Fat Guy

Cold water is probably safer than warm, since that way nothing in the system ever gets into danger-zone temperatures. I imagine warm is quicker, but I've never done the math. Given that it's going to be smoked for several hours, though, I'm less worried about food safety than I'd be were it ground beef destined to be cooked medium-rare.

McWilliams and other advocates of "life cycle assessment" are carefully considering all such factors. It doesn't strike me as the slightest bit problematic, save for her failure to follow up as rigorously as a journalist should when the subject doesn't give real answers to questions. Lesley Stahl didn't invent Alice Waters backlash. She's reporting on it. And having seen the footage, I have a much better feel for why Alice Waters rubs so many people the wrong way.

I'd use a water bath. If it's already vacuum packed, or if you have a big enough zipper bag, immerse that in a warm water (probably by filling the sink) and change the water every 15 minutes or so. That should get you something relatively defrosted in a couple of hours.

I assure you McWilliams is absolutely familiar with the cost of oil, both cost as in price and cost as in environmental and social cost. But what he's saying is do the math and look at all the things that use oil. Transportation, McWilliams points out, only uses a small amount of oil compared to the actual processes of agriculture. So more efficient agriculture is a huge oil-saver, and if that more efficient agriculture has to occur far away it still saves oil even taking transportation into account. Then there's what McWilliams refers to as the "last mile problem." Farmers markets are wasteful of oil because all those farmers driving to the farmers market, and all those people making an extra trip to the farmers market if they need to go by car, are using more oil than it would take to truck larger quantities of food to large supermarkets. In other words, raising food locally can waste oil.

I really think anybody who is wondering about the impetus behind Alice Waters backlash should invest the 12 agonizing minutes in watching her 60 Minutes profile. Granted, the editing of TV segments is not under the control of the subject. But they hardly seem out to get her. The few tough questions they ask, they don't really drill down on. And despite that, to me Alice Waters comes across as cringe-inducing, out of touch and, yes, condescending. Am I the only one who finds her tremendously annoying based on this footage?

I don't really understand that comment, but again to quote McWilliams: Worth reading just as an introduction to his larger body of work: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/opinion/06mcwilliams.html

The point is that it uses less oil to produce many items far away and ship them in.

I'm not sure it can be said she has policies as such, as she's not in a position to make policy beyond, say, the human resources guidelines at Chez Panisse. But for the basics of what might be called her platform, you can check the introduction to the "Art of Simple Food." It's reprinted on the MSNBC website here. If you scroll down to the end you get to the "planks" of her "platform":

Be that as it may, there's a difference between saying Eggleston Farms lamb is the best and saying everybody in New York should eat Eggleston Farms lamb. How much does it cost per pound versus Costco's lamb from Australia? Is there enough of it to replace all of Costco's lamb from Australia? Would the environmental and energy impacts of producing enough lamb in New York to supply all of New York's lamb demand be greater or less than the impacts of producing it in Australia and shipping it in?

This one said "Made in China" on the packaging. I don't know whether Oneida still makes anything in New York, but they didn't make this here. Bargains like this are often available at TJ Maxx, Marshall's, Tuesday Morning, Century 21 and stores of that ilk. They always seem to have a bunch of skillets in the housewares area.

It's been a while since I got a new nonstick skillet. In particular, the 8" skillet I used all the time (and only) for eggs was really on its last legs. The other day my wife was at a discount store downtown (named, confusingly, Century 21) and they had a nice anodized aluminum nonstick skillet on clearance for $15. The brand is Oneida but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's made in the same factory in China that makes similar skillets for many other brands. It looks just like a piece of Calphalon or whatever. So this morning I went to cook a fried egg in the thing. I suppose one can make any skillet nonstick by adding enough fat. My old nonstick skillet, which probably lost its nonstick coating years ago, needed a sizable pat of butter to cook an egg in a nonstick fashion. I decided to try using the new nonstick skillet with no fat at all, just as a test. It was really and truly possible to cook a fried egg in the thing with no fat at all. It was an amazing display of materials technology. Now, an egg tastes better when cooked with some butter, so I'm not going to make a habit of attempting this stunt. But I'm just amazed at how nonstick this thing is. It's like, food really doesn't stick to it. That's the dream, people.

I think the issue is that, once you start grinding meat, its original marbling is irrelevant. The appeal of Kobe and Kobe-style beef is its marbling. If you eat a piece of Kobe strip, it is incredibly tender because it has so much marbled fat. If you stick that in a grinder, it doesn't matter that it had all that marbled fat. It's just as easy to add some fat to the grind from elsewhere in the animal in order to achieve whatever percentage of fat is desired in the final product. Nobody is going to be able to tell the difference. There might be some benefit to using something like grass-fed beef, which has a great flavor but tends not to be as tender as grain-fed beef, in a hot dog. But even that might be overshadowed by the spices. Hard to know for sure without experimenting.

This is the conventional wisdom but is wrong. I'd suggest starting by reading some of James McWilliams's writing. I recently sat in on a panel at the IACP conference in Denver that Dave Scantland ("Dave the Cook") was moderating. McWilliams was on the panel and utterly dismantled the local-is-better argument. This is just one of many examples McWilliams cites in his work: Just the act of farmers driving pickup trucks to a farmer's market, and consumers making an extra trip to a farmer's market (when they're already going to the regular supermarket anyway) is highly energy inefficient. McWilliams explained, and has the numbers to prove it, that it is more efficient to drive a semi trailer full of food half way across the country than for dozens of farmers to drive their small pickups and vans an hour or two to a given market. He went on and on, wrecking the common assumptions about food miles and locavorism. It was enlightening.

If we're talking about sushi places in Japan, where the archetype is the small sushi-ya owned and operated by the sushi chef, then yes, the chef's skill with egg might be a useful data point -- though still perhaps not as useful as direct evaluation of the fish. Outside of traditional restaurants like that, whether in large Japanese hotels or in most of the rest of the world, the approach and business model are different and there's not necessarily a strong connection between the quality of the egg and the quality of the rest of your experience. The most extreme example would be that, of course, you're not going to go into Nobu (whether in New York, Tokyo or anywhere in between) and order some egg to see whether you want to eat the sushi there. At any of the major sushi restaurants in Midtown Manhattan, you'd be making an error to assume the egg is the litmus test. You'll get much better information using tuna as a sample, though even that's only an indicator. And in the 90% or more of sushi restaurants in the world that are not Japanese owned, it becomes even less useful to evaluate via egg. For most people, the egg is an afterthought. It's not central the way it is in small, traditional, Japanese-run sushi-ya.

It's possible to eat local and survive, or even eat very well, in plenty of places outside of California. There have been several good demonstrations of people eating well for a year, locally, in cold climates. I think I most recently read about a guy who did it in Vermont. The problem is that the guy in Vermont who eats locally for a year is not a usable model for feeding a nation or a planet. It's mathematically unlikely that everybody in a state with a significant population could, even if motivated, eat from that state's breadbasket. Even were it possible for a state like, for example, Illinois to produce all the food consumed in Chicago, there's no evidence saying that would be a desirable outcome. It would still probably be more energy efficient to produce a lot of it in California and Mexico and ship it in. And in a free society, people in New York have the right to order Rancho Gordo beans from California, which is good for them and for Rancho Gordo. What concerns me about Alice Waters's approach is that the logical end result is a tax that makes it so expensive to send Rancho Gordo beans from California to New York that few if any people will pursue that option. On top of all that, California's year-round supply of local food -- all that great stuff they serve at Chez Panisse -- is not quite a naturally occurring thing. California's need for water has created what many would call an environmental catastrophe. It might be more environmentally sound to grow food in the Northeast, where there's plenty of water, and send it by train to California than vice-versa. But we probably couldn't grow enough of it for California, no less ourselves, without converting every available bit of land into farmland and forcing half the population back into agriculture, and maybe not even then.

If you advocate an unattainable goal as a matter of policy, that may be the same as being wrong. In any event, I think she's wrong about some things, has lofty unattainable goals with respect to some things, and is probably right about some things. She is not alone in her condescension, but she has a high enough profile that she's getting called on saying things that others are saying every day. That's just how this sort of thing works.

I think Alice Waters is wrong about many things, and condescending about others. I think the backlash overstates her importance. But I think many of the arguments underlying the backlash make sense. Others don't.

Yes, existing school lunch programs are notoriously stupid, and most any of them could be improved dramatically without spending an extra penny. In most cases, just switching to rice and beans would be a nutritional improvement and a cost cutter. There are many organizations and people working in this space and have been at least since I was a kid. Alice waters and her organization are hardly the sole voice on the school-lunch issue.

I do think that's an overstatement (Jeremiah Tower would certainly object to the claim that Alice Waters single-handedly did anything). The improvement in restaurant ingredients has been due to a variety of factors, many of which have nothing to do with Alice Waters and many of which she probably opposes (e.g., extensive air-shipping of ingredients is why sushi is so much better now than ever before; it's also why the overwhelming majority of top restaurants, which do not use strictly local, seasonal products and are not run on the Alice Waters model, are so much better now). What we can say about Alice Waters is that she has been an important figure in the California cuisine revolution, and that California cuisine has been influential across a broad spectrum of American restaurants. She is a revered figure in the restaurant world, and is also an important and galvanizing political figure on food issues in general.

Sushi restaurants have collectively made tuna the gold standard, like it or not. There is a lot of competition to ensure the best supplies of tuna, and most sushi chefs consider it critical to have the best possible tuna. So for me tuna is the best litmus test. When I go to a new sushi place where I'm not sure if it's going to be good (as opposed to one where I'm going based on a trusted recommendation), if I'm at the bar, I'll order a piece of regular tuna and a piece of toro as sashimi to start. If they have gradations of toro available I'll pick one. If the quality of that fish standing alone as sashimi is high, I'll proceed to order other things, including all the things I like better than tuna. I agree that rice is important, yellowtail is important, egg is important, etc. But tuna is the litmus test for me, not by choice but because the industry has made it so.

So is it the case, historically, that prior to year X servers didn't ask such questions?

I agree. Something along those lines makes the most sense to me as a check-in question.

In a lot of restaurants, where the server has several tables to look after and is often in the weeds, the timing of the question isn't really a matter of choice. There's simply a process that unfolds: presentation of menus, taking of drink orders, delivery of drinks, taking of food orders, bringing food, circling back to ask how the customer is doing. This happens when it can happen, in other words not when another table is having an order taken or food delivered or whatever. I don't object to the practice overall. I think in a lot of restaurants if the server didn't check in, many customers would find that neglectful. I just think sometimes the chefking-in language is unnecessarily bizarre.

My assumption is that the survey participants, who have been chosen for some degree of sophistication about restaurants, are able to separate the two and would not reduce a restaurant's ranking on account of personal troubles during a meal. That would be the case, for me at least, whether the question had been phrased in terms of "restaurant" or of "meal." In addition, the distinction between "meal" and "restaurant" is mostly going to be relevant when you've been to a restaurant 20 times and have one bad meal experience. But when we're talking about places like Alinea and El Bulli, chances are most people ranking these places have been there a maximum of once in the relevant time period. So in those cases there is complete or near-complete convergence between "restaurant" and "meal." In any event, there is no evidence that would lead me to believe that any of the weirdness in outcomes of this survey process have to do with widespread misunderstanding of whether the question is "restaurant" or "meal." At least for me, the answers, especially in this context, would be the same.

There are also plenty of people who will take the position that food is the only consideration when judging a restaurant, or is the 99% consideration. This is, for example, why the New York Times has awarded three stars (out of four) to several limited-service, limited-decor restaurants. For those people, best meal (defined, incorrectly I think, as best food) and best restaurant are also synonymous.