emzee

With all the hype around social networking and various other Web 2.x phenomena, sometimes I’m reminded that one of the most powerful aspects of the Internet is still the hyperlink. The way it allows you to free-associate your way across the ideascape so often leads me to new places I would have never, ever found in “meatspace”.. so today I was reading the NYT Magazine feature on an artist building his career in Second Life, and a few clicks later I ended up watching this video…

The music in the video is just an evolving electronic synth loop like something from Steve Reich or Brian Eno, but it’s the animation of the evolution that’s whimsical and funny on the surface and weirdly conceptual once you watch it for a while. Even though I know there aren’t real ants inside my computer rearranging the notes as the music plays, and I even understand a bit about the physics of what’s really going on in the computer’s processor, in the end the ants aren’t a bad metaphor for understanding how it all works.

A few weeks ago I attended a mini-conference hosted by Kraft Foods.. Today I got a big box from the mail guy, and inside was a care package from those nice folks at Kraft.. Planters Peanuts, Wheat Thins, Oreos, and yes-even a box of Macaroni and Cheese. Aww, guys, you shouldna…

Finally got a chance to try the omakase at Nobu last night. I wonder what percentage of their orders are from people who are too deep in conversation to want to take the time to look at the menu.. the big surprise (other than that it was actually very good) was that it was more like a kaiseki-type progression of dishes rather than a series of exotic sushi pieces. Here’s what I can remember:

• Chopped toro tartare in a wasabi broth with a bit of caviar on top, and a mountain berry on the side
• Oysters on the half-shell, but cooked, with a soy-miso sauce
• Mackerel tiradito, in a yuzu-based sauce
• Kobe beef (generous portion, at least 4oz), seared and then sliced, with asparagus
• A 6-piece plate of sushi, good but nothing exotic (mackerel, toro, etc.)
• Mountain-berry sorbet/granita, very fresh-tasting
• Warm chocolate cake with green tea ice cream

I think there was another dish in there somewhere.. no photos unfortunately, too dark for my iphone camera in there, and besides I always feel like a dork taking pictures of my food in restaurants (though I do it anyway).

I thought I had an unhealthy obsession with food and health, but NutritionData puts me to shame. Using a huge database of government nutrition data from the USDA, they’ve created a site that lets you look up foods to see how healthy or unhealthy they are.

Hummus - nutritious, not so filling?

What makes the site particularly cool is some of the visualizations they use to help you make sense of the reams of data that come up. My favorite is the “fullness factor” - at first I assumed it was subjective, picturing labs full of test subjects eating all different kinds of foods and filling out surveys about how full they felt. Those experiments did get done, but the site actually uses a mathematical formula:

FF=MAX(0.5, MIN(5.0, 41.7/CAL^0.7 + 0.05*PR + 6.17E-4*DF^3 - 7.25E-6*TF^3 + 0.617))

… which gives you fullness on a scale of 0 to 5. The formula’s a bit hard to read properly, but apparently it does a decent job predicting actual satiety recorded in those experiments with people eating in labs. That said, my experience with hummus is a lot different than the model’s.

The moral of the story is that no matter how into something you think you are, there’s someone out there that’s taken it way, way further than you ever could imagine.

An article in the WSJ about a new “antisnob” way to categorize wines caught my eye last week.. I’m no wine snob myself - I like wines that are good but cheap, more of a Chile guy than Bordeaux - but the headline alone reeked of populist, Rachael Ray style analysis. What made me read it was the pedigree of the guy offering the categorization - Tim Hanni, one of the first Americans to pass the Master of Wine exam, only a few hundred people in the world have the title. So the guy knows his wine.

Does liking salt make you prefer certain wines?

One of his more interesting innovations is an online wine survey that asks you some basic questions like how much you like salt, and how you take your tea or coffee (”black and strong” all the way down to “never touch it”). Based on these answers, it pops up with your position on a spectrum from “sweet” through “sensitive” to “tolerant”, and it suggests types of wines you’d like based on the result.

I tried answering the survey a bunch of different ways, being the market research geek that I am, to try to figure out the model.. basically if you like strong tastes (salt, black coffee, imported beers), your score says you’ll like stronger-tasting wines. Saying you know a lot about wine will further bump you up the spectrum. If you hate salty or bitter flavors, it’ll suggest you drink White Zinfandels. Fair enough, I suppose..

But then I noticed that it asks if you’re male or female. I tried a few different combos of answers, and submitted them once with “male” checked, and then again with “female” checked. Each time, if I checked “female”, it put me lower on the spectrum, closer to the wimpy wines (lambrusco, sweet moscato), and checking “male” would put me closer to the cabernets. WTF?? So he’s an anti-snob, but his model assumes women like less sophisticated wines, just because they’re female.. classy.

I’m ashamed.. I’ve fallen victim to a food-fad book. Not Atkins, not south beach, not the cleanse - a few days ago, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the book that’s supposed to be the anti-foodfad book. The author even starts off by saying the book was inspired by his outrage at the way the Atkins craze almost eliminated bread from the American diet.

As I read it, I felt a smug sense of intellectual superiority - I was reading a real book about food, not some diet book that weak-minded housewives grab off the shelf as they’re pushing a grocery cart filled with pop tarts and cheetos. The book explains the evils of industrial food production, especially corn - which has infiltrated nearly all processed food in the country. It then presents our salvation - harmonious, ecologically sustainable small farms, where everything is organic, tastes amazing and is good for you.

You are what you read

A couple of days later I dutifully made my way to the Union Square Greenmarket, where I loaded up on sustainably-grown produce and grass-fed meat sold by small farmers in upstate New York. The meals we prepared from that food did taste amazing, and I felt much healthier by the end of the weekend (placebo effect? naaah…).

Then I got on a plane this morning. They handed me a bagel for breakfast.. I looked at the cream cheese packet - mostly processed milk products. I shuddered, but at least it’s still milk of some sort. Then I looked at the jam - high fructose corn syrup, the root of all food evil and the cause of America’s obesity epidemic. I almost couldn’t eat it - how brainwashed have I become? I read a book and suddenly I’m grossed out by a teaspoon-sized pack of corn-sweetened jam. Pretty sad.

Two days in Tel Aviv and it feels like I’ve been eating almost nonstop.. each meal better than the last. Israeli food tastes like a mix of Arab, Turkish and Greek flavors, with eastern European bits snuck in here and there. Some dishes are really simple, others more elaborate, but the unifying characteristic is that they’re very filling.

Jewish tapas

You’ve probably heard the joke about Jewish food - tastes great, only problem is, 72 hours later you’re hungry again. But most Israelis you see on the street are surprisingly thin. Maybe they’re like the French - rich food, big meals, but no fat people.. do all those cigarettes really burn off the fat? Though now that they’ve begun enforcing the smoking ban in Tel Aviv, maybe they’ll start fattening up…