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The Bowery Whole Foods Market

First, a few words on the neighborhood. Inside the door, above a landscape of crushed-ice, a long wooden board has been affixed to the wall, the purpose of which quickly becomes clear. Fish, having been selected from the tank in front, sail wriggling through the air, hit the board, bounce, skitter along it, hit the far inside wall, and fall to the ice below to be grabbed, alive, and filleted by the staff in back. Below the plank that ensures the fishmongers' accuracy, the heads of large salmon, recently detached, continue to yawn and gawp reflexively. In front sit wooden baskets of soft-shell crabs, porgies, shrimp of all sizes, razor clams with their phallic, protruding siphons, and numerous flatfish, all whole and waiting for inspection by customers who wouldn't think of buying a fish without checking its gills for redness and pressing its scaly sides for taut resilience. Squeezed between the wall and the crab and lobster tanks sits a large black bucket, nearly the size of a garbage can, from which the topmost of many layers of frogs stare up.

Such is a typical fish stall on Mott Street, in downtown Manhattan. But many other food shops south of Houston Street and east of Lafayette Street, of all cuisines and nationalities, share the stall's intensity, if not always the sheer directness of the relationship between people and the animals they eat that obtains there. In the window of Despana, a newish food boutique on Broome that specializes in Spanish delicacies such as paprikas, olives, cheeses, and oils, hangs a salt-cured pig's hind leg, hoof and all, unmistakably a severed mammalian limb, waiting to be sliced into transparencies of Serrano ham. Inside Dom's, a nearby Italian grocer, chickens complete with head and feet (the better to be added to to your stockpot) lie in cases beneath gamy homemade sausages that age hanging from the ceiling. The Essex Market's Dominican butchers sell goat meat and oxtails, while pig stomachs and tripe are available nearby. Not only the Sullivan Street bakery but the Balthazar bakery, Ceci-Cela, the Falai bakery and several others turn out impeccable breads.

Bangkok Grocery, the city's best purveyor of galangal, shrimp pastes, lime leaves, fish sauces, and other Thai ingredients, is a few blocks below Canal on the San Francisco-esque, tilted Mosco Street. Back up on Mott sits DiPalo's, the legendary supplier of the best Parmigiano-Reggiano and other Italian artisanal products in this country. Catty corner from it one can buy the city's best Banh Mi, or Vietnamese sandwich, at Banh Mi Saigon Bakery. (This opinion professionally corroborated by the always scintillating J. Slab at The Porkchop Express.) Vegetable sellers and more fishmongers from China's Fujian Province line Grand Street all the way to Hester, where a right turn brings you to Il Labatorio del Gelato, New York's most lauded ice cream makers, and a little beyond that a wide-ranging chocolate shop where you can find most of the finest single-bean productions of Michel Cluizel, Valrhona, and other chocolate titans. Next door is Alejandro Alcocer's excellent food shop, Orange, and restaurant, Brown. Over another block on Grand is Doughnut Plant, where Mark Singer makes his grandfather's recipes using organic ingredients. And back up to Houston sits Katz's, the pastrami champion of New York City.

Back west a few blocks on Houston is the new Bowery Whole Foods. Is it just me who finds still finds appending the word "Bowery" to such amenities as pricey supermarkets oxymoronic? Or has the word Bowery already shed its downmarket connotations, or rather, already accrued the upmarket status into which downmarket connotations are now magically transformed? Whichever confusing permutation it is, the branch itself comically interrupts perhaps the densest, most diverse, and best collection of individual food shops in the United States. Whole Foods, the American food economy's answer to Crate and Barrel, is no doubt a useful intervention in most suburban contexts in which there are thirty enormous chain pharmacies for every good butcher or fish shop. If you live on the exurban outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, presumably Whole Foods appreciably increases the diversity of available food.

But on Bowery and Houston, Whole Foods represents a much poorer form of food diversity than what is already there. And, food shops are not just food shops: they are a solidified form of the social relationships that obtain between people in an particular place.

Read the rest of Asad Raza's piece at 3 Quarks Daily

we're Number One!

Based on recent obesity statistics, courtesy of Wellington Grey (via Neatorama)

Ignorance Heuristics

When making decisions in the real world, there is often a tradeoff between speed and accuracy. There is a whole spectrum of approaches that can be brought to bear on a problem, ranging from a simple gut feel decision to sophisticated statistics like running a nonlinear regression. If we have the necessary resources, is the latter always better? The Boston Consulting Group’s Strategy Institute describes what they call “fast and frugal heuristics”, and explains the situations in which such simple decision making strategies can be more effective than even sophisticated analytical techniques.

[snip]

An example of an ignorance heuristic in action:

Let me illustrate the way this heuristic works with one example: Which US City Has More Inhabitants: San Diego or San Antonio? We posed this question to students at the University of Munich and the University of Chicago. The latter, who have a reputation for being among the most knowledgeable in the US, were correct 62% of the time. Yet 100% of the Germans got the correct answer 100% of the time. How did the Germans infer that San Diego was larger? All of the Germans had heard of San Diego, but many of them did not recognize San Antonio. They were thus able to apply the recognition heuristic and make a correct inference. The American students were not ignorant enough to be able to apply the recognition heuristic.

More from WIRED

Ah yes, The Onion

Area Man Confounded By Buffet Procedure

ERIE, PA—Area resident Don Turnbee was "completely bewildered" by standard buffet protocol at the East Frontage Road Ponderosa Steakhouse, sources close to the 37-year-old eater reported Tuesday.

Turnbee, who ordinarily relies on Burger King, McDonald's and other fast-food establishments for his nutritional-intake needs, was confused by procedures regarding Ponderosa's "$6.99 Grand Dinner Buffet." Among his uncertainties: when to pay for the meal, which food items he had unlimited access to, whether soft-drink refills were free, and whether to move around the various serving stations in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

"There was a lot of different stuff you had to know," Turnbee said. "I wasn't sure if I was doing it right."

Ponderosa patrons reported seeing Turnbee wander aimlessly for 20 to 30 minutes through the restaurant's all-you-can-eat buffet area, which features more than 75 choices of hot and cold appetizers, salad items, fresh fruits and pasta, as well as a "No Stopping The Toppings" dessert/sundae bar.

"It's pretty confusing. They need to put up some signs explaining how everything works," Turnbee said. "At Taco Bell, at least they have railings so you know where to walk."

The Onion

What's Next, Donuts?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A fruity cocktail may not only be fun to drink but may count as health food, U.S. and Thai researchers said on Thursday.

Adding ethanol -- the type of alcohol found in rum, vodka, tequila and other spirits -- boosted the antioxidant nutrients in strawberries and blackberries, the researchers found.

Any colored fruit might be made even more healthful with the addition of a splash of alcohol, they report in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture.

Dr. Korakot Chanjirakul and colleagues at Kasetsart University in Thailand and scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture stumbled upon their finding unexpectedly.

They were exploring ways to help keep strawberries fresh during storage. Treating the berries with alcohol increased in antioxidant capacity and free radical scavenging activity, they found.

Any colored fruit or vegetable is rich in antioxidants, which are chemicals that can cancel out the cell-damaging effects of compounds called free radicals.

Berries, for instance, contain compounds known as polyphenols and anthocyanins. People who eat more of these fruits and vegetables have a documented lower risk of cancer, heart disease and some neurological diseases.

The study did not address whether adding a little cocktail umbrella enhanced the effects.

Rueters

Wagging Which Way?

...there is another, newly discovered, feature of dog body language that may surprise attentive pet owners and experts in canine behavior. When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

A study describing the phenomenon, “Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli,” appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.

The full article in the NY Times

Denby at his best

An incomparable marksman, stealthy, silent, relentless, hiding among snowcapped peaks; the muzzle of a high-powered rifle aimed directly at the camera; helicopters swirling over mountains and city streets, pursuing the hero from the sky; gunmetal colors everywhere, and the chuggah-chuggah-chuggah of pounding drums and electronic music, a sound both primal and advanced at the same time: “Shooter,” directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Mark Wahlberg, as Bob Lee Swagger, a betrayed Marine marksman who becomes a vigilante crusader for justice, is a virtual textbook of action clichés.

[snip]

For two hours, chase follows shoot-out as Swagger fires at men who, like movie targets from time immemorial, obligingly refuse to take cover. Swagger never misses—he could hunt mosquitoes for a living—and the extras, both live and digital, do their job; they fall down.

David Denby, the film critic for the New Yorker, can be very good when he's on. The above example was taken from this review

Uunartoq Qeqertoq

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland's enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland's remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea.

Shaped like a three-fingered hand some 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it has been discovered by a veteran American explorer and Greenland expert, Dennis Schmitt, who has named it Warming Island (Or Uunartoq Qeqertoq in Inuit, the Eskimo language, that he speaks fluently).

The US Geological Survey has confirmed its existence with satellite photos, that show it as an integral part of the Greenland coast in 1985, but linked by only a small ice bridge in 2002, and completely separate by the summer of 2005. It is now a striking island of high peaks and rugged rocky slopes plunging steeply to a sea dotted with icebergs.

As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.

The full article in The Indpendent (U.K.)

"Production Units"

Piglets in confinement operations are weaned from their mothers 10 days after birth (compared with 13 weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their hormone- and antibiotic-fortified feed. This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a desire they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring.

“Learned helplessness” is the psychological term, and it’s not uncommon in confinement operations, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of sunshine or earth or straw, crowded together beneath a metal roof upon metal slats suspended over a manure pit. So it’s not surprising that an animal as sensitive and intelligent as a pig would get depressed, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection.

Sick pigs, being underperforming “production units,” are clubbed to death on the spot. The USDA’s recommended solution to the problem is called “tail docking.” Using a pair of pliers (and no anesthetic), most but not all of the tail is snipped off. Why the little stump? Because the whole point of the exercise is not to remove the object of tail-biting so much as to render it more sensitive. Now, a bite on the tail is so painful that even the most demoralized pig will mount a struggle to avoid it.…

More than any other institution, the American industrial animal farm offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism can look like in the absence of moral or regulatory constraint. Here in these places life itself is redefined—as protein production—and with it suffering. That venerable word becomes “stress,” an economic problem in search of a cost-effective solution, like tail-docking or beak-clipping or, in the industry’s latest plan, by simply engineering the “stress gene” out of pigs and chickens. Our own worst nightmare such a place may well be; it is also real life for the billions of animals unlucky enough to have been born beneath these grim steel roofs, into the brief, pitiless life of a “production unit” in the days before the suffering gene was found.

Michael Pollan,“An Animal’s Place” New York Times Magazine, 11/10/02

I found the above quote in a comment thread on this post at Prospect.org

The Imus Firestorm: A final look Back

I never wanted to spend much time or electronic ink on the Imus story, and thought that my one earlier post would be my last. But Matt Taibbi of The Rolling Stone has such a good, thorough smackdown of the mainstream media's reaction to the event, that I can't resist excerpting and linking.

First of all, let's just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton -- dumb, rich -- gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls.

The idea that NBC -- the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson's tits -- was "offended" by the use of the word "ho" is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that "ho" would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years.

Matt's full story

The girls of Bihar

Bihar, a North Indian state, is the birthplace of Buddhism. The Himalayan mountains are to the north, in Nepal. Like many places in India, the literacy rates are low, and especially so for women. In spite of this, Archana Masih has an inspiring report which includes brief testimonials by some tough and resolute young girls from Bihar. This one was taken from Baby Kumari, age 12, Class VI:

My father is a labourer, I live in a small thatched hut but I’ve represented Bihar in many swimming competitions and won several medals.

Seeing my interest in swimming, my father saved Rs 350 [U.S. $8.30] so that I could get a swimsuit. The person who trains us, bought the swimsuit from Patna.

On seeing the swimsuits of me and my two friends — Savitri and Payal, who are also champion swimmers too — people in the village said: ‘What is this?’ But now we’ve participated in many competitions, so it doesn’t matter.

We went to Goa for a swimming meet early this year but they put us in the 19-year category. Still I stood 6th.

We began swimming in the village pond when we were very young and people began telling us we were good. We trained in our village against the wishes of many villagers and try to be our best with whatever resources we have.

We wake up at 3 am every day and go to the pond to swim. We run and swim to build our stamina and swim for two-and-a-half hours every day. Then we come home, eat vegetable and roti and walk to school. It takes us an hour to reach school.

I don’t eat anything during lunch because I am not eligible for the mid day meal scheme (the free lunch given to children up to Class V), so I stay hungry till I get back for dinner.

Masih's full piece can be found at rediff.com (via Indian Writing)

Don't Worry: It's been reattached

The story, including the happy (?) ending, at Metro.co.uk

OK, so it's not an alternative fuel

Nor does it have broad applications. But Tom Ballhatchet's hamster cage innovation is pretty damned clever. The hamster runs on the wheel, which in turn powers a paper shredder, which creates fresh bedding for the adorable little critter!

Tom's site (via Neil's World)

The "Right to Roam"

I love it! And what an admirable move. You see, politicians can do good things which actually benefit the masses.

Ministers are to open up the entire English coastline to the public in a historic and controversial extension of the "right to roam".

The move, which will make it possible to walk all 9,040 miles around the coast of Great Britain and create the first ever right of access to thousands of beaches, is provoking a bitter backlash from landowners and celebrities with expensive seaside properties, who will not be compensated.

It will also boost the profile of the fast-rising Secretary of State for the Environment, David Miliband, whose decision to push through the measure will win him new friends among Labour traditionalists, since access to the countryside is one of their most totemic issues.

Until now, the public has only had a right of access to about half of the country's coastline, mainly along paths, and - despite a popular misconception - none at all to most beaches. People are legally entitled to travel by boat over the foreshore when the tide is in, but not to walk on it when the waters recede.

Even where there are paths with rights of way, they often do not join up, or are blocked by private property, forcing walkers to make long detours inland.

Labour promised to improve access to the coast in its last election manifesto, and now Mr Miliband has decided to push through measures to create a "right to roam corridor" all round the English coast. This would automatically shift landwards if it was eroded away, allowing access to continue.

"England's coastline is a national treasure," Mr Miliband told The Independent on Sunday yesterday. "It should be the birth-right of every citizen. Many parts of the coast are already accessible but some are not. We want to create an access corridor so that people can walk the entire length of the English coast."

The Independent (U.K.)

Very Smart Doggy

Doggy's ball ends up in the pool; Doggy wants ball, but doesn't want to get too wet; Doggy solves problem.

A different use of Pie Charts

Craig Robinson uses them to to review aspects of his personal life. View the full sets of charts at Craig's site (via kottke.org)

New York to Dublin

Courtesy of Google Maps. The best part? Step 23:

Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 miles)

(via Kottke.org)

Knee-Jerk(s)

I try as much as possible to avoid network television, partly because of the overwhelmingly bad programming, and partly because of the inevitable (and awful) commercial bombardment. When I do happen to be exposed to commercials, I'm usually good at tuning them out (if I haven't already muted the sound), but towards the end of 60 Minutes on CBS this evening, I did an aural double-take. The commercial, depressingly like so many these days, was about health issues. But unlike the vast majority in that vein, this one was not touting some wonder drug, but – hold on to your hats – knee replacement!

The cheerful voice in the ad, which specifically targeted women, suggested that the viewer might need a knee replacement, and should therefore consider the Zimmer Gender Solution™ Knee . The best part, however, was the end of the ad, during which the voice excitedly introduced the company's trademarked phrase:

It's the knee women are talking about!™

Well, perhaps some of the women who have had their knees replaced with Zimmer products, and those who have stock in the company.

On the remote chance that you would like to learn more, here's the Zimmer site

More Good news about chocolate?

I like dark chocolate quite a bit, but if all these recent studies are to be believed, we probably shouldn't bother eating anything else. Here's the latest:

A nutrient in cocoa called epicatechin appears to lower the risk of four common killer diseases, work suggests.

Among the Kuna people of Panama, who can drink up to 40 cups of cocoa per week, rates of stroke, heart disease, cancer and diabetes are less than 10%.

The Kuna also appear to live longer than other Panama inhabitants and do not get dementia, a US scientist reports in Chemistry and Industry.

BBC

No ordinary Hole

Over forty years ago, researchers in the Soviet Union began an ambitious drilling project whose goal was to penetrate the Earth's upper crust and sample the warm, mysterious area where the crust and mantle intermingle– the Mohorovi, discontinuity, or "Moho." So deep is this area that the Russian scientists had to invent new ways of drilling, and some of their new methods proved quite inventive. But despite the valiant effort which spanned several decades, the Russians never reached their goal, and many of the Earth's secrets were left undiscovered. The work done by the Soviets did, however, provide a plethora of information about what lies just beneath the surface, and it continues to be scientifically useful today. The project is known as the Kola Superdeep Borehole.

[snip]

Today, the deepest hole ever created by humankind lies beneath the tower enclosing Kola's drill. A number of boreholes split from the central branch, but the deepest is designated "SG-3," a hole about nine inches wide which snakes over 12.262 kilometers (7.5 miles) into the Earth's crust. The drill spent twenty-four years chewing its way to that depth, until its progress was finally halted in 1994, about 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) short of its 15,000-meter goal.

Read more at Damn Interesting

"Marinated in the culture of speed"

Carl Honore, author of the book, In Praise of Slowness, found himself rushing through the reading of his son's bedtime story, and realized that something was wrong. Ted.com has just posted a video of Honore giving an interesting talk on the problems we've created by speeding up everything in our modern Western society, and what might be done to counteract this powerful trend.

Click here to watch the 20:00 video

The Poor of Cairo

Ali Mezar has spent his life fishing a narrow, muddy patch of the Nile in this, one of the most crowded cities in the world. But Mr. Mezar has little contact with urban civilization. He sleeps in his boat, makes tea from the dirty Nile water and on good days earns a few dollars.

A fisherman at work on the Nile in Cairo. Men like him live by their wits and earn a few dollars on a good day.

Not far away, on the shoulder of a busy avenue, Karim Sayed, 21, herds sheep and goats matted with urban filth. He spends his days staring into oncoming traffic, hoping to make a sale before the police move him or confiscate a sheep.

At the city’s edge, in a packed neighborhood built entirely by its residents, Mina Fathy and his neighbors fix sewerage, water and electricity problems on their own because they say the government offers them virtually no service in such functions.

Cairo is home to 15 million and often described as the center of the Arab world, an incubator of culture and ideas. But it is also a collection of villages, a ruralized metropolis where people live by their wits and devices, cut off from the authorities, the law and often each other.

Read the full story in the NY Times

Ah, truffles! (no, not the chocolate ones)

Thanks to the artist and writer Elatia Harris, one of the fine contributors to the consistently excellent 3 Quarks Daily, I recently came across a wonderful history of truffles. Here's the beginning of her piece:

On a winter’s night in Paris long ago, I ducked into the Grand Vefour – then a charmingly approachable temple of gastronomy, free of the rather strained merriment that signals too much money being spent – and, as one of seven guests of a rich man, sat down to a dinner that would leave me not as I was before.

To my right was Diarmuid C.-J., an elderly esthete of some renown living among dusty art objects a stone’s throw from the restaurant. He was well used to ordering without regard to the menu, and he did so this night. While others were calling for appetizers, a fish course and an entrée, Diarmuid commanded a dish of eight lightly sautéed whole fresh truffles. A little salt and pepper, a splash of cream whisked into the pan juices – that would suffice for his dinner.

But, what were truffles? Rare mushrooms, the man on my left quickly whispered to me. Rare, and black and growing underground. They were the cost equivalent, I later determined, of ordering five or six personal lobsters while others in your party struggled with choices less pricey and less pure. But cost was only part of the story.

Dinner began to arrive, the unexcitingly superb starter items of the era: delicate pike terrines, mussels steamed with shallots and Chablis. Who isn’t happy with such? But it all fell away when, in a footed, lidded Limoges dish, Diarmuid’s golf ball-sized truffles were borne to the table by a sly-looking servitor who uncovered them and swanned off. The others, including our imperturbable host, smiled faintly but intently, like Etruscans at bull games. They were in the know. Silently, I sniffed the truffle aroma, nothing if not a decisive fragrance, but I lacked the right referent. The grassiness of the cream -- cream had never smelled so grassy -- called up woods and moon and dew. The odor I might later describe as “earthy” and “musky” and many other things to do with cheese was then but deeply portentous. An agreeable fright overtook me: it was Pan, I understood – it was Pan! Beneath the cool weight of napery, my knees knocked slightly. I shot Diarmuid a meaning glance, all but nudged him as he plied his knife and fork, and opened my mouth to receive a truffle. For was I not still a baby bird, the whole world’s pleasure to feed me? The saurian flicker of his cold pale eye should have warned me to desist, but it did not.

And so, my first truffle. Tuber melanosporum, unearthed not a day earlier by a caveur who knew a secret place in the oak groves of Perigord, who had gone out after nightfall with his muzzled, truffle-ardent sow or his keenest bitch – for the female of the species is by far the better finder – and, kneeling where the unerring animal pressed its snout among the roots and panted and grunted and stamped, had angled his small trowel into the soil and sifted his way down to the prize. My prize. Oh, I could wish it had been fed me by an unbegrudging man, but that might only have crowded the sensation.

Not a sensation that I particularly had words for, either, looking back on the almost convent-bred purity of my food vocabulary that year. Best just to liken it to the entrance into the room, naked, of that person whom you know will make all the difference. Time passed -- I'm not sure how much -- and as I licked my lips and refocused on the table I saw that people -- all but one -- were smiling those faint, intent smiles not at the truffles but at me.

Having been admitted, in any case, to the 4,000 year-old company of those who know the truffle firsthand, I was hardly astonished when, a few years later, a Parisian banker, discovering that his cook had served his only truffle to two of her friends, made television news by shooting her. The investigating magistrate refused to bring the banker to trial for what was “obviously a crime of passion, completely understandable and completely forgivable.”

Yes, I understood. And if, wedged among his dusty curios, Diarmuid caught the news and untenderly remembered me, then I spared a thought for him too.

Read the full piece

Pulp Fiction in Animated Typography

Sound weird? It is. But it's also cool, and interesting. Jarratt Moody, the creator of the piece, took one of the many famous bits of dialogue from the film and, well, you'll see.

Click here to view the short film (requires QuickTime). (via boingboing)

More other? click here!

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