Yesterday was the last day vendors at our public market were offering heaps of good basil, and the garlic is getting towards end of season, so I made way too much pesto yesterday. I used the trick illustrated in this video to peel the garlic, and it works pretty well. Consider this an open thread.
Food
Because Someone Has to Go There…
…The inevitable musical storm open thread.
The original for what has to be our theme song for the next couple of days seems to be breaking the front page, but here’s my favorite cover.
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”420″ height=”345″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/-Y0VhPXOooQ” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
…I’ve also long been partial to Willie’s version:
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And while, Bay Area born and bred, and old Dead fan that I am, I still can’t entirely warm to this rendition, that old fella sure can play guitar:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”560″ height=”345″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/MzUcdyO7_ug” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
And speaking of someone who can play a little lead…enjoy the tasty little slow(ish) solo at about 2:30 of this one:
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Well, thanks a lot ladies and gentlemen — don’t forget to tip your servers, and come on back, ya’ hear — I’ll be here all week. Let’s go out with just one more. If you want to check out one approach to production, this from Ole Blue Eyes will set your back fillings aching, though Frankie’s voice is as it ever was.
But for pure old country spare singing, the Man in Black can’t be beat:
<div align=”center”><iframe width=”420″ height=”345″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/YvNavReXi7U” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe></div>
Oh — and that hurricane? Take care, everyone. We’re looking for a fair amount of wind where I am, but nothing truly outlandish. I’ve got my eye on some big trees around my house, though there’s nothing much I can do about them (we took out some real home threats this summer, for which I’m grateful). We’ve got some water stored up, and food for the next couple of days, and lamps and lamp oil — but things don’t look to be too apocalyptic where we are, so mostly we’re gearing up for a wet, wild day and keeping an eye out for our older neighbors.
And as for tonight — eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we sump-pump. Our plans are for a pomegranate juice and green peppercorn marinaded skirt steak (under the broiler; the Weber is already tucked into the garage), tomatoes from the in-laws’ garden, and more of the spouse’s chocolate short bread cookies from yesterday’s oven.
You?
Pull Up the Drawbridge, Stockpile Now
You don’t have to watch squirrels’ acorn-gathering efforts or measure wooly-bear caterpillar bands to predict an ongoing cranky, isolationist, get-away-from-MY-stuff season:
Consumers can expect to see a jump in prices for pasta, meat, vegetable oil and many other grocery items in the coming months as a pair of new government reports forecast on [Aug. 11] that a brutal mixture of heat, drought or flooding has taken a toll on the corn, soybeans and wheat grown on American farms.
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Futures prices for those important crops jumped on [Aug. 11], and commodities experts said that would lead to higher prices for manufacturers and consumers.
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“The message, based on today’s report, is these higher costs should not be expected to abate any time soon,” said Bill G. Lapp, president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a commodity consulting firm that works with restaurant companies and food manufacturers. “It implies higher cost forthcoming and subsequent margin pressure, and at some point the need to increase prices at the retail level or on the menus.” …
The geeks at Wired chip in to explain how “Food Prices Could Hit Tipping Point for Global Unrest“:
“When you have food prices peak, you have all these riots. But look under the peaks, at the background trend. That’s increasing quite rapidly, too,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. “In one to two years, the background trend runs into the place where all hell breaks loose.”…
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The researchers are hardly the first to portray food problems as a spark that inflames social inequality and stokes individual desperation, unleashing and amplifying impulses of rebellion. The role of food prices in triggering the Arab Spring has been widely described. Their innovation is a pair of price points on the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s food price index: about 215 in current prices, or 190 when corrected for inflation.
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It’s at those points where, on a graph of food prices and social unrest between 2004 and 2011, unrest breaks out. But whereas they were crossed by price jumps in 2008, Bar-Yam and colleagues calculate that the underlying, steady trend — driven primarily by commodity speculation, agricultural crop-to-fuel conversion and rising prices of fertilizer and oil — crosses those points between 2012 and 2013.
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“Once we get there, the peaks aren’t the problem anymore. Instead it’s the trend. And that’s harder to correct,” said Bar-Yam. At that point, widespread political unrest and instability can be expected, even in countries less troubled than those in North Africa and the Middle East.
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The Mexican Truffle
Things I learned from the Internet: corn smut, called huitlacoche, is considered a delicacy. The Wikipedia etymology section is worth a read, too.
With my mind on my money and my money on my mind
Yesterday Matt Yglesias flagged a survey showing that people who spend longer in school tend to spend more on alcohol.
Kevin Drum and James Joyner both pointed out that educated people drink more expensive alcohol (e.g., mixers or craft beer rather than schlitz).
When I saw Matt’s chart, my first reaction was that the amount that people spend on alcohol probably has a lot to do with the amount of money they make. High school graduates would probably not turn up their nose at Laphroaig, but they also want to drink more often than once a month. With that in mind I combined the chart with comparable data from a 2008 Department of Commerce survey on income by education level*.
From this I can conclude that graduating high school alone does not change drinking habits much. You earn a little more, you spend a little more on booze. A few college credits also has little effect. The most surprising result is that although people with a college degree make significantly more money, they spend significantly more on booze and then some. If you stay in school for another degree the effect flips; you make quite a bit more still but the amount that you spend on drinking changes hardly at all.
The last two data points make sense to me. The burden of doing well enough in college to meet my goals (in my case, getting into grad school) still left plenty of time to work on pickup lines, learn to mountain bike and climb and so on, and especially to refine the hell out of my drinking habits. If I hit the job market at that time, I am sure that most jobs that I could get in 1999 would have left me plenty of time to do it.
Grad school hardly killed my interest in booze, in fact just the reverse. Most Fridays the students in my cohort would hit a dive bar for margaritas and epic, cathartic grousing sessions about our advisors, our research, our teaching and any other indignities the universe thought up that week. As often as not I needed beer like I never did in college. There just wasn’t time.
Needless to say there are a million reasons to qualify a direct income-to-booze-money comparison. But hey, it agrees with my experience so it’s good enough for me.
(*) To make comparisons easier I multiplied the amount spent per year by a constant so that income and booze expenditures are equal for high school dropouts. When categories did not precisely overlap it was usually because the DoC data contained extra sub-categories (e.g., Master’s versus PhD), so when necessary I averaged those together along with the separate (and still disturbing) numbers for male and female.
With my mind on my money and my money on my mindPost + Comments (73)
Canned Tomatoes Are Looking Better & Better
Hat tip to commentor dj spellchecka for the link to NPR’s interview transcript on “The Troubled History of the Supermarket Tomato“:
GUY RAZ: I’m speaking with Barry Estabrook. His new book is called “Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit.” Barry, a big part of this book is not just about the taste of tomatoes but about the process of getting them to market. And you describe this world, and I’m using your words, you describe a world where slave labor is employed.
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BARRY ESTABROOK: Let me run down a few little items here: people being bought and sold like animals, people being shackled in chains, people being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough or being too weak or sick to work, people actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850’s slavery to me. And that, in fact, is going on or has gone on. They were – in the last 15 years, there have been seven successful prosecutions, slavery prosecutions in the State of Florida. Even, you know, the ones that are not being held as slaves probably work at the very, very bottom of the American workforce… They’re paid basically per pound that they pick. If it rains, they don’t make a cent that day.[…] __
RAZ: A few years ago, some of these farm workers in Florida started to organize, actually. And there was a campaign backed by some labor unions and student groups and their conditions apparently improved. What happened?
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ESTABROOK: In the last seven or eight months, there’s just been a sea change in labor relations in the Florida tomato industry. What had happened was this small group of grassroots people called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers had been lobbying since the early ’90s to get a raise and to have some basic primitive workers’ rights put in place.
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What they started concentrating on was the end customers of these farmers. They started with – actually with the Taco Bell restaurant chain. And after four years, Taco Bell said, okay, we’ve had enough. I mean, four years of boycotts, demonstrations, they signed a board. And then gradually, all the other fast food chains in the country, one by one, often kicking and screaming, signed onto this agreement. The sad thing is that not a single supermarket chain in the country, with the exception of Whole Foods, has agreed.
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Canned Tomatoes Are Looking Better & BetterPost + Comments (51)
OG
The tremendous power of chain restaurants was demonstrated once again in my part of the world yesterday, when one of our area bloggers decided to pack it in after a single visit to Olive Garden. That’s a shame, because her blog was quite good.
Before commenting on that, let me get this out of the way: chain restaurants suck most of the time. For some reason, they don’t take reservations, so the popular dinner hour begins with a cattle-call lineup that often stretches out the door. Then there’s the food, which is often either too salty or too greasy, and the drinks, which are either weak, overpriced cocktails or draft beer that tastes like the tap hasn’t been cleaned in a month.
That all said, a lot of locally-owned restaurants also suck a great deal of the time. They pawn off food that was cooked and frozen somewhere else as their own, they are probably more likely to violate health codes, and they’re less predictable over time than a chain.
What I don’t get about chains is the extremity of reaction to them. There’s the “Applebees salad bar”, “real Americans eat here” response, which ignores the fact that a lot of the people eating at chains are doing so because it’s the least worst alternative, or just didn’t want to drive a few more miles, or because the chain offers up cheap food for kids. And there’s the “index of the apocalypse” response, where the chain is a symbol of all that’s bad with our suburban/corporate car culture. I’m more in the latter group, but I’ll fess up that I’ve eaten at Olive Garden without having an existential crisis, and see no reason to go all emo about the popularity of chain restaurants. Almost everything that’s popular is at best mediocre, and the sooner you understand that, the more likely you are to go find something less popular but better.