Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Food. Show all posts

Monday, August 19, 2013

How to tell if a coffee shop serves good coffee, part 2...

Without drinking it, obviously.

This is continuing in the 'news you can use' category, among the trivialities that have been occupying my life of late while the events of the world pass me by.

I used to go with the smallest cup size offered by the cafe. There's a tendency among bad coffee shops to serve you up enormous bathtubs full of bilge water. Of course, to get a larger cup of coffee, they simply run the water through the same set of grounds until it turns into a burnt mess. The places that offer you a small sized coffee are more likely to know what they're doing.

But this was superseded by a tip from AL - the number of milk jugs on display. Good places will never heat their milk more than once. As a result, they tend to have a lot of small milk jugs around. If you see that, it's very likely somewhere that knows what they're doing. On the other hand, I've never had a good coffee from a place that had a single giant milk jug that kept being reheated.

If the place is failing the above signals and you still need a coffee, at a minimum order the smallest size you can.

(For the previous best signal, see here)

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

31 Days of Vegetarianism

Out of interest, I decided to try being vegetarian for a month. (Not vegan though - that $#!^ is wack, yo.) Partly this is due to lingering ethical concerns on the subject. The other reasons were a self-control aspect, and a social experiment aspect - just seeing what it would be like.

I can report back on a few observations in relation to said experiment:

-I didn't end up missing the taste of meat very much - certainly not when it wasn't around, and even when it was in front of me it wasn't hard to do without. The bigger issue, in fact, was remembering not to eat meat. I had to restart the month (twice!) because I ate meat without thinking about it. In normal meal situations it was easy enough to remember, but things were harder when you came across food in non-meal contexts and weren't thinking about it.  The first was with Athenios at Chick-Fil-A where I ate one of his nuggets without thinking about it, and the second was at SH's party where I ate a meat hors d'oeuvre before cursing myself about 20 minutes later. Both of these were within the first week, and afterwards I got used to it.

-The much bigger inconvenience wasn't the foregone taste, but rather the impact on the available choices when eating out. You can't just go to any of your regular restaurants without checking whether they have anything reasonable, and some places (e.g. Korean BBQ) are essentially ruled out altogether. Even at the places you could eat at, there was a huge reduction in choice. It's being in East Berlin wearing a grey polyester suit and peering across at the Armani store on the other side of the wall. I feel seriously bad for vegans.

-I note in passing that virtually nobody takes any kind of intermediate position on vegetarian ethics. Attitudes tend to fall into one of:
a) Eating animals is a-ok!
b) I suspect eating animals may be wrong but I like the taste and convenience, so I just avoid thinking about the ethical angle.
c) I think eating animals is wrong, so I abstain altogether.

Both a) and c) are entirely consistent. b) is the more interesting one - it doesn't make sense as a logical position, unless you think about the cognitive dissonance aspect.

To illustrate the point, consider the alternative intermediate position between a) and c)

b2) I suspect eating animals may be wrong but I like the taste and convenience, so I try to eat less meat than I otherwise would.

Makes sense, right? If killing chickens is bad, we should stop altogether, but it's still an improvement to only kill 10 instead of 20 if you can't or won't give up altogether.

Nobody thinks this way though. So why not?

Simple - the cognitive dissonance would be enormous. You'd have to constantly be facing up to the fact that you're doing something you think is somewhat wrong. You'd be reminded of this every time you considered whether to eat meat, and likely would feel somewhat guilty whenever you gave in.

And you can't have that. No man is the villain in his own narrative.

Hence people opt to just not think about it.

Nobody wants to see how the sausage is made.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Lifestyles of the Not-Quite-Rich-and-Famous

Athenios and I sometimes frequent the restaurant Fogo De Chao. It's one of those all-you-can-eat Brazilian steakhouses. They give you a coloured token where green side up means 'keep bringing me more succulent meat!' and red side up means 'now please bring a nurse specialing in patients at risk of coronary emergencies'.

The piece de resistance is always the feeling of self-loathing and extreme fullness at the end of the meal. It is, after all, the gastronomical equivalent of binge drinking.

What's funny though is that you often see a certain clientele at these places that seems at odds with the description above. Namely, slightly thugged-out guys, often somewhat dressed up, on dates with their girlfriends (who are always in cocktail dresses). The beverage of choice tends to be name brand champagne, consistent with the conspicuous consumption vibe that they give off.

And all this seemed odd to me, because it's a place that, notwithstanding it's expensive price, I'd be rather embarrassed to bring a girl, certainly for a one-on-one date.

I rarely see these kinds of couples at the other nice restaurants I go to. So what's the story? Obviously they're trying to impress their date with a fancy meal, but why this place?

My guess is that Fogo De Chao is essentially the poor person's idea of how rich people would eat. Start with an item at the expensive end of restauarnt menus, a steak. Then jack up the price and quallity. And finally, consume it in enormous quantities, since that's clearly how the wealthy live.

Of course, the wealthy distinguish themselves by their thinness and their meager consumption of food. If they are going to eat a lot, it has to be spread out across lots of tiny courses and given a fancy name like 'degustation'. In addition, it has to be healthy, and made from fresh ingredients. Eating a meal comprised entirely of meat would seem horribly gauche. You might be able to sell it in other contexts as some spin on the Atkins diet, but that's a harder claim at the all-you-can-eat restaurant.

In other words, other than the price and quality of the meat itself, this is entirely a low-brow eating experience. The wealthy are more likely to be eating a salad at the raw food restaurant, or checking out the Michelin recommendations in their city.

It might seem, then, that the signalling of these guys would be a failure, since no rich person is going to be impressed by this kind of consumption. Indeed, it seems possible (and likely) that many of the people in question aren't aware of how high class people would perceive it. But realistically, they aren't actually signaling to these people - the signaling is all done for the girl. And if she shares the same conceptions of what wealth looks like, it will probably be successful.

Still, it's a funny business model alright - the high-brow go there to feel low-brow by their huge consumption, and the low-brow go there to feel high-brow by how much they're spending

Thursday, September 6, 2012

In Defence of Wasted Food

There was a CNN article on Hacker News recently complaining about the amount of wasted food in America today.
Forty percent of food in the United States is never eaten, amounting to $165 billion a year in waste, taking a toll on the country's water resources and significantly increasing greenhouse gas emissions, according to a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council released this week.
The group says more than 20 pounds of food is wasted each month for each of 311 million Americans, amounting to $1,350 to $2,275 annually in waste for a family of four.
While wasted food is certainly not aesthetically satisfying, I find myself somewhat in the minority by viewing this as rather cheerful news. 

The main reason is that this is a huge celebratory victory lap in the quest of human beings to overcome what was the central problem of their existence from roughly 1 million B.C. until about 1950-ish: namely how to secure enough calories to stay alive.

Doubt not this fact - people waste food only because they know that there's plenty more where it came from. If there were some enormous, prolonged civil emergency in America where the food supply became insecure and sporadic, you can bet your bottom dollar that hungry people would very quickly revert to eating everything still in their refrigerator, tasty or not, out of expiry code or not. 

The definition of "wasted food", or even "food" in general, is something that varies with how desperate the economic condition is. There's a reason that people eat brains, kidneys, tripe, etc. in much smaller quantities than they used to. You know why? Because back then, meat was so scarce that you had to eat the whole animal. But now, cheeseburgers are delicious and cheap. If you go back to, say, the Battle of Stalingrad, people got so hungry that they would eat literally anything that contained a calorie. They would boil old leather boots - leather is skin, and has calories. Lipstick, made from animal fat, became a dessert. Even those bemoaning food wastage probably don't boil their shoes when they've worn through them.

The other problem with this view of the world is that it ignores the fact that food has a significant option value. When I do the shopping, I don't know exactly how many times I'm going to be eating at home in any given week. Maybe dinner plans will come up, and I'll go out. Maybe I'll have a big lunch and not be hungry. Maybe I'll just not feel like cooking.

When I'm buying food with a short expiry date, I'm buying the option of eating it later. The nature of options is that they sometimes expire unused. This doesn't mean the option wasn't worth something, it just means that something better came along. 

The types of foods that tend to have short expiry dates (and thus are more likely to be wasted) are fresh foods - fruit and vegetables, milk, meat, cheese. If all you eat is baked beans and spam, you'll probably have not much wasted food. But you'll be eating less healthily. I imagine that wasted food is probably also correlated with aspirations (unsuccessful, perhaps) towards healthy eating. You buy the broccoli thinking that you'll eat it. Maybe you go for a hot dog instead - hyperbolic discounting springs eternal. But if you never bought the broccoli, you would have eaten the hot dog with certainty.

I figure you always want to keep an eye on what the counterfactual is. Wasted food is generally fresh food. It would be nice if the counterfactual were more efficient consumption of fresh food. But it's probably just more processed food instead. Be careful what you wish for.

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Whole Foods Doesn't Want My Money

In many ways, I would be a natural demographic for Whole Foods, grocers to crunchy yuppie mums everywhere, to market to. I like high quality fruit and vegetables. I'm fairly price insensitive. I live in an area where they are located fairly close by. I could be upsold on a bunch of other random interesting food items.

But I don't go there very often, except for certain specialty items. I certainly don't do my regular shopping there.

And why not?

Because they don't sell any Coca-Cola products.

Now, I'm not saying this means I boycott them on principle.

But rather, it means that if I want a regular supply of Coke Zero and want to buy their fruit and vegetables, I now have to visit two stores per shopping cycle*, instead of one.

And you know what? There are closer substitutes to Whole Foods high quality fruit and veg at the povvo supermarket than their are substitutes for Coke Zero among the gourmet artisan Mexican soft drinks, or whatever junk it is they have instead.

The thing I find so funny is that there is no chance that a small amount of shelf space devoted to Coke wouldn't shift some product. Hell, they'll devote entire aisles to ridiculous placebo pills and potions for every conceivable ailment, real or imagined. You're telling me that the fifth brand of echinacea sells more than Diet Coke would in the same shelf space? Don't make me laugh.

So why do they do it?

Simple. Because Whole Foods knows that they're marketing themselves to the demographic of wankers. These people pride themselves in part on not buying soft drinks because they're "bad for you", but clearly that's not enough. Not only do they not want to buy it themselves, they also don't want you to be able to buy it there either. They think that the presence of Coke would somehow taint their wholesome organic good-for-you vibe. With all of the puritan fury they can muster, they're eschewing patronising anyone who sells Coke products because ... well, frankly I've got no idea why. Insert crappy modish cause here.

The people running Whole Foods are no fools, of course. They seem to have estimated that there's far more money to be made appealing to the Anti-Coke puritan crowd than there is to be made appealing to me.

That's fine. It's a free country, they're a free company, and I wish them the best of luck.

But I'll take my low brow dollars somewhere that isn't too pompous to sell me a Coke Zero, and avoid the professional shopping-cart busybodies.

Which is a shame, because they have really good fruit. So it goes.

*The phrase 'shopping cycle' is used under advisement. The original draft read 'week', but then a fit of honesty compelled me to admit that the actual frequency is less than that.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Fatties Are Optimising

Let me repeat a frequent refrain that I hear from smug skinny people from time to time:
Hur hur hur. Look at that fat guy at McDonalds, getting a super-sized Big Mac meal with a diet coke. As if the diet coke makes up for the huge number of calories he's consuming! What a moron!
Reader, I am here to tell you that at least along one metric, the fattie is behaving in an entirely rational way, and the skinny guy is in fact the moron for not understanding optimisation.

When I say 'rational', I don't mean that they are doing the optimal thing in some cosmic sense. Rather, I mean it in the classical applied microeconomics sense that they are maximising something.

So what exactly might they be maximising that would be consistent with their behaviour?

Consider that they get utility from eating equal to

U = Taste*Quantity

It's better to eat tastier stuff, and it's better to eat more of it. Not too controversial, right?

In addition, suppose they can't eat an unlimited amount - let's grant them a binding calorie budget for each meal. The exact budget doesn't actually matter for the analysis.

So the fatties want to eat as much tasty food as possible given a maximum total calorie allowance. How do they choose the amounts of foodstuffs to get to this point?

Well, if you work through the fairly simple constrained optimisation, the relevant metric for comparing across food items is the taste per unit calorie. This is a measure of how good the 'value' of each food is, if you think of calories like money. In other words:

"Value(Food X)" = Taste (Food X) /  Calories (Food X)

In equilibrium, you will want to allocate more consumption towards foods that deliver higher value, and reduce consumption in low value foods.* When faced between two foods, that's how you'll decide between them.

Let's add further the assumption that the person must have at least one food item and one drink item.

So how do you choose between the items?

Let's start by comparing Coke versus Diet Coke.

A 12 ounce can of Coke has 140 calories. Let's call it's tastiness = y.

A 12 ounce can of diet coke has, say, 1 calorie (it's closer to zero, but never mind). Let's say you find diet coke much worse than coke - it's only 30% as tasty, say.

So the value of coke is V(coke) = y/140
The value of diet coke is V(diet coke) = 0.3y/1

In other words, Diet Coke is 42 times better value than Coke.

Now let's compare a serve of fries relative to our equivalent of 'Diet Fries', say a Premium Southwest Salad with Chicken.

A large McDonalds French Fries has 500 calories. The salad has 290 calories.

But everyone knows that the salad is not 60% as tasty as the French Fries. At best, it's about a quarter as tasty.

In other words, the Salad is worse value than the large fries.

So the fatty that is rationally optimising the problem we've set out will choose the large fries and the diet coke, and ignore the southwest salad and the coke. This will give him more tasty food for the same amount of calories.

And this conclusion holds no matter what the calorie budget. It doesn't matter if you let the guy eat a huge meal - he's still better off ordering more fries and a diet coke. Coke has a much (calorie)-cheaper substitute than fries do for the same level of taste.

I think it's a mistake to assume that fatties don't care about being fat. My guess is that they care deeply about it. They just really like food.

And these are exactly the people whom I'd expect to figure out the optimal way to eat the most amount of tasty food for a given level of calories.

Frankly, if I only optimised over the things above, I'd eat McDonalds a lot more. It's tasty as hell, and doesn't even have that many calories. As we've seen, you can eat it every day and not necessarily get fat.

The only thing that stops me getting to this point is adding in a health cost to each item. If you care about your health (and on this front, I think it's safe to assume that fatties may not care as much), then you're more likely to pick the salad. But most people are unlikely to pick the salad based on the taste/calorie tradeoff alone. Unless they're idiots. In addition, Kevin Murphy's back-of-the-envelope calculations about how large the health costs of a hamburger are suggest that they're only in the range of $2-$3 per hamburger. What the costs are in terms of attractiveness, however, is another story.

But the bottom line is that it's the fattie at McDonalds who isn't ordering the diet coke who is more likely to be making the mistake. You're always better off ordering the diet coke and getting a larger fries instead.

*Technical aside: if you don't specify a declining function of taste with greater consumption (i.e. each fry tastes as good as the last), the equilibrium will be a corner solution - e.g. you only eat french fries. The fact that people tend to want a burger and fries suggests that taste declines with consumption, and thus the optimisation is at an interior solution. Fact.