Eat This Newsletter 106: restaurants and more
Hello
Who’d be a restaurant critic?
I’m old enough to remember when Bourne & Hollingsworth was a rather dowdy department store in London. Now, apparently, it is “a self-styled ‘creative lifestyle company’. They ‘curate beautiful spaces’.”
I learned this from a review by Jay Rayner, in which he lets the Bourne & Hollingsworth Garden Room, at the top of a London hotel, have it with both barrels. Delicious stuff.
There is a slight chance you might form the opinion, based on that one review, that Mr Rayner is not a very nice person. Let me say that you would be wrong. To prove it there is another article in the same issue of The Guardian, in which he tells the story of a man in the end stages of a cancer, who asked Rayner for his top 10 restaurants in the UK because “[g]oing and eating a few decent meals strikes me as one good way to spend some of my remaining time.” It’s a lovely piece.
Of course, if you’re wondering why, in this modern, suit-yourself age, we still need honest and knowledge restaurant reviewers, let me remind you about Ooobah Butler’s hysterical write-up I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor and In Praise of Fake Reviews by Tom Slee. Both are a couple of years old, and still relevant.
P.s. Jay Rayner also says “Normally, I stick to a mantra: never eat in a restaurant that is on a boat, that turns or has a view because it won’t ever be about the food.” Specifically on restaurants that turn, I highly recommend the food in the revolving restaurant at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Crystal City, Arlington, VA. The views are pretty good too.
Who’d work in a restuarant?
Still on the subject of restaurants, here’s a nice rumination by Samuel Ashworth on the gastro-military complex that is the traditional French restaurant and how, just possibly, the decline of the system is reinvigorating French food. Ashworth compares the brief time he survived as a stagiaire with some time spent at a restaurant that deliberately avoids that whole culture, and along the way throws in some thoughts about the status of French food.
The structure of kitchens was permanently fixed, and the classics were not to be tinkered with — cooks were expected to produce dishes with perfect fidelity to tradition. In the same way that McDonald’s conquered America by guaranteeing consistent, non-toxic hamburgers on any interstate, anytime, France conquered the world by ensuring that wherever a traveler washed up, when he ordered tournedos de boeuf in a grand hotel, he knew what he was getting.
P.s. Is stage really pronounced “stodge”? I don’t think so.
Champions of breakfast
Very clever title for a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists in the US, calling on the companies that manufacture breakfast cereal to change their raw materials and the way those are produced. The logic is impeccable:
While the breakfast food industry is a relatively minor user of US grains, cereal is a beloved and highly visible lever for improving the sustainability of our food and farm system. Four companies account for 86 percent of the $8.5 billion US breakfast cereal market; many of their brands are household names, and they make more than just cereal. By investing in supply chain improvements, defining and improving sustainability standards, and raising consumer awareness, these companies can help expand opportunities for sustainable grain farmers, setting the wheels in motion for larger-scale market shifts.
General Mills gets some praise for making moves in the right direction. One effort, to make cereal from the perennial grain Kernza, came up short in 2019. Perhaps 2020 will be the breakthrough year.
Under various scenarios, the UCS report forecasts reduced soil erosion, reduced greenhouse gas emissions and reduced fertilizer runoff. Here’s the UCS blogpost on the report.
P.s. I don’t think it says anything about improved nutrition.
The relative cost of more and less nutritious calories
Grand reports seem to be landing on desktops at an ever-increasing rate lately, and many of them are concerned with global diets and health. One common trope is that healthy food is more expensive than unhealthy, at least if you completely ignore externalities. Now comes a new and detailed analysis from the World Bank looking at just that question. The approach is interesting. They compare the price of a calorie from a “nutritious” food (my scare quotes) to the average price of a calorie from the most common staples in each country.
Our analysis yields a striking result: As countries develop, their food systems get better at providing healthier foods cheaply, but they also get better at providing unhealthier foods cheaply. Hence the problem in less developed countries is that poor people also live in poor food systems: nutrient-dense foods like eggs, milk, fruits and vegetables can be very expensive in these countries, making it much harder to diversify away from nutrient-sparse staple foods like rice, corn and bread. The problem in more developed countries is rather different: unhealthy calories have simply become a very affordable option. In the US, for example, calories from soft drinks are just 1.9 times as expensive as staple food calories and require no preparation time.
There’s lots more in the blog post (and I imagine even more in the paper). Would it be too much to expect another analysis that maybe tries to take some of those externalities into account.
How China feeds its people, perhaps
I’m not a huge fan of Quora, a website that allows people to ask questions and people to supply answers, because in my experience the questions and the answers are just not that interesting. So when my pal Luigi pointed me to a question about how China feeds its people, I was skeptical. Instead, the incredibly detailed answer by Janus Dongye Qimeng made me marvel at some of the stories he told. (I marvel, too, that Janus is willing to be a sharecropper for Quora, but that’s another matter.)
Of course, Quora being what it is, there other answers and not a few comments, which ratchet the skepticism back up a bit. Nevertheless, it is clear to me that intensification of a very specific kind is going on at an incredible pace in Chinese agriculture. How that will play out in a few years or decades, I cannot even imagine.
And finally, I generally subscribe to the doctrine that a question in a headline usually calls for a resounding “No!” in reply. However, in the case of the NPR’s recent Is Grass-Fed Beef Really Better For The Planet? Here’s The Science I’m going to have to settle for “It all depends”.
I know. What a cop-out.
All the best,
Jeremy