Things THEY Don't Want You To Know: food

Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Here's what you'll be dining on in Hell. (Why I Hate People)

Yesterday, as a treat, I had an ice cream sundae. Two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and some "Magic Shell" (Reese's Peanut Butter Cup flavor!) on top, with a couple of old animal cookies crumbled into it for flavor.

That sundae was an homage to the sundaes they used to serve at a drive-in restaurant I went to, as a kid, called "The Kiltie." The sundae at "The Kiltie" was called a "Circus Sundae," and had chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream, with some frosted animal cookies on it.

I never understood the link between animal cookies and circuses; possibly, the animals represented by cookies were circus animals? I don't know -- we didn't think about it much because ice cream usually didn't require much thought. Or forty-eight hours prep time.

*Sound of one shoe dropping*

Ice cream, one would think, would require minimal prep time, if you are not making the ice cream from scratch (as I used to do when I lived on a student budget. I don't know if it was cheaper to make my ice cream from scratch. I do know that when I lived on a student budget I had $35 per month for 'entertainment' set aside, and 'entertainment' included clothing, as well, so once I had to choose between getting a new pair of shoes and going to a movie. I chose the shoes. So I made ice cream not as a way of saving money, but as a form of entertainment.) Ice cream should require maybe a few minutes sitting on the counter to let it soften up enough to scoop it easily out of the container, max, right?

RIGHT! say all the people who do not know the best way to eat ice cream/demonstrate that you are a soulless monster. All those people, people like me, think that ice cream is a simple, inexpensive treat that has nothing in common with jewelry, which is (A) why we have at least a chance of going to Heaven and (B) have never eaten "Serendipity's Grand Opulence Sundae."

I don't remember where I first heard about this abomination, but it's enough to know that it exists and that there are people who can order it and somehow sleep at night.

The "Grand Opulence Sundae," I think, has to be a joke, but if so, it's not funny. It actually appears on the Serendipity III's menu, listed at $1,000. Why is it a thousand bucks for a sundae?

Here's the recipe, taken from a site that didn't know how to spell "opulence" but tried to blog about it anyway:

Start with 5 scoops of premium vanilla ice cream made from Tahitian Vanilla beans and Madagascar Vanilla and cover them in 23k edible gold leaf.

Drizzle the whole affair with the world's most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porceleana and chunks of rare Chuao Chocolate.

Then suffuse the sundae with Parisian candied fruit, gold dragets, truffles and Marzipan Cherries.

Place a tiny bowl of Grand Passion Caviar on top and serve in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18k gold spoon.

For the finishing touch, add a gilded sugar flower by Ron Ben-Israel.

As I said, this has to be a joke, right? The menu at the restaurant says "Guiness World Record," so this was a stunt or something, right? STILL NOT FUNNY but someone's attempt at a joke, right?

Maybe not. You can watch one being made:

And the site where I got the link to that also claims that Serendipity serves not just a $1,000 ice cream sundae but a $25,000 Frozen "Haute" Chocolate:

I see what you did there, Serendipity. No, not the play on words, but the way you demonstrated your contempt for humanity by even imagining these desserts.

(The Haute Chocolate is described on the restaurant's site as "The World's Most Expensive Dessert,":

served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18 carat gold and white diamond bracelet attached to the neck. The goblet is further laced with 23 carat edible gold. The recipe includes Serendipity frozen hot chocolate mix that contains 14 rare and secret cocoas, 14 of the world rarest and most expensive cocoas from Africa and South America, milk, ice cubes whipped cream and shavings from the world's most expensive truffle, the La Madeline au Truffle ($2,500 a pound). Topping it with five grams of 24 carat edible gold, this opulent dessert is served with a $14,000 jewel encrusted spoon. The bracelet and the spoon belongs to the sweet-toothed customer who ordered this bejeweled dessert.

Although it seems both cheating, and remarkably dumb, to include 'jewelry' as part of the dessert. If I serve you a pizza inside a mansion, and you get to keep the mansion, would that make the pizza the world's most expensive?

Or would it just be dumb?

The restaurant claims to sell about 1 sundae per month, and the 48-hour notice is required, according to Wikipedia, because ingredients have to be flown in from around the world.

I went looking to find someone who had actually eaten -- paid one thousand dollars to eat-- this ice cream sundae, and I found this blog that was chock-full of poor spelling, claiming that people who have "accomplished something" and feel like "donating money" --

NOTE: I FOUND NOT ONE SINGLE THING THAT WOULD CLAIM THAT EATING THIS REPRESENTATION OF WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IN SOME WAY HELPS ANY CHARITY

-- and which, poor spelling and all, wanted to suggest that the author had eaten the sundae but clearly he or she had not. This site, meanwhile, claimed "there are many people" who would tell you the sundae is "worth every penny" but couldn't name one of the "many" people.

Another blog claimed that in the 9 years the restaurant had offered this Way To Prove You Are Awful, it had sold 200, citing a restaurant spokesperson, but then THIS blog claimed that the first one (or maybe the first one at the DC version of the restaurant) had been sold to celebrate a 12-year-old's birthday.)

AS AN ASIDE: Congratulations, mom and dad: you are among the World's Worst Parents!

Let me just point out that all the blogs say that the ice cream is luxurious and that the whatever is whatever and let me say that all of that talk about how the more expensive something is, the more whatever it is. That is bullsh*t.

PEOPLE MAKE THINGS MORE EXPENSIVE SO THAT RICH PEOPLE WILL PAY MORE FOR THEM THE POINT BEING THAT THE RICH WANT TO PAY A LOT OF MONEY TO HAVE THINGS WE CAN'T HAVE.

There is, of course, a link between how expensive something is and the quality it will have. I get that: when I buy a toy at the Dollar Store, as I do because I am not rich, I know that toy will likely be far lower quality than a $40 toy from Toys "R" Us, and the same goes with food, generally: discount, 2-for-$1 boxes of generic Frosted Mini Wheats are not going to generally be as delicious/nutritious as full-price name brands.

But there is an upper limit. There is clearly a point where the ice cream can get neither icier nor creamier, and hence there is a maximum price point where, after that, you are paying for things likee "edible gold leaf," which: all gold is edible, it's just harder to chew, or you are, more clearly, paying for things like "HA STUFF IT WAIT STAFF THIS ICE CREAM COSTS MORE THAN YOU WILL MAKE THIS MONTH AND I'M GOING TO GIVE IT TO MY BRATTY 12-YEAR-OLD SNOT."

I mean honestly, the "world's most expensive chocolate?" What separates that from melted down Hershey's bars?

(I look forward to at least one commenter telling me about some process that makes chocolate from the Andes taste far better, or some kind of crap.)

I want to put this in perspective, for that commenter, and for anyone who is tempted to defend (or try!) a dessert like this or the mere idea that we should fly in desserts for people.

The USDA puts out monthly estimates of food costs. You can read them online, when not leaving comments somewhere about how awesome it is that we can have someone hand-carve an edible flower for dessert. The most recent stats available, May 2013, have for a family of four an average cost of food $1,032 for a month, on a "moderate" plan, and $632 on the "thrifty" plan.

The "thrifty" food plan is the one that people on food stamps are supposed to be eating -- it's what they could afford. That includes such luxuries as one serving of cereal per child per week. But that lucky kid also gets a whopping 3.45! servings of milk! Imagine that lucky kid on food stamps, getting to wash down his PB&J with a cold glass of milk as many as 3.45 times per week!

"Mom, can I have some milk?"

"Not until tomorrow, Junior. Enjoy your 0.41 cups of dry cereal."

Dinner could be either the 0.19 servings of "red meat, lower cost," or perhaps one of the 2.45 eggs allotted that child per week, alternated with 1.18 potato servings per week.

That's for a child aged 9-11.

On average, Serendipity claims some awful person walks into one of their restaurants, once a month, and orders a sundae that would buy food for a family of four for two months.

Did you know, too, that there's a huge fight over whether we should continue to fund foodstamps? 1 in 7 Americans receives them. 1 in 7 Americans has to tell their kids they only get a glass of milk every other day.

But we might cut that program because it's really expensive guys, to keep people from starving. News articles focus on the 'profiteering' that allegedly goes on over food stamps, claiming that it's a huge boondoggle. (The latest talking point is a claim that people are buying food with foodstamps and shipping it to relatives overseas. If that's true, nobody has yet proven it.)

Congress, which plans on working a solid 12 days between July 25 and September 30 -- seriously: the Congressional schedule has TWELVE workdays out of 67 days in that period-- wants to cut food stamps by $100,000,000,000 over ten years, fake numbers that don't mean anything because they're not binding.

"Food Stamps" are actually a program known as "SNAP," the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program." In 2012, 47,000,000 people received SNAP, 72% of those being families with kids.

(ENJOY YOUR 1 egg every 3 days kids!)

The average SNAP household makes less than $2,100 per month (for a 3-person family) and gets about $133 per month in benefits. SNAP cost $81,000,000,000 in 2012, but 92% of that was money given to people -- the administrative costs of SNAP are 5%, mostly helping the states (laboratories of democracy!) administer the program.

$81,000,000,000 sounds like a lot, but you're thinking small potatoes. The federal budget in 2012 was

$3,795,547,000,000

or 3,795 billion dollars. That makes food stamps less than 2% of the federal budget.

The Department of Defense, meanwhile, asked for (and will get) $118,000,000,000 just to fight in Iraq this year. Over the next two years, the Iraq war (which, technically, isn't that over?) will spend an amount equal to food stamps each year. Which means we could fully fund food stamps AND cut the deficit if we hadn't elected Cheney's Puppet and started and continued a bogus war designed to benefit defense contractors.

So what will those families do when food stamps get cut and they can't get help buying their kids 2.45 eggs per week?

One of the food recommendations from the USDA was to buy low-cost meat. Nothing is lower-cost or higher in deliciousness than a good hot dog, so maybe those families could get their kids some of these:

That's the Serendipity Hot Dog. It costs $69.00.

*Sound of other shoe dropping*

But the ketchup is made from heirloom tomatoes! Savor that taste: it'll provide you comfort when you're burning in a pit of fire for all eternity.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Welcome a new TBOE reader! Oh, and some stuff about cooking (POP!Best!)

Or maybe two new readers: A Twofer Sunday! Or something.

Hot on the heels of my posting The Best Cookbook, in which I opined that

We have, then, reached a point in our culture where cooking is purely for entertainment,

and also noted that

Cooking... has all the other hallmarks of an art that isn't practiced by most people. We have more TV shows about chefs and cooking than we do about detectives with troubled homelives, and we have shows about restaurants and how to find them, and we have shows where cooks go to restaurants. We've done from dinner theater to dinner as theater...

Which I thought was clever, and which also spurred on a Chicago chef and a New York food writer to use me as their muse; in a New York Times article titled (less cleverly) In Chicago, The Chef Grant Achatz Is Selling Tickets To His New Restaurant, food writer Pete Wells expands on my thesis:

BY this point, nearly everyone agrees that dining out has replaced going to the theater and that chefs are rock stars. So why don’t restaurants sell tickets? Grant Achatz, the highly praised chef of Alinea in Chicago, has asked himself the same question.

Grant Achatz didn't just ask himself the question I thought of first, but he answered it by deciding that (as the NYT headline spoiled for you) he's going to sell tickets to his restaurant, called Next (which is a pun -- because not only is it Grant's next restaurant but it's the next thing in restaurants. I'm starting to really like Grant.)

Tickets will go for $45-$75, assuming you don't buy them from a scalper and assuming you don't get confused and buy old tickets to a Charlie Sheen live show, and can be resold; the cost of the ticket includes the whole shebang, as nobody in the restaurant business says but they should: drinks, food, and whatever else it is people get in restaurants that don't have playlands (the only kind of restaurants I eat in anymore.)

And, apparently, restaurants sans playlands feature more than just mere food and drink from this era: Grant Achatz is going to time travel:

The menu will change four times a year, with each new edition featuring the cuisine of a particular place and time. When the restaurant opens, Mr. Achatz said, the theme will be Paris in 1912, with painstakingly researched evocations of Escoffier-era cuisine. Three months later, the kitchen will turn out a fresh set of recipes — evoking, say, postwar Sicily, or Hong Kong 25 years from now, with modern techniques employed to imagine the future of Chinese cuisine.

One side effect of all this rock starrery is to put the hurt on waiters:

But the plan would also have value for Mr. Achatz and his main partner in Next and Alinea, Nick Kokonas. By law, restaurants may distribute tips only to those employees who work in service. But the service charge included in the ticket price “gives him control over the money,” said Bill Guilfoyle, an associate professor of business management at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. “He can give it to whomever he sees fit.”

Mr. Achatz could pay cooks more than members of the wait staff, a reversal of the usual pecking order that could allow him to recruit shining kitchen talent.

Really? Waiters make more than cooks at restaurants? Is that true of every industry, that the person who carries things for you makes more than the people that make the stuff? Because I thought that the rule of Less Talent=More Money applied only to banks and Fox News contributors.

Of course, the idea that cooking is entertainment didn't originate with me...

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Monday, April 04, 2011

The Best Cookbook

I have about seven cookbooks on our counter which, admittedly, I almost never use. They range from the "Betty Crocker Cookbook" my mom gave me a long time ago to the two Rachael Ray 30-minute cookbooks I got Sweetie as a retirement present when she stopped working in an office and opted to spend every day chasing after twin boys to the "It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook" which has lots of recipes for food that we imagine people in the 1930s would eat (or at least people in the 1940s would eat if they weren't busy having their banks shut down and leaping off bridges, that being my understanding of both the movie It's A Wonderful Life, which I've never seen, and life in the 1930s, which I've never seen, either.)

What those books all have in common, besides not ever really being used, is that they all try to make cooking more fun or interesting, bringing new combinations of flavors and textures to meals, teaching us how to cook like Grandma imagines she used to cook back in the 30s, or how Han Solo would cook in a different galaxy...

... did I mention that one of the cookbooks is actually the Star Wars Cookbook?...

...teaching us, in short, how to come up with something other than "throw the hot dogs in the microwave and put them on the table next to a bag of chips," which I personally have never done. I always boil the hot dogs. It only takes about 3 minutes, after all, so it's not that much longer than in the microwave, and I prefer my hot dogs to have that authentic home-cooked flavor. I don't want my kids growing up having only tasted microwave-warmed, individually-wrapped hot dogs.

Which, as an aside, how did we get to a point where hot dogs are individually packaged and wrapped but Reese's peanut butter cups are not? Was unwrapping the Reese's really all that difficult? And couldn't a case be made that for most of us, me included, making it easier and faster to eat candy isn't really a wise idea?

I have all these cookbook options, allowing me to cook a meal that almost-literally spans space and time, slow-cooking a ham while whipping up a side dish in 30-minutes or less and topping it off with a dessert of Wookie-ookies. And when I look at those cookbooks, all I can think of is why bother?

Cooking these days has stopped being functional. And you probably didn't even notice, because didn't even notice until recently. We no longer have to cook, not for any practical reason, and that has led to some interesting (but stupid) developments.

The realization that cooking isn't functional anymore, that it's become a luxury like racquetball or commuting to work, things we do for fun or romanticized reasons or because we've not yet adapted to the new world (like people who still read books), dawned on me slowly, beginning with the KFC $10 Challenge. Remember that?

I remember that - -and I remember it well, because I watched that commercial and thought "That's stupid; cooking the stuff yourself is always cheaper," which at the time I thought was true for the same reason almost everyone thinks everything is true: because I believed it.

Cooking stuff for yourself might once have been cheaper than eating out or letting someone else cook it for you and bringing it home, or making frozen meals; that may have been where I and probably everyone else began to believe that cooking for yourself was cheaper than having someone else do it. So I initially, believing that cooking for myself and my family, was cheaper, dismissed that ad... until I was in the grocery store a few days later and thought to myself "I wonder just how wrong that ad was," and looked at the ingredients of such a meal myself, and found out the ad was right.

It didn't immediately sink in at that point that letting someone else do the cooking was almost always, if not actually always, cheaper and easier. That ad came out a long time ago and I only recently decided that cooking is no longer practical, that it's a hobby and something that people do because they want to, not because they need to, and it took a while to get there as I noticed that meal after meal, basic meals that we love around our house, were cheaper and easier if we simply ordered out or got frozen stuff.

We like, for example, to make burritos (or soft tacos, or chimichangas, whatever we might call them that week), beef and cheese and salad-y stuff wrapped into a shell. And I began to notice that there were frozen versions of those selling for two bucks. And they were good, and they were done in 20 minutes without any frying, chopping, mincing, or grating. One dish Mexican food for less than the cost of the meat I'd have to put into them.

The final straw was pizza. I pride myself on cooking pizza, and cooking it well. I make my own dough (using a basic mixture that I then customize) and fry the meat and use fresh ingredients and I even once owned a pizza stone and I let the dough rise. I experiment with sauces and cheeses and meats and even fruit, and I make a damn good pizza, as everyone who ever has tried it has said. (I also make a damn good cheesecake, but I don't do that as often because if you eat leftover cold cheesecake for breakfast people look at you all funny.)

I originally began making my own pizza back in law school, when my grocery budget was $20 per week; I was able to afford pizza back then by scrimping on other groceries -- lots of Ramen noodles and oatmeal -- and by getting the ingredients myself and making the pizzas myself. I bought flour and yeast and cheese that I'd grate myself and meat that I'd fry up, and the total ingredients, about $10, would make 3 or 4 pizzas overall, and they were good, and as I got better at it I'd occasionally imagine myself, someday, running a successful chain of pizza restaurants that would have people flocking to them, waiting in line to get into them.

(Two things stand out from that story: One, I'm completely incapable of doing anything without imagining that the thing that I'm doing will someday lead me to be rich and possibly famous, although I'd settle for rich. Whether it's blogging, cooking pizzas or raising twins, I'm always certain that I'm moments away from that serendipitous, Harrison-Ford-painting-doors-moment that will lead to my discovery. And, Two: In my imagination, people still go to restaurants to sit down and eat pizza, which really hasn't happened since 1983.)

But nowadays, I don't have to do that, and not just because my grocery budget now exceeds $20 per week. Not only are there frozen pizzas at the grocery store that cost as little as $1.00 -- one dollar -- but there are higher-quality, really-pretty-good frozen pizzas that go for only a few bucks, too, and there's delivery and carry-out pizza for five bucks, also, and all of them don't require that I fry, grate, mix, roll, and otherwise work for my food, so why bother?

And so on, with almost every food you can think of, including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which it's now cheaper to buy pre-made than to make yourself, and how hard was it to slather PB&J onto some bread? Not very hard. But hard enough, apparently, that our civilization found a way to put the ingredients into a little pocket of bread called an "Uncrustable" and sell it to us for less than the basic ingredients of that sandwich, too.

We have, then, reached a point in our culture where cooking is purely for entertainment, which is demonstrated not just by all those facts I just gave you, but by the fact that there is a cookbook out there, and a cooking movement out there, which is "reinventing" the PB&J sandwich and urging you to cut your oven in half or cook with liquid nitrogen.

I'm talking about "Modernist Cuisine," and I'm using that phrase to denote both the cookbook and the trend. If you haven't heard about modernist cuisine then you either don't subscribe to The New Yorker, or you don't eat at restaurants whose menu might read like this:

Foods that change temperature when you eat them,

a cup of tea that is cold on one side and hot on the other,

a “Styrofoam” beaker that turns into a bowl of ramen when the server pours hot water over it,

edible clay and rocks,

a pocket watch that turns into mock-turtle soup,

a bar of soap covered in foam that is actually a biscuit with honey bubbles,

a milkshake volcano

Those are actual items listed as part of "modern cuisine" in an article in The New Yorker that talked about the trend and the cookbook that details the trend. Apparently, restaurants are now employing Penn & Teller as the cook and waitstaff. (Also, the article mentions, at some places the menus are edible. But you should probably wait to snack on it until after you choose your entree.)

Those all sound fascinating, true -- who wouldn't want to take their watch off and have it become a soup? -- but also they sound less like a meal than a show, and when did we go from "dinner and a movie" to "dinner is the movie?"

Whenever it happened, it was a major shift, because the book that chronicles what modernist cuisine is all about -- a book titled, obviously, "Modernist Cuisine" -- is huge.

Not huge like "a lot of people want to read it" but huge like "so big that you'll never be able to order it and sneak it past your wife... she's going to find out." Here's the description from the book's website:

Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,438-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging.

It takes six books and 2,438 pages to describe how to boil a hamburger that's been frozen using liquid nitrogen... whereas it only took J.R.R. Tolkien half of that to invent an entire world.

So what does it take 2,438 pages to tell you how to do? I haven't read the book yet -- it's on back order, despite being self-published (although "self-published" doesn't mean the same thing when the self-publisher is Nathan Myhrvold, the millionaire former chief technical officer of Microsoft who once worked with Stephen Hawking; it's safe to say he can afford, even with a book this size, to get a few advance copies and send them to reviewers) but the reviews and articles about it I have seen make a point of mentioning that it will teach you to slow cook things -- extremely slowly, apparently, over days -- and how to cook things in vacuum-sealed bags boiled in water that is precisely one temperature, or another.

There's even a recipe for freezing a hamburger in liquid nitrogen and then cooking it. Or maybe you're supposed to do that in reverse; I forget.

Amidst all that are pictures of stoves cut in half and deconstructed tomatoes, or something. It all sounds, frankly, fascinating -- one article pointed out that Myhrvold notes that ovens heat up at different rates and hit different top temperatures depending on sea level and air density, so that there can be as much as a 59-degree difference if you're cooking something in Mexico City versus New York City, and the idea of freezing hamburgers with liquid nitrogen will appeal to anyone who (like me) bought a deep fryer and then began imagining just what else he could deep fry.

But is it helpful?

That's the question I was asking myself as I read about Modernist Cuisine, and I followed it by this: Is it really a cookbook?

The first cookbook I ever owned was -- and still is, as I have it -- is that aforementioned red-and-white-checkered Better Homes & Gardens cookbook that has about 500 pages in it and is broken down into sections like Cakes and Meat and pastries. It has recipes in it that I use from time to time -- last night, I used the recipe for Meatloaf as a starting point for making meatloaf, freely replacing some of the ingredients with others: I substituted "club crackers" for breadcrumbs, left out the onions at Sweetie's request, and inserts a layer of Ritz crackers and parmesan cheese midway through. The result was delicious and unexpected, and I couldn't have done it without the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, primarily because I didn't know how long to cook a meatloaf for and at what temperature, here or in Mexico City.

Even with that, I didn't need the cookbook; I wanted it because I wanted the experience of making a meatloaf. It wasn't faster or cheaper or easier to make a meatloaf from scratch. I'm sure that I could have bought a meatloaf already made and simply put it in the oven (and, having checked, I know now that you can), but in this case, the process was what I wanted. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I didn't have much else to do, and Sweetie wanted meatloaf, and I enjoy cooking things and experimenting.

As I made that meatloaf, and thought about Modernist Cuisine, it struck me that cooking really has become an art -- exactly like books and movies and paintings and sculptures and other art forms that serve as decorations or enhancements to our life but which for the most part we simply consume rather than produce.

Cooking, for about 2,011 years, has existed in a sort of limbo between art and activity: it was art that anyone could do, or almost anyone. From Jell-O molds to birthday cakes to homemade pizza to Christmas cookies to breakfast, we all not only had to eat, we had to make what we ate or at least get someone close to us to do it for us.

It wasn't, really, until recently that food became both fast and easy: drive-through restaurants were still relatively rare when I was a kid, and while there have been restaurants for decades (if not centuries) they haven't been convenient or cheaper than simply doing it ourselves.

But as food dumbed down and became easier and cheaper -- as chicken went from having to kill the chicken, pluck it, and cook it to a McNugget, it became less and less like a do-it-yourself necessity and more and more like an art, until we hit the stage we have, where food is an art.

Like clothing before it, food has jumped from things we all do to things we all mostly consume, joining that pantheon of arts that most of us look at and say "Wow, that's neat: wish I could do that."

Most of our art forms have done that. Cave paintings used to (judging by the quality, and not based on any knowledge of my own) be done by just about anyone. Then, in the middle ages, art moved to being done by masters with apprentices working under them. Now, "art" is commissioned by corporations and done by teams of people working for them. (Or it's done by James Franco, but either way it's not very accessible to the common man). Art is in museums and sells for billions and has to in some way involve a preserved shark corpse, and for the rest of us there's that guy who paints while jogging on a treadmill:

Writing and storytelling, too, have taken this route before cooking. In the olden days (before 2002), stories were communal affairs, people taking old legends and adding their own twists on them and re-telling them. Then someone started writing them down, and the Brothers Grimm hired J.K. Rowlings' lawyer when he was just a boy, and suddenly everything was set in stone and nobody told stories anymore: they bought them on their Kindle or went to see them at the Globe Theater. Nothing stops us from writing a book, and it's easier than ever to do that (unless, like Nathan Myhrvold, you want your book to include sawed-in-half stoves, which can get expensive, I bet), but you only write a book, nowadays, if you like to write; if you just want a story, it's far cheaper to download a book for $0.99 on your Kindle than to sit down and write up the story yourself.

So it's gone with all our other art forms, and so it now goes with cooking: Cooking is now something you do for fun, or not at all, and people will begin (or continue) the process of dividing themselves up into people who consume other people's cooking or people who try to do it themselves.

Cooking, after all, has all the other hallmarks of an art that isn't practiced by most people. We have more TV shows about chefs and cooking than we do about detectives with troubled homelives, and we have shows about restaurants and how to find them, and we have shows where cooks go to restaurants. We've done from dinner theater to dinner as theater, something you know about if you've heard of the Messi Dessert.

Cooking, I think, is the last activity to fall, too -- clothing ourselves went from activity to art a while ago, and I can't think of anything that's left in our lives that can go from pasttime to part-time, so we've finally hit the point where all of society either does something or consumes something but rarely does both. (People who make a thing, after all, rarely seem to take part in that thing. If you followed Stephen King's columns in Entertainment Weekly, you know he rarely reads horror or talks about it. Paul Simon, in an interview with The AV Club, recently seemed to admit that he doesn't listen to much pop music.)

Most of us fall on the side of the consumer -- partaking of art that other people have made, although there's hope that it won't always be a one-way street, that as our society advances we'll find ways to let people make their own art, whether that be music or cooking or painting. You may criticize her, but Rebecca Black's "Friday,"

is an example of how a regular person, with a modest investment that ddn't even include sawing a stove in half, can create something (sure, with some help, but I bet that Myhrvold didn't typeset his book himself), and the Internet has been helping regular people get back into making art that others can enjoy for some time, as people make home movies that get them not only fame, but a $30 million Hollywood contract -- as Fede Alvarez got for his movie, Panic Attack!:

So cooking, having spent the better part of human existence as a shared task but now having become art, may someday cross back over again, the way music and writing and filmmaking are, but for now, cooking has moved on and is the province of the Da Vincis, the Rays, the Myhrvolds, and the rest of us can dabble in our kitchens in anonymity, and buy our take-out chicken, and marvel at the wonders that the brilliant minds out there have come up with, and hope that someday, we, too, will be able to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like an expert.

Wait, what? Even that's an art now?

It sure is: The following is taken from the highbrow article "Deconstruction, Architecture, and a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich,"

One of the signature dishes served at Alinea, the Chicago restaurant that's now widely regarded as the best in the country, is a deconstructed peanut butter and jelly sandwich (above). The dish is architectural: the sandwich is presented on a structure resembling a whisk with the loops cut off. At the top of the structure is a single grape, still attached to its stem, dipped in peanut purée and wrapped in brioche.

This is that sandwich, which The New Yorker called a "cutting edge classic":

And just to show you how deconstructed (read: arty) that sandwich is, the article notes this important point about that "Deconstructed Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich:"

There's no jelly.

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Sunday, March 06, 2011

What does Backward Dilbert have to do with The 4 Best Soda Flavors That Should Be Revived? (Semidaily List) (See article for this.)

I saw the other day in the store that Pepsi was selling "Pepsi Throwback" and "Mountain Dew Throwback," the...

... okay, I've seen that for some time now. It's been there in the soda aisles for a while, right across from where Mr Bunches always stops to get his crayons, but if I'd said "I saw back around the beginning of the year a few months ago that..." it wouldn't have had the same ring, because then you'd be thinking "Well, sure, but why are you talking about it now, instead of something more timely, like Charlie Sheen? Isn't this meant to be a pop culture blog? And isn't 'pop culture' right now dominated by throwing 'tiger blood' or 'F-18' into sentences at random?"

...which is all true, but I'm not going to listen to the questions of some hypothetical (?) reader(s) who are just trying to distract me, anymore than I'm going to listen to, well, um, other things that are trying to distract me.

It's early. I can't come up with analogies until my pizza-for-breakfast has kicked in, which should be any minute now.

The throwback in "Pepsi Throwback" is that it's made with "real sugar" which is a throwback to the days when things were made with real sugar, including soda, the days before we discovered saccharine, and certainly before we discovered that saccharine does really bad things to people, things I would be more specific about except that I'm not sure what saccharine really does to people and I don't feel like going to look it up. Instead, I'll just note that my spellchecker recognizes the word "saccharine" and knows how to spell it, which is kind of interesting to me because I'm pretty sure that saccharine isn't used in regular conversation at all, or even in irregular conversation, so why would that word be programmed into spellcheckers? I mean, I'm sure it doesn't use up all that much space in the memory of a computer, but it does use up some space. Someone once told me that each letter equals one bit of information, or at least I think someone once told me that, and since "remembering (maybe) what someone (maybe) once told me" = "reliable knowledge in today's world" I'll go with that, which means that remembering how to spell saccharine uses 10 bytes on my computer -- plus 10 on my home computer, plus 10 on my phone, which knows how to spell it for text messaging (I just checked) so that's 30 bytes of information that I can't use for something else, like storing a phone number, unless I want my computers to forget how to spell saccharine in order to remember your phone number.

That doesn't seem like much, but remember that there are as many as 100,000,000,000 people in the world, and if 1/10 of those people have computers and 1/10 of those people with computers have a need to store one more phone number than their computers have memory for, then 1,000,000,000 phone numbers are not being remembered, so consider the lost productivity that represents, because you can further assume that at any given moment, 1/10 of those people whose computers don't have enough memory to store that last critical phone number are instead looking it up, doing that instead of something productive like figuring out that if you read Dilbert strips backwards, they make as much sense...

... I'll have to come back to that and explain it...

... those people are instead using their time and their boss' resources to look up a phone number, and probably getting distracted, once online (because who looks up numbers in a book anymore?) by Dilbert or something, so they're even less productive -- 100,000,000 people, worldwide, not doing anything productive and becoming a drag on the economy all because Microsoft had to $*(#&$ make sure that we know how to spell saccharine.

Nice work, Bill Gates.

(If you thought about questioning the math I used there, don't bother: It's the same exact math that NASA and other "scientists" use to estimate how many Earth-like world are out there.)(Seriously. Read this article, and notice that every single number is an estimate, as signified by the use of the word "about.")

About Dilbert: I don't read Dilbert everyday, but I have it bookmarked (on my work computer, of course; I don't use my computer at home for reading. I use it for blogging and for letting Mr F and Mr Bunches watch videos of people falling down the stairs, which is really what they watch nowadays, and which are surprisingly common on Youtube.) When I notice the bookmark, I usually go and get caught up on Dilberts but I read them in reverse chronological order, starting with whatever day I'm on and paging backwards, and what I've noticed is that it makes no difference -- even though Dilbert usually has a storyline, that storyline does not unfold in what would be described as strict chronological order, so you can actually pick it up at any point and read it forwards or backwards and it makes just as much sense either way.

And now you know what I'm doing while the rest of you are looking up phone numbers and/or correctly spelling saccharine.

All of which explains why I'm thinking about sodas today, or, rather, it doesn't explain it at all but I've blown a lot of time on the introduction, so let's just pretend that's all an explanation and I'll give you the list of

The 4 Best Soda Flavors That Should Be Revived*
(*I promise it doesn't include Crystal Pepsi because I'm not all about cheap references simply to make an emotional connection with you, unlike some other people I could name if that pizza breakfast had kicked in yet.)

In no particular order -- well, in numerical order, but really just in the order I thought of and typed them - -they are:

1. Sarsaparilla. Did you know that sarsaparilla and sassafras were once almost interchangeable in soft-drinks, but that sarsaparilla, which comes from a vine native to Central America and was probably discovered by Cortes (or so I just made up) won out because sassafras -- which is also used to treat head lice and is I'm pretty sure the only thing that was ever both a soda flavor and head lice treatment -- causes cancer? Has anyone ever done a study of just how many things we put into soda that cause cancer?

Sarsaparilla is fun to say:

2. Cream soda. Like ribbon candy, cream soda seems to be gone but it's not really -- it's just buried in the aisles that nobody goes into. It's been around since before it was patented by James William Black in Canada back in 1886, and the fact that it was a Canadian who patented it means that if you drink cream soda now, someone is going to call you a socialist and think that you favor universal health care, like that's a bad thing.

The original soda name was taken from ice cream soda and it used to be served with ice cream floating in it, but that wasn't necessarily the same beverage that Black based his soda on, as there have been other recipes around for the soda. The earliest known recipe was in a farmer's magazine in 1852 and was made from water, cream of tartar, Epsom salts, sugar, tartaric acid, and an egg.

You could, if you bring this back, omit the egg. But it wouldn't be cream soda.

3. Baby Ruth Soda. Baby Ruth is widely known as a candy bar. But the name was trademarked as a: "NONALCOHOLIC MALTLESS BEVERAGE SOLD AS A SOFT DRINK." (The original is in allcaps; I just pasted it.)(And I don't have to say cut and pasted it because that's the only way you can paste something on the computer. It's like cease and desist, in a way: you don't need to say both in order for it to make sense.)

The trademark was registered to Sun-Maid Raisin Growers of California, in 1927, which makes me think it was raisin flavored soda, which you're saying "gross" about, but isn't it really just grape soda, only dried out? I'm not 100% sure that a raisin-flavored soda would be a bad thing.

In fact, as I sit here, I'm not 100% sure what raisins taste like.

If it seems crazy that there was a soda named after a socialite, remember that nowadays we name milkshakes after celebrities.

4. Coca-Cola: After This American Life trumpeted that it had found the original Coke recipe, only to realize (but not highlight) that it wasn't really, Coca Cola executives invited people to make their own, if they wanted, using the "found" recipe; Coke shrugged off the idea as though it was no big deal, so why don't other soda companies jump all over this and create something like "Mountain Dew Throwback Original Cola," advertising it as "made with the original secret recipe Coke doesn't want you to know about" and getting people to all try their soda?

They wouldn't have catchy songs that were stylized versions of World Cup soccer songs, though:

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Friday, July 13, 2007

The Best Of... Food

Click on the pictures or titles to go to the articles!

The Best Of...

Food!

57 Words About The Bacon Sundae from Burger King

H is for How In The World Is This An Alien Alphabet (THIS is a THING?!)
Peeps Dioramas.