Ezra Klein has a great post up at the IFA (actually I found it first at his Washington Post blog, but as this is a foodblog I should probably link likewise). The backstory is that a foodie sneered at another foodie for liking an upscale chain restaurant. The sneeree challanged the sneerer to visit said restaurant and if they didn't enjoy the Miso Salmon the sneeree would buy 15 copies of the sneerer's book. The sneerer lost.
As Klein says:
Foodies have an unfortunate tendency to alight on a Unified Field Theory of Corporate Food: It’s bad for the environment and bad for workers and bad for animals and bad for waistlines and, above all that, a fraud, because it also tastes bad. This would be convenient, if true. If people weren’t actually enjoying what they were eating, then getting them to change their eating habits would be pretty easy. But it’s not true, of course. They keep going back to the Cheesecake Factory because, well, they like it.
This rings very true to me. I like the cookbooks I have, but they have the annoying habit of saying stuff like "this is so much better than the stuff you'll get in restaurants" and such, but often its not necessarily true. For example, the Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favourites says of their Asian Noodle Soup: "This soup is so much better than the freeze-dried ramen noodle sopus in the supermarket, there is no comparison. And you'll feel good that your soup is filled with fresh wholesome ingredients instead of who knows what." Well, the second part may be true but the first part an overstatement at best and just wrong at worst. Raman noodles are, in fact, often better and always comparable.* Which makes sense. When you pack your food with lots of fats and salt they are going to have a inherent taste advantage. That doesn't mean you can't overcome it, but often a lot of the, say, organistas are blind to that simple fact.
Klein's solution is mandatory nutrition labelling for restaurants. Although interesting it might have some downsides. It could impose costs on smaller restaurants that chain restaurants could absorb easier, leading to more chain domination. More ominously it could backfire. Hardee's has embarked on a corporate strategy of embracing their unhealthiness. They flaunt their Monster Thickburger's 1,400+ calories and 107 grams of fat and use the outrage about it to sell burgers. I don't know if I have a solution, but it seems like changing the way we pour billions of dollars into agribusiness might be a good start.
*Plus, the ramen noodles are very cheap and just go in boiling water. The Asian Noodle Soup recipe has a crazy Rube Goldberg construction where part of the recipe is on another page and part of that recipe is on yet another page.
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This is fascinating stuff.
ReplyDelete1) To anyone who'd accuse chain restaurants of being particularly unhealthy, I'd point out that restaurants on the whole are pretty unhealthy so it's almost a moot point. If you want to eat reasonable quantities of fat and salt, cook at home. If you want the joy of being cooked for and all that entails, go to a restaurant. Obviously McDonald's and that shit is particularly processed, but that's old news.
2) Personally, on the chain restaurant question, I'll admit I have a lot of prejudice against them. Not as a health thing, but as an issue of "taste." My prejudice increases relative to how upscale the chain is. Having read this post, though, I realize that it is prejudice pure and simple. I hate Moxie's because I believe they will serve me something really generic designed to please all palates and thrill none. Have I ever eaten at a Moxie's? No, I haven't.
3) These days I eat at a cheap chain restaurant three nights a week. It's probably spoiling me and I need to cut down on salt, but it makes easily available to me delicious dishes that I feel would be a waste of time to cook for one person.
1. I do think its true that chain restaurants, on the whole, are going to be just as unhealthy on a per bite basis as other restaurants (unless its the type where the waiter is wearing hemp). But, the chain restaurant is going to have far bigger portions. The Cheesecake factory has grotesque portion sizes (apperently, a lot of people use it as a leftover generator but a lot must not).
ReplyDelete2. In terms of prejudice to have, one against upscale-chain restaurants is a good one. I share it. I don't like the concept – generic and expensive, among other things. That said, I have been dragged to Moxie's a couple of time and I quite enjoyed their nachos. Still, it's way too expensive (I dropped $8 on a pint, that's a pitcher at Ein-Stein's or the cost of my last grocery bill).
3. Ah but that's Korean cheap chain restaurants, right? Which ones are they?
3. Yes, this is Korea, here. It's very different. The mainstay for single diners is the kimbap joint. For 4,500 Won ($4.25) to 5,000 Won you can get a meal, tax included, no tipping.
ReplyDeleteThe most ubiquitous chain is kimbap cheonguk, a hugely varied franchise. There's also Food 2,900 whose Korean name I don't even know, but it's really bright and it's the most fast-foody. Really easy to navigate with all the photos and english. But I eat at Kimbap Ggapae (kimbap cafe???) a smaller chain, pretty standardized but good food all around.
Because more people in Seoul eat at restaurants more frequently, the menus at these places run the gamut from starchcrimes like ramen with rice cakes to wholesome fare like soft tofu stew and a hot vegetable and beef stew I enjoy called Yukjejang.
Dang Jacob, you're just trying to provoke me into starting my own blog.
So so far that's 2 east asian countries with currencies valued 2 orders of magnitude smaller, eh?
ReplyDeleteThose all sound like excellent chains, certainly better than ours. Now I want to get Korean food. Though I did have a good meal at Quiznos today. I went cause I have some quiznomoney and they just gave out these incredible coupons ($3.79 for an 8" sandwich).
I am, in fact, trying to provoke you into starting your own blog – that is one of the two secret reasons I started the blog.