a serious nonfiction book will usually have a bibliography and some kind of footnotes. When books are deeply linked, you'll be able to click on the title in any bibliography or any footnote and find the actual book referred to in the footnote. The books referenced in that book's bibliography will themselves be available, and so you can hop through the library in the same way we hop through Web links, traveling from footnote to footnote to footnote until you reach the bottom of things."
My thought on this is that plagiarism will be very easy to measure and quantify once all books are linked and searchable. I only hope that every poorly researched paper I ever wrote in high school has been erased from my family's old computers. Could you imagine how easy it would be for the plagiarism bot to figure out whether my paraphrasing was much closer to copying? On the other hand, I could also put my draft paper through a plagiarism detector to determine whether I had unwittingly "internalized" some source.

The one caveat to this future is that perpetually extended copyright protection may stop the digitization of books. If I were concerned solely about my reputation in the eyes of my former high school teachers, I'd say to hell with digitization, there's such a thing as too much transparency. But for the future of knowledge, let's hope the indexing continues apace.

May 04, 2006

Are chefs more likely to be libertarians?

In 2004 California passed a law banning the production and sale of foie gras by 2012.

"I hope I'm retired by 2012," said Thomas Keller, owner of the French Laundry in the Napa Valley and Per Se in Manhattan, who believes the government should not tell people what to eat. "If force-feeding a duck is cruel, then packing chickens in a cage is cruel, and then the veal and the beef. We are all going to be vegetarians soon if they have their way. We should probably start converting now."

Mr. Keller might have been joking, but animal activists are not. Their opposition to the force-feeding of ducks and geese is just the beginning of a campaign against what they consider inhumane farm practices.
...
Charlie Trotter, who stopped serving foie gras in his eponymous restaurant five years ago because he did not like what he had seen on several foie gras farms, said he is not an animal rights activist but is opposed to interference from the government.

"When I took foie gras off the menu I was not trying to make a political statement," he said. "I am certainly not gleeful about this. I am very much a libertarian." And he added: "I don't think government should tell people not to smoke in restaurants."
From Wednesday's New York Times.

I can think of two reasons why chefs are more likely to be libertarians:

1. Chefs, and in particular the best ones like Trotter and Keller, are basically in the hedonism business. With many on the right and the left calling for greater regulation of personal choice, a chef might feel that his livelihood is threatened and identify with those that defend personal freedom. Libertarians are on the forefront of that battle.

2. Chefs and restaurateurs must deal with government regulations that are often ineffective and arbitrarily enforced. See for example, this article on New York City's crackdown on sous-vide, a technique where food is cooked very slowly under vacuum to create incredibly tender and flavorful results. The chef's think they're doing it safely, but since the local authority has no specific rules for the procedure, chefs like David Chang have had to destroy thousands of dollars worth of food at the order of the city inspectors. (David Chang is a friend of my cousin's, and I've eaten at his restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in New York City. It's really damn good.)

Does the best cuisine develop in areas with the least regulation? A large grant to do some field research to answer that question would be nice.

Update: The blog (Marginal Revolution) and blogger (Tyler Cowen) I seem to reference more than any other has had two posts that go some way towards answering my last question. See here for reasons why lax regulations help the barbecue in Lockhart, Texas be arguably the best in the country. See here for the effects that labor market regulations and taxes are having on French cuisine.

The Next Big Thing

Seth Roberts' book, The Shangri-La Diet, is #3 on Amazon. If his crazy theory (eat ~300 calories a day of flavorless oil or sugar water-->lower body's "set point"-->feel less hunger-->eat less-->lose weight) actually works for a significant number of people, this book is going to be huge.

My favorite passage, from pages 136-137:
"Food connoisseurs avoid ditto foods -- exactly the foods my theory says you should avoid. They search out, purchase, eat, and even glorify foods with unusual and subtle flavors -- exactly the foods my theory says you should eat. Inevitably these foods are made in small batches and cannot become very familiar. A culture of food connoisseurship may be the very reason the French are less obese than Americans."
I learned about Roberts over a year ago on Marginal Revolution, but haven't yet had the courage to try his method. The science behind his diet seems sound, but with a sample size of pretty much Seth Roberts, some of his friends, and a few dozen people in the blogosphere, it's fair to say that the theory is as of yet unproven.

But on the off-chance it does work, I'm thinking of buying some stock in Filippo Berio.