Seth's Blog

Maybe someday someone will make a movie called ROTTEN — about fermented food and how it is good for you. Until then, you might want to see FRESH.

http://www.freshthemovie.com/screenings/

Two weeks ago I was in New York City. I have been there many times. For the first time, I was unexcited by the prospect of eating in the city’s fascinating restaurants. I think it’s all the fermented food I eat (at least two servings per day). All of it has complex flavors; all the New York restaurant food I liked had complex flavors. I am no longer complex-flavor-deprived.

From a post about life in Taiwan:

Don’t they eat dogs and other odd stuff like snakes?
No.  They don’t eat dogs.

I think a small fraction of restaurants in Beijing serve dog, but I never encountered one and I never saw dog meat for sale. In Seoul, however, they obviously eat dogs. I saw dog meat for sale in a traditional market. The dogs were alive (as many animals are in Asian “wet markets”). I later saw a booklet aimed at visitors to Korea that dismissed dog-eating as some sort of urban legend.

A new restaurant with the excellent name Umami Burger has just opened in Los Angeles. According to The Foodinista, the food is as good as the name:

An attractive space with an attractive clientele. The tightly edited menu consists of 10 burgers, and a few sides including fries and a market salad. But, we’re told at 12:45 pm on a Tuesday afternoon, they’ve run out of buns. . . . amazing homemade ketchup . . . The beef patties on all of the above, really flavorful and just plain GOOD. I don’t know how they can make such a great burger and charge so little. . . . I’m telling you, the burgers are great.

Review by Jonathan Gold.
Thanks to Tucker Max.

Beijing’s dirty air is easily the worst thing about living there. You might think what to do about it is obvious. Many people do, including this man who wants to sell the expensive air filter he bought:

I remember the day IQair Sales Rep Justin Shuttleworth came to my place [in Beijing] to give me a demo. This guy has the easiest job in the world. All he does is come with his little air quality measuring device, show you how bad the air you are breathing is in your apartment (indoor air is sometimes worse than outdoor air for those who don`t know), and as the minutes go by, you literally see the amount of particles in the air go down, until it’s basically nil. This was the first time that I could actually smell the difference.

This is from an email list I’m on.

I got the same demo.  But it had the opposite effect: It made me not want to buy the IQair filter.

The air coming out of the IQair filter was very clean, yes. But there was only so much it could do. More dirty air was always coming into my apartment and no matter how high (= noisy) they ran the machine the overall level of dirt was no more than cut by 2/3rds. I already had an air filter. The air it produced wasn’t quite as clean as air from the IQair filter but it was still much much cleaner than the intake air. The IQair machine cost about 11,000 RMB. My filter had cost about 1,000 RMB. For 1,500 RMB I could buy a bigger version of what I already had, an air filter that cleaned twice as much air per minute as the IQair machine while producing roughly the same amount of noise. Its output was slightly dirtier than the output of the IQair machine but the overall cleaning effect — the reduction in dirt — was much greater. I ended up getting two of the 1,500 RMB filters.

I think of this demo when I hear someone talk about how this or that traditional diets is better than our modern diet. They make a simple point: People who eat the traditional diet are healthy, people who eat the modern diet are unhealthy. Just as the IQair demo guy has “the easiest job in the world.” They inevitably conclude: Eat the traditional diet or at least closer to it. Just as the conclusion of the demo is supposed to be: Buy an IQair filter. It seems so simple.

But it isn’t so simple. Eating the traditional diet isn’t easy, just as the IQair filter isn’t cheap. Maybe their abstraction — their description — of the traditional diet leaves out something important. Just as the IQair people do not measure cleaning power per decibel, which turns out to be what matters. (I traded air pollution for noise pollution. I wanted the best deal possible.)

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember the Canadian anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson who spent many months with Eskimos eating what they ate. He came back and told the world “you can eat only meat.” In his conclusions and subsequent field experiment, he ignored the fact that the Eskimos ate a lot of fermented meat.

• Or great packaging. Agua de Piedra, a brand of mineral water, uses only the bottles that would otherwise be wasted when a glass-bottle manufacturer changes production from one color to another. Not only is this a great idea but it gives their bottles an attractive variation in color. I really liked the water, too.
• The Pacari line of chocolates includes “raw” chocolate, that is, chocolate that is “minimally processed and unroasted to maintain the antioxidants and complex flavor profile of the cacao.”
• I was surprised that there is a drink based on tumeric: Sajen Jamu.
• One of the most interesting features of the show was the vast increase in the amount of cheese (all artisanal cheese) compared to all previous shows I attended, such as the show 2 years ago. Perhaps the best cheese I had was from Quickes Traditional, a farm in the south of England. They make many kinds of cheddars.

At the Fancy Food Show, I heard someone say that the better a food tastes the worse it is for you. “What’s an example?” I asked. “Butter,” he said. “It goes straight to your arteries.”

What a choice. I have three pounds of very expensive butter in my freezer, purchased from an Amish farmer who raises grass-fed cows. I eat it as often as possible. I believe butter may have fat-soluble nutrients we need to be healthy, nutrients that are found in high concentration in growing plants (such as grass) but not in ordinary animal feed. In the Swiss Alps, in the 1930s, Weston Price found small communities that produced almost all the food they ate. Because of the altitude, they couldn’t produce much. They did have grass-fed cows and prized the butter from those cows. They were in much better health, especially dental health, than their neighbors who ate mostly industrial food.

There was a time, long ago, when exactly the opposite of the overheard statement was true: The better a food tasted the better it was for you. Now it is complicated.

Pistachio saffron milk. A just-released product from Ajmera Innovations. Sort of a step up from pomegranate soda and a dozen other high-end drinks, just as pomegranate soda was a step up from Coke and Sprite.

At the Fancy Food Show, Kriss Harvey, a pastry chef and frozen dessert solutions specialist, served me a spoonful of powdered chocolate ice cream, his invention. It looked like chocolate ice cream but it tasted unlike any ice cream (or any food) I’ve ever had. It was there and not there. It was in my mouth and then it was gone. It was the most ethereal food I’ve ever had.

We had been talking about El Bulli, the Spanish restaurant of experimental food. Two friends of Mr. Harvey’s had worked there one summer and had come back complaining about the food (rabbit ears) and the workload. Just because people will pay a lot for your unusual food doesn’t mean you are advancing things, said Mr. Harvey. Maybe your food doesn’t taste very good. He pointed to a certain now-forgotten fad among New York dessert chefs a few years ago. That’s fashion, I said; it has a perfectly good purpose (to support experimentation). Then Mr. Harvey served me his powdered ice cream. Which was more memorable and impressive than anything I had at Alinea, an American version of El Bulli.

• self-experiment about sleeping much less
• economics of yoga
• Guess the CME (Continuing Medical Education) Sponsor (psychiatry)