Posts tagged food and drink

Piquantly contrarian essay on Starbucks' real genius: its appeal to the unreconstructed American consumer.

re: coffee, consumerism, food and drink, starbucks

Andy:

For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”

Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder? . . .

In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.

Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.

What a fascinating and funny idea: a café where you get what the previous person ordered. No peeking!

re: consumption, creativity, food and drink, humor, unintended consequences

Andy:

Located inside the Urban Design Center Kashiwa-no-ha, the Ogori cafe looks innocuous enough, but holds a surprise in store for its patrons. In a nutshell, you get what the person before you ordered, and the next person gets what you ordered. Thus, if you’re in on the game, you can choose to be either a generous benefactor, and treat those that come after you – or try your luck at being cheap. Either way, it’s an interesting experiment that explores surprise, kindness and encourages interactions. . . .

[Caleb Stasser explains:] "As I sat down to enjoy my surprise Appletizer, loving this insane idea and wondering what would happen if you tried it in America, a Japanese woman approached the cafe. Since she could actually speak Japanese, she could read the large sign at the front and, fortunately or unfortunately, got advanced warning of what she was in for. Before making a final decision on what to order, she quietly snuck up to me to try to ask me what I had ordered, knowing that it would be her unwavering refreshment destiny. The staff put a quick stop to her trickery, and I didn’t answer.

"Of course, regardless of what she ordered, she got the orange juice I ordered a few minutes earlier. But here’s one of the moments that make this experiment cool: she actually chose orange juice, just like I did. So she got what she wanted. Ogori cafe synchronicity!"

Chopping is also excessively cinematic in that it mimics the very techniques of film production and editing, the precise chopping of continuous reality into 24 images per second, the mini-guillotines used to trim and edit film stock, the terminology of cuts and splices.

re: cultural worlds, food and drink, movies

Nate:

One of the delights of watching food-centric films is to see the main characters demonstrate their culinary skills. The breaking of an egg, the flipping of an omelet, the chopping of an onion (or a carrot or a piece of celery) become impressive feats when performed with dexterity and brio. The food writer Michael Pollan has noted that television cooking shows have come to resemble athletic events, showcasing the spectacular, often competitive talents of their chefs. In narrative film, however, the spectacle of cooking is always more than spectacle; it is also a dynamic means of representing character. Chopping, in particular, in being both precise and violent, is an exceptionally cinematic activity, capable of expressing repressed emotions of rage, bitterness, and passion. It is no wonder that most every film in which food plays a role invariably has a chopping scene.

Our shelves of cookbooks are fascinating not so much as a body of knowledge, but as a body of ignorance: they contain what we don't know (or no longer know) about food, but our ignorance and aspirations take on very specific, trend-sensitive forms, a bit like—come to think of it—a good bundt pan waiting for batter.

re: books, cultural worlds, food and drink, ignorance, knowledge

Nate:

“Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are,” Brillat-Savarin challenged his readers in 1825, and his wisdom if not his brio was already old hat. Human meals serve those mixtures of raw and cooked that make up anthropological codes. Nearly every prescription or preference blends irrational faith and scientific requirements, as Marvin Harris shows in his fascinating Good to Eat: look long enough at a seemingly arbitrary food rule (cloven hooves, sacred cows) and one can probably discover a self-preserving logic behind it, but look hard enough at an apparently sensible directive (a glass of milk, a handful of supplements) and one will like as not detect a prejudice posing as sense. Omnivorous and hungry, body and spirit, we sit down at a table spread with necessary choice; we cannot eat to live, that is, without in some measure living to eat. As Laurie Colwin once put it, then, cookery books will always “hit you where you live.” What seems distinctive and disquieting now, what seems to have increased in the two centuries since Brillat-Savarin shot a turkey in Hartford or even in the two decades since Colwin roasted a chicken in her New York apartment, is the number of volumes hitting us combined with the force of their impact. A nation with a lot of food books is a nation without much sense of food, as The Economist recently pointed out.

I love how even standardized American-cum-global cuisine can still go off in its own condiment-slathered local direction wherever it lands. This list makes me simultaneously very hungry and just a little bit queasy.

re: colombia, food and drink, guatemala, south america

Nate:

Guatemala Generally called "shucos", are cooked in a carbon grill. They're served with the classic boiled sausage, guacamole, mustard, mayonnaise,boiled cabbage. If you want you can add ketchup, bacon, pepperoni, salami, Spanish chorizo, longaniza or meat. They cost around $0.50 in all Guatemalan cities. You may order the famous "mixto" who brings all the toppings already mentioned, but its price may rise to $2.00 or $3.00.

Colombia In Bogotá and practically all the country, the hot dog is eaten with an unusually great amount and variety of condiments and fixings. In a single hot dog, is normal to find mashed potato chips, cheese, strings of ham or bacon, ketchup, mayo, mustard, pineapple sauce, and chopped onion.

Dirt-eating is fascinating and, one must admit, kind of disturbing. It calls to mind strange associations—of little kids who experience the world by putting it in their mouth; of the pregnant heroine in Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible who craves dirt for its needed nutrients; of parrots flocking at clay banks for their own dietary supplement, of the American slaves described in historien Eugene Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll, who swallowed dirt in response to their dire conditions—and, more happily, of the farmer sampling his soil to discern how best to tend it.

re: agriculture, dirt, food and drink, taste

Nate:

“It used to be,” writes William Bryant Logan in Dirt, “that a good farmer could tell a lot about his soil by rolling a lump of it around in his mouth.” Today, apparently, it is harder to find someone who literally eats dirt:

Not in Texas, nor Vermont, nor Kentucky, nor California, nor western New York. Everybody knew somebody who once did it, but nobody could quite remember the name of the fellow.

Finally, Logan came across Bill Wolf, an organic pioneer who started his environmental research under Buckminster Fuller and who used to eat soil, until his doctor forbade him.

Soil contains bad bugs as well as good ones, and the physician did not want to have to sort them out in Wolf’s guts. But back in the days when he chawed, Bill could tell acid from alkaline by the fizz of the soil in his mouth.

A very acid soil would crackle like those sour candies that kids eat, and it had the sharp taste of a citrus drink. A neutral soil didn’t fizz and it had the odour and flavour of the soil’s humus, caused by little creatures called “actinomycetes.” An alkaline soil tasted chalky and coated the tongue.

Having conducted this simple taste test, Logan explains, farmers could apply calcium carbonate to the Sprite-flavoured fizzy soil and gypsum to the Milk of Magnesia tongue-coating soil, which would then “react with the hydrogen of acid clays and the sodium of salt-clays, respectively,” in order to re-balance the soil’s pH and improve its structure.

Michael Pollan asked readers to submit their favorite dietary rules and rules of thumb; of the 2,500 responses he received, he selected his top 20 for an interactive feature. The whole list is great, but the other one that stuck out for its similar emphasis on the importance of not just the food but the culture we create around it in our daily eating was this: "You don't get fat on food you pray over."

re: cultural worlds, food and drink

Nate:

"When drinking tea, just drink tea." I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information in the morning, when I'm also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day. I believe that it's so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food. Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning. (Of course, some time ago, I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him the aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper. When confronted, the teacher said, "When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!")

—Michelle Poirot

A fascinating detail from one of the many good, inspiring, and challenging obituaries of the Green Revolution's pioneering crop scientist, Norman Borlaug. The Economist's obit is also full of lovely details.

re: agriculture, cultivation, food and drink, gardens and cities, science

Nate:

In 1953, Dr. Borlaug began working with a wheat strain containing an unusual gene. It had the effect of shrinking the wheat plant, creating a stubby, compact variety. Yet crucially, the seed heads did not shrink, meaning a small plant could still produce a large amount of wheat.

Dr. Borlaug and his team transferred the gene into tropical wheats. When high fertilizer levels were applied to these new “semidwarf” plants, the results were nothing short of astonishing. The plants would produce enormous heads of grain, yet their stiff, short bodies could support the weight without falling over. On the same amount of land, wheat output could be tripled or quadrupled. Later, the idea was applied to rice, the staple crop for nearly half the world’s population, with yields jumping several-fold compared with some traditional varieties. This strange principle of increasing yields by shrinking plants was the central insight of the Green Revolution, and its impact was enormous.

Of course all these lists of "50 best things" are, even at their best, arbitrary and hyperbolic. But they're also fun—clearly scratching some itch in the collective mind of reader and writer. In the case of food/travel lists like this one, they really can be a treat.

re: asia, cultural worlds, england, europe, food and drink, lists, philippines, turkey

Nate:

20. Best place to buy: Olive oil
Turkish embassy electrical supplies, London

The most unlikely olive oil vendor in the world? At his electrical supply shop in London's Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family's olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.

76 Compton Street, London EC1, 020 7251 4721,www.planet mem.com

26. Best place to eat: Filipino cuisine
Lighthouse Restaurant, Cebu, Philippines

"The Lighthouse in Cebu in the Philippines is my favourite restaurant. We always eat bulalo (beef stew), banana heart salad, adobo (marinaded meat), baked oysters, pancit noodles, lechon de leche (suckling pig) and, to drink, green mango juice – my daughter is addicted to it! The staff are so friendly and welcoming. The chef has been there for more than 20 years, so the food is very consistent."

Gaisano Country Mall, Banilad, Cebu city, Philippines, 0063 32 231 2478

Does investing our own (fruitful) labor into a cultural artifact's creation cause us to overvalue said artifact, as these business-school-types argue? Or is it rather that the investment of a fresh egg or a few turns of an allen wrench counteracts a tendency to undervalue—and underappreciate—the labor of others?

re: business, diy, food and drink, furniture, ikea, work

Nate:

When instant cake mixes were introduced, in the 1950s, housewives were initially resistant: The mixes were too easy, suggesting that their labor was undervalued. When manufacturers changed the recipe to require the addition of an egg, adoption rose dramatically. Ironically, increasing the labor involved – making the task more arduous – led to greater liking....

When people construct products themselves, from bookshelves to Build-a-Bears, they come to overvalue their (often poorly made) creations. We call this phenomenon the IKEA effect, in honor of the wildly successful Swedish manufacturer whose products typically arrive with some assembly required.

In one of our studies we asked people to fold origami and then to bid on their own creations along with other people’s. They were consistently willing to pay more for their own origami. In fact, they were so enamored of their amateurish creations that they valued them as highly as origami made by experts.

We also investigated the limits of the IKEA effect, showing that labor leads to higher valuation only when the labor is fruitful...