It should come to no surprise that restaurant owners adjust their menus to increase check totals overall and to promote the items that bring in the most profit. We told you earlier today that when there were no dollar signs on the menu, customers spent more.

As Dave Pasegic of the Restaurant Resource Group notes, a menu …

is the only piece of printed advertising that you are virtually 100 percent sure will be read by the guest. Once placed in the guest’s hand, it can directly influence not only what they will order, but ultimately how much they will spend.

And the strategies used to promote high-profit items are very intriguing.

People don’t read menus from top to bottom — or at least, their gaze doesn’t necessarily linger at the top. For example ….

… the National Restaurant Association recommends that chefs place the dishes they want to sell on the center of the inside right page of their menu.

{ Baltimore Sun | Continue reading }

photo { Terry Richardson }

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I’m willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don’t have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. (…)

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.

Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. (…)

Just because we humans can’t hear them doesn’t mean plants don’t howl. Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

{ Natalie Angier/NY Times | Continue reading }

illustration { Kirsty Whiten }

Bananas are just a fruit, how are they considered a global issue?

Although bananas may only look like a fruit, they represent a wide variety of environmental, economic, social, and political problems. The banana trade symbolizes economic imperialism, injustices in the global trade market, and the globalization of the agricultural economy. Bananas are also number four on the list of staple crops in the world and one of the biggest profit makers in supermarkets, making them critical for economic and global food security. As one of the first tropical fruits to be exported, bananas were a cheap way to bring “the tropics” to North America and Europe. Bananas have become such a common, inexpensive grocery item that we often forget where they come from and how they got here.

{ The Science Creative Quaterly | Continue reading }

related { Why we slip }

For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most startling thing about modern England. English food used to be deservedly famous for its awfulness–greasy fish and chips, gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now [in 1998] it is not only easy to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even become hard to find. What happened?

Maybe the first question is how English cooking got to be so bad in the first place. A good guess is that the country’s early industrialization and urbanization was the culprit. Millions of people moved rapidly off the land and away from access to traditional ingredients. Worse, they did so at a time when the technology of urban food supply was still primitive: Victorian London already had well over a million people, but most of its food came in by horse-drawn barge. And so ordinary people, and even the middle classes, were forced into a cuisine based on canned goods (mushy peas!), preserved meats (hence those pies), and root vegetables that didn’t need refrigeration (e.g. potatoes, which explain the chips).

But why did the food stay so bad after refrigerated railroad cars and ships, frozen foods (better than canned, anyway), and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? Now we’re talking about economics–and about the limits of conventional economic theory. For the answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. The appreciation of good food is, quite literally, an acquired taste–but because your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.

And then things changed. Partly this may have been the result of immigration. (Although earlier waves of immigrants simply adapted to English standards–I remember visiting one fairly expensive London Italian restaurant in 1983 that advised diners to call in advance if they wanted their pasta freshly cooked.) Growing affluence and the overseas vacations it made possible may have been more important–how can you keep them eating bangers once they’ve had foie gras? But at a certain point the process became self-reinforcing: Enough people knew what good food tasted like that stores and restaurants began providing it–and that allowed even more people to acquire civilized taste buds.

So what does all this have to do with economics? Well, the whole point of a market system is supposed to be that it serves consumers, providing us with what we want and thereby maximizing our collective welfare. But the history of English food suggests that even on so basic a matter as eating, a free-market economy can get trapped for an extended period in a bad equilibrium in which good things are not demanded because they have never been supplied, and are not supplied because not enough people demand them.

{ Paul Krugman, Supply, demand, and English food, 1998 | more }

Salami battle in supermarket leaves Germans in hospital

Two Germans needed hospital treatment after they fought a pitched battle in a supermarket with salamis used as clubs and a chunk of Parmesan cheese brandished like a dagger. (…)

He clubbed the younger man with a salami as his mother tried to fend him off with a sharp 4lbs piece of Parmesan.

The pensioner then pushed the woman down on to a glass countertop on which she cracked her head.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Wim Delvoye’s salami floors }

{ Richard Wilkinson for Saatchi & Saatchi, Germany | Head & Shoulders poster }

Orchidaceae, the Orchid family, is the largest family of the flowering plants.

The Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew list 880 genera and nearly 22,000 accepted species, but the exact number is unknown (perhaps as many as 25,000) because of taxonomic disputes.

The number of orchid species equals about four times the number of mammal species, or more than twice the number of bird species. It also encompasses about 6–11% of all seed plants.

About 800 new orchid species are added each year.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

related { Japanese researchers extract vanilla from cow dung. }

illustration { Octavio Ocampo }

Why do women eat salads on dates? A new study suggests it’s all for show.

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, observed 469 individuals in 266 groups at three cafeterias on campus. Sitting at a distance of at least 10 meters (damn Canadians and their metric system), the researchers watched these people in a natural setting and recorded how many people were sitting at each table, of what gender the people were, and estimated the caloric content of what each one was eating.

The findings were pretty clear:

1) Females chose foods with significantly fewer calories when eating with men rather than women. (Note to Jezebel: word “female” is in the study!)

2) Women’s food choices weren’t affected just by a man being present, but in proportion to how many men were present — more men equaled fewer calories.

{ True/Slant | Continue reading }

The ability to digest the milk sugar lactose first evolved in dairy farming communities in central Europe, not in more northern groups as was previously thought, finds a new study led by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology. The genetic change that enabled early Europeans to drink milk without getting sick has been mapped to dairying farmers who lived around 7,500 years ago in a region between the central Balkans and central Europe. Previously, it was thought that natural selection favoured milk drinkers only in more northern regions because of their greater need for vitamin D in their diet. People living in most parts of the world make vitamin D when sunlight hits the skin, but in northern latitudes there isn’t enough sunlight to do this for most of the year.

In the collaborative study, the team used a computer simulation model to explore the spread of lactase persistence, dairy farming, other food gathering practices and genes in Europe. The model integrated genetic and archaeological data using newly developed statistical approaches.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Pica is a medical disorder characterized by an appetite for substances largely non-nutritive (e.g., clay, coal, soil, feces, chalk, paper, soap, mucus, ash, gum etc.) or an abnormal appetite for some things that may be considered foods, such as food ingredients (e.g., flour, raw potato, raw rice, starch, ice cubes, salt).

In order for these actions to be considered pica, they must persist for more than one month at an age where eating such objects is considered developmentally inappropriate. The condition’s name comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird which is reputed to eat almost anything.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

You’re sitting at home and you see an ad on TV for junk food. Fast food, some sugary cereal, a hot dog wrapped in a waffle wrapped in bacon wrapped in whale blubber. Whatever. Even if you don’t go out and buy this product, can the ad itself contribute to making you fat?

It can.

That’s the conclusion of a new paper out in Health Psychology:

Children consumed 45% more when exposed to food advertising. Adults consumed more of both healthy and unhealthy snack foods following exposure to snack food advertising…

{ True/Slant | Continue reading }

related { Weird food McDonald’s sells around the world. }

related { We spend more on products with detailed nutritional information. }

Coffee contains caffeine, and as everyone knows, caffeine is a stimulant. We all know how a good cup of coffee wakes you up, makes you more alert, and helps you concentrate - thanks to caffeine.

Or does it? Are the benefits of coffee really due to the caffeine, or are there placebo effects at work? Numerous experiments have tried to answer this question, but a paper published today goes into more detail than most.

The authors took 60 coffee-loving volunteers and gave them either placebo decaffeinated coffee, or coffee containing 280 mg caffeine. That’s quite a lot, roughly equivalent to three normal cups. 30 minutes later, they attempted a difficult button-pressing task requiring concentration and sustained effort, plus a task involving mashing buttons as fast as possible for a minute.

The catch was that the experimenters lied to the volunteers. Everyone was told that they were getting real coffee. Half of them were told that the coffee would enhance their performance on the tasks, while the other half were told it would impair it. If the placebo effect was at work, these misleading instructions should have affected how the volunteers felt and acted.

Several interesting things happened. First, the caffeine enhanced performance on the cognitive tasks - it wasn’t just a placebo effect. (…)

Second, there was a small effect of expectancy on task performance in the placebo group - but it worked in reverse. People who were told that the coffee would make them do worse actually did better than those who expected the coffee to help them.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

{ Pepsi Azuki (red bean flavor) }

{ We don’t bother to dry chives or parsley, since whatever tastes pleasantly herbaceous when fresh, intensifies into the flavor of sunburned grass clippings. Instead, we dry the oily herbs, like rosemary, sage, thyme, and lavender — and Thai basil, which is actually closer to mint than the Genovese variety and adds welcome floral notes to wintertime stir-fries. | Kerri Conan/NY Times | Continue reading }

Teapot technology is largely ignored by mainstream media (some say unfairly). But today, scientists in France unveil a technique that should breath hi-tech life into a new generation of bespouted objects.

The problem with teapots is their annoying habit of dribbling, particularly at low rates of flow. The phenomenon has achieved such notoriety that it has been imaginatively dubbed the “teapot effect”.

Previous studies have shown that dribbling is the result of flow separation where the layer of fluid closest to the boundary becomes detached from it. When that happens, the fluid flows smoothly over the lip. But as the flow rate decreases, the boundary layer re-attaches to the surface causing dribbling.

Previous studies have shown that a number of factors effect this process such as the radius of curvature of the teapot lip, the speed of the flow and the “wettability” of the teapot material. But a full understanding of what’s going on has so far eluded scientists.

Now Cyril Duez at the University of Lyon in France and a few amis, have identified the single factor at the heart of the problem and shown how to tackle it. They say that the culprit is a “hydro-capillary” effect that keeps the liquid in contact with the material as it leaves the lip. The previously identified factors all determine the strength of this hydro-cappillary effect.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }