Greg Sanders

Increasing productivity in the kitchen

Matt Yglesias made an argument on food that seems to have ticked off many of his commenters (Hat tip, Chicago David Chen)”

If over time people were getting poorer, but the number of hours in the day was getting longer, and gender norms were shifting toward the idea that women should get married young and drop out of the workforce in order to do unpaid domestic work, then obviously people would start cooking more. But that’s not what’s happening. Compared to people in 1959, people in 2009 have more money, less time, and less ability to call on socially sanctioned unpaid domestic labor. So obviously they’re going to cook less. Or to look at it another way, there are lots of things you can do in 2009 that you couldn’t do in 1959—read a blog, download an MP3, get a movie from Netflix on Demand. There are also a lot of things you can do in 2009 that were prohibitively expensively in 1959—fly cross-country, make a long-distance phone call to your sister. But there’s no more time in the day. Which implies that people need to spend less time doing the things that you could do in 1959. Sometimes we can get out of this box by finding technological innovations that let us do things more quickly, but you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch… [emphasis mine]

And maybe someone could do it. The world’s purveyors of processed foods have noted a real market demand for healthier products. Consequently, they’re poured a lot of time and energy into creating things that at least seem healthier. And so we really have a lot of healthy-seeming options. But they’ve never, as best I can tell, poured all that much effort into trying to create things that are actually healthier. But someone could. Jamie Oliver could do it. Mark Bittman could do it. Michael Pollan could do it. And it would be more likely to succeed than an endless procession of NYT Magazine articles hectoring people about how they should cook more.

Apparently Oliver did work to improve school lunches, so good on him for that.  In any event, given some recent disappointing results from NYC food labeling, I’m going to focus more on the home production side.  Yglesias is correct that you can’t really speed up cooking from scratch, but that is quite different than saying you can’t speed up cooking in the home.  There’s a reason microwaves are everywhere, they’re fast, cheap, and make things hot.  There’s downsides to this of course, I think first and foremost the weakness is that they dehydrate the food, but I could be wrong on the cooking science there.

Anyhow, I’ll be doing a home cooked meal for my wife’s birthday today.  Which is cool, I enjoy cooking and since I follow the federal holiday schedule I’ve got the day off.  However, most days if I’m cooking something it has to be within 30 minutes.  Happily, my Mark Bittman cookbook does have a 30 minute index which I find very helpful, although I often don’t have the necessary ingredients on hand.  What I could really use is not a cookbook so much as a home economics book.  Lay out weeks worth of recipes at a time, tell what you need to buy, what you need to cook ahead on the weekend, and estimate the time and price investment.  Also, perhaps put the maximum efficiency recipe in with all the shortcuts and then layout where time can be added and what the benefits are.  E.g. go with fresh veggies rather than canned to improve nutrition and taste; do pure oven baking rather than a mix of oven and microwave for juicier chicken but at the cost of 15 minutes.  That sort of thing.  This does seem like an area where software could help, particularly in combination with grocery delivery services like peapod.  However, the software solution might not be useful for the people who most need to have productive kitchen options.

I think a lot of the trouble here is that the tradeoffs of restaurant cooking are rather different than the tradeoffs of home cooking.  Cooking does scale nicely, but learning to exploit those economics of scale is not an easy task, particularly in a small household.  In any event, how do we get to more home economics books?  Perhaps by marketing it to men.  While I was no Don Juan in my single days, I did find even low level cooking skill consistently drew positive comments from women and similarly enabled parties.  I won’t rehash the whole ‘nice guy’ discussion here, but generally speaking there’s no real reason to believe that being ‘nice’ or even just being genuinely kind is a particularly efficient signaling mechanism for your fitness as a romantic partner.  The ability to cook seems to be, and it also has the advantage of being a skill that raises your general fitness rather than just tries to invest a lot of effort in a single relationship with a person that isn’t interested in you.  I would love to see the foodie coaches capture the marketshare of the pickup lunches coaches.

Tour of the Guinness Store House 2009-07-16

We're down to our last four trip entries!  Two of them will be from Greg, and two are from me (wife of Greg, for those of you just joining in).

For our last full day in Dublin, we started off with a tour of the Guinness Storehouse.  Be warned that there are lots of pictures in the slideshow.  While neither of us is that much of a beer drinker (you can see a picture of me staring rather dubiously at a pint), my dad is quite the connoisseur and I figured he'd really enjoy the tour via photos.

The building was actually used as a storehouse until the late 1980's; after a while (I don't remember exactly when) it was converted over to the tour center.  It's quite nifty inside as you start at the lowest level and work your way up to the seventh floor where there's a bar where you can have a pint and look out over the entire city.

The tour begins with the fact that all Guinness is divided into four ingredients: water, hops, yeast, and barley.  It then takes you through the steps of the brewing process and lets you sample a bit from a fresh batch.  The next parts deal with transportation and advertising; there's lots of cool stuff to see in both.  Greg was particularly enamored of the small trains used to transport things around the brewery complex.  After that is a brief history exhibit, a place to pour your own pint, and a temporary exhibit space that was currently being used to showcase the artwork of the cartoonist who drew the most famous ads, such as the various zoo animals who always manage to steal their keeper's brew.

We had fun at the topmost floor bar.  I love places with excellent panoramic views.  The windows had a few of the more notable locations marked.  After we gazed and sipped and relaxed, we headed back down to the gift shop, and then on to our next stop, the Barracks Museum.