Memo 2: Sweets
This week I’ve had a wonky set of meals — moving into a new place in the imminent future has motivated me to eat as much stored frozen food as possible and buy as little fresh food as possible (read: I’m not eating my healthiest). Tacking onto this my nostalgia for the Westwood In-n-Out, my craving for sweet things are at an all-time high. And so I’m starting this post off with Mel’s milkshakes.
Mel’s is a Baudrillardian wet dream of simulacra, a brazen love of the 50s that has gone in and out of style (which you can thank American Graffiti for keeping around). It’s a uniquely Californian thing, only being in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Mel’s feeds upon tourists readily playing into the nostalgic west coast vibes, and has remained mainly unchanged. The only exception to this is Mel’s Kitchen, this 21st-century attempt at modernizing Mel’s with Impossible burgers and avocado toast.
I have only had Mel’s once in LA, at the Sunset Strip location past midnight on a Thursday.¹ It seems harsh for me to only go to Mel’s once in the past 4 years, but in general I am just not the biggest fan of ice cream in Los Angeles. Salt and Straw is good, too crowded; McConnell’s and Van Leeuwen are great, but too expensive; Saffron and Rose is fantastic, but I’m overwhelmed by the incalculable number of flavors. Hence, Mel’s it is.
The biggest draw to Mel’s, and by far the only thing I ever remember having there, is their milkshakes. It’s $14 or so, so a complete slap in the face.² The milkshake comes in a comically large glass goblet, with the metal blender cup also full of leftover milkshake. It’s more than one person should, or even could, drink in one sitting. It’s unnecessary excess at its finest and if you lean into the moment, it’s weirdly great.
Speaking of leaning into the moment, another sweet treat that is actually bittersweet is the Stanford marshmallow experiment.³ It’s a pretty well-known 60s experiment, the gist of it goes like this: experimenters put a marshmallow on a table in front of a young kid and said they had to leave the room. If the kid could sit several minutes without eating the marshmallow, they could eat two marshmallows when the experimenter returned. Decades later, those experimenters tracked the kids and found that the kids who didn’t eat the marshallow before the experimenter was back did better in school.
I first heard about it in my Soc 1 class, a testament to this experiment’s position in psychological canon. The conclusion is simple, easy and alluring: self-control and grit are tied to success. With self-improvement the oversaturated zeitgeist of this time, the marshmallow experiment is attractive because it validates what we want to be true. If you can control yourself — forget about the outside world, and focus on yourself — then you’ll be alright at the end of the day.
Most marshmallow pics are boring, so here’s a screenshot from Summer Camp Island.⁴
So, of course, the marshmallow experiment is somewhat too good to be true. The difficulty in replicating the experiment has thrown up red flags, which ties back to the controlled variables of the experiment. As researchers controlled for outside factors, they found that socioeconomic status has such a strong effect on the results that it pretty much nulls out the self-control = success answer. This is no new information, as the impacts of poverty on delayed gratification has been noted. It even fits within the parameters of the study: if it is more advantageous for people in poverty to seek out short-term goals because of the unpredictability of their class status, then eating a marshmallow quickly isn’t a lack of self-control. It’s being effective.
So, if self-control and success is a correlation caused by socioeconomic factors, then what’s the issue?
The biggest snag is that there really is no straightforward answer. As someone who did experimental lab studies, it is so so hard to prove causation and not correlation. And especially with something like poverty — which affects people similarly but not 100% the same in each case — it’s even harder. As this article points out,
While it may be tempting to think that achievement is due to either socioeconomic status or self-control, we have known for some time that it’s more complicated than that.
The bigger takeaway that stuck with me after writing this is that it’s not only hard to lift up a true coherent answer without oversimplifying it, it’s hard to even tell what a true answer is sometimes. Finding an article that explained the nuances of the marshmallow experiment was surprisingly difficult, as the first articles that popped up said that the marshmallow experiment was misleading… but the answers for why this is were muddled or wildly different.
If it was that hard for me to find a correct, straightforward article when I already knew what I was looking for, how easy could it be for me to find the wrong thing with good intentions? And how do you deal with people cherry-picking information to back up their arguments in this present day, and then when fact-checking their statement, you stumble across a nuanced situation with no easy answer? These hard questions are unfortunately relevant now.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
MoMA's Film Vault Summer Camp: for this month, MoMA is showing film shorts from their personal collection online. Last week had short clips from the early 1900s, which was a good small amount of romanticism for the past. This week, Katherine Hepburn’s screen test for Joan of Arc is available among others.
Researchers Say PDFs Are 'Unfit for Human Consumption'. Validating (I deal with too many PDFs and thought this) but depressing (I will have to continuously deal with too many PDFs) news.
Coppola is giving out signed copies of The Conversation script if you buy $800 worth of his wine, which is actually not that bad of a deal. If anyone wants to rally up a group of 16 and go in on this, let me know.
Can MasterClass Really Teach You to Serve Like Serena Williams? I wrote off MasterClasses for a while as being a ripoff, and maybe it still is, but this article was a really interesting look into it. The fact that the company refers to its target customers as “CATS: curious, aspiring 30-somethings” is a funny dig at millennials.
It is the only Mel’s, I have found out, that is open 24/7 on weekends. That is probably a good thing, because past midnight Mel’s is odd energy.
Apparently some menus online have Mel’s milkshakes for $9, which means I have just been going to the overpriced places and so it’s a much bigger slap in the face.
I’ll get better at my transitions, I swear.
Summer Camp Island is a delectable animated show with bite-sized 10-minute episodes, magic, and genuine wholesome energy. Highly recommended for destressing.