Moopheus

Actually, having worked in design and do photography, I am aware of how this works. And the main point of marketing and advertising research is to sell you something you might not actually want to buy on its own merit; that's not really a point in its favor. Yes, sometimes they look like little works of art. Often the message of that art fails, at least for me, to be "I want to eat that." The message I get from those photos posted by Soba is 'What's actually for dinner?" and "I'll probably need to eat again in and hour," as well as "Did the kitchen forget to rinse the soap off this bowl?" Why would you want the asparagus to stand up? You can't cut it that way. The first thing the customer has to do is knock them over. That strikes me as bad design.

Except that big processors like McCain deal with a large network of contract farmers, for whom companies like McCain comprise the bulk of their market. Which means that McCain has a lot of power to basically set the price they're going to pay for the potatoes.

Well, not my food, because I do not care very much about that. I do not really want my food to look cool. I want it to look like food. Mainly I care about it tasting good. Food that looks cool is trying too hard to make me like it before I eat it.

Maybe it's just me, but I never really thought that the inability of my food to rise off the plate was a problem that needed a solution. Generally, the only time I want my food rising off the plate is at the end of my fork. Of course anything that gets a certain amount of hype is going to get a backlash. This is a surprise? The foodie world made a big deal over Ferran Adria and his foams. Which most people are never going to eat. Then, you say, foam, in itself, is not really a new thing: we've had it in various forms and uses for a long time. But if it not a new thing, then why the fuss. Either these modernists have invented something new and wonderful, or they have not, and the fuss is baloney.

Yeah, I hear rabbits are quite hard to breed... Yes, easy to breed, but apparently costly to feed. Apparently rabbit farming was only recently legalized in Australia (because it is considered a pest).

I would have to add that I am particularly impatient with places that are set up to make you wait so they can sell you alcohol at the bar.

Avoid the cakes, though, when I've had them the slices are stale from sitting out too long. And wee tiny slices they are, too.

My wife and I have little tolerance for waiting. Unless it is something really special, maybe 15-20 minutes tops. Often times, if we get somewhere and there's a long wait, we'll just go somewhere else. I think any place that has a longer wait than that should take reservations.

The plain water doesn't have crap in it. Or at least, that's what they want you to believe. Remember a while back when there was a bit of a stink made of the fact that the premium bottled water sold by Coca-Cola was discovered to be unprocessed Atlanta municipal water. There was nothing wrong with it, but folks were miffed to discover they were paying premium prices for basically ordinary tap water.

And then go to the Chocolate Room on 5th ave. for dessert--it's not far down from Franny's. Though as I recall the desserts at Franny's are good. Hell, if I were just there for one day, I would do both, but I am piggy that way.

In OPEC countries, the price of gasoline is typically highly government subsidized. Because they are worth more? How much are you paying for potatoes? Around here, raw potatoes are definitely cheaper per pound than frozen fries.

This I checked again, the shop was restocked. $1.59 for a 500ml bottle. That doesn't seem like too bad of a markup, considering.

I like Athan's in Brookline for pastry. The Modern Pastry shop on Hanover is good if you are in the mood for something Italian.

At the most fundamental level, cooking is the application of heat to food, and food is cooked when certain biochemical changes occur in the food. These changes may vary depending on the method used and the type of food, but the end result is generally an altered state that is distinct from raw. Basically, these two things have to occur for there to be "cooking." Just rewarming already cooked food doesn't really cut it, and mixing raw or precooked ingredients doesn't either. This isn't to say that these aren't useful methods of making a home-prepared meal, but they aren't really cooking. If you make a simple salad of say greens, tomatoes, and vinaigrette, do you say you "cooked" the salad? No, of course not. There are certainly plenty of times in the summer when my dinner may be such a salad because it is just too hot to actually cook. Beyond that of course, is a host of issues, such as cooking skills, food quality, and economy. The industrialization of the food supply over the course of the 20th century has changed the way people use their kitchens, even for those of us who still like to cook from basic ingredients and have the skills to do so. What used to be fairly clear distinctions of categories have blurred. While not all the changes have necessarily been bad, a price has been extracted--change does not come for free.

Though this sort of restructuring usually involves some store closings. So not all of America's malls and highway rest stops will be deprived of their cheap pizza, only some of them.

I do have also the impression that home baking has fallen off more dramatically than home cooking generally. Though it's hard to say for certain. It's still something that a lot of people do once in a while, but not as regular habit; it's just for special occasions. Packaged cookies and cakes and cake mixes, frozen doughs, and that sort of thing outsell basic baking supplies by a large margin. Pillsbury doesn't even promote its own flour on its web site; more than 90 percent of flour production in the US goes to commercial bakeries. Of course, baking products were among the earliest commercial convenience products; food processors have been trying for more than a century to eliminate home baking. I suppose maybe we should be hopeful that after that much time, they haven't succeeded completely.

Most frozen veg is not precooked, just preprepped. There certainly seem to be more preprepped options in the grocery--veg cut and washed, salad greens premixed, that sort of thing. If you still have to cook it, then it's cooking. Unless you're eating it frozen. No, but it does count as a home-cooked meal. I mean, if you make a lasagna, and it's enough for two nights, that's two home-cooked meals, though you only cooked once. When I make soup, I like to make a big batch and put extra in the freezer. There's certainly nothing wrong with using your effort efficiently. In trying to sort through data on what people are actually spending their food money on, it seems that while there's a lot of use of prepared and processed foods, there's still a fair amount of cooking going on, even if it is fairly rudimentary. People are still buying an awful lot of tray-packs of meat, cartons of eggs, butter, cheese, raw veg, etc. Not sure what the historical trends are though.

"Prepared foods" in grocery stories is a fast-growing category, but one thing you have to consider is that is not necessarily just a substitute for cooking, but also for a restaurant meal. Which is to say, the consumer isn't thinking "I'm going to get this instead of cooking," but "I'm going to get this instead of take-out." Possibly more so in the last couple of years as the recession has forced some to cut back on restaurant trips. My personal observation has been that those prepared food bars that every store has now are very popular with the office-lunch crowd. Also, not knowing how to cook doesn't necessarily stop people from trying, at least based on the number of times some former neighbors set off the fire alarms.

Oh dear, a few new ones on me that look interesting...bookcase already full...

Eat less religiously, more hedonistically.

I don't know if this quite what you're looking for, but you could do worse than start with some of the books in this thread:

Here are some food expenditure statistics from the USDA; http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/data/ One thing that I notice is that the percentage of income spent out of the house is fairly stable over time, but the percentage spent for "in-home" has shrunk considerably. These tables are mainly about where people are spending money, not so much about what they are spending it on.

Those are usually $4-5 a can here for DOP San Marzano, less if non-DOP. Non-SM Italian tomatoes are usually around $2-3 a can. I was just in the local supermarket that I'd previously seen carrying Mexican Coke, and when I looked to check the local price, it was gone! I have a soft spot for certain British candies (Smarties!) but they're $1.50 or more here.

More likely it represents the lack of a market? Is there any consumer CVap market? If you want to develop a mass market for new appliances, you've got to get it on Martha Stewart and HGTV. What do these things really offer for Joe McMansionite? Convenience? Less cost? Aspirational consumerism?

Bagel, cream cheese, lox, coffee, juice. That's my five!