The Future Food Shortage Will One Day Suck

If you're like me, you enjoy eating, look forward to eating, and have assumed for pretty much your entire life that you would be able to keep eating for as long as you were alive. That is, if you live in a first-world country you have to figure that you will die of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, gunshot wound, drug overdose, nuclear terrorism, or car accident before you will die of starvation. Ha ha! Turns out you actually should worry about starving to death—at least, this British guy does. He argues that rising population, rising energy costs, climate change, and the crushing poverty that most agricultural workers worldwide live under could combine to create a “food crisis” not unlike the oil crises we've already seen. (It's a long article, but worth skimming at least.) He adds that the increased reliance on biofuels will mean that less of the crops we grow will be used for food, thus worsening the hypothetical future food shortage.

He lives in the UK, which imports way, way more food than the US does, so Americans shouldn't necessarily worry too much about this (not that Americans will worry about anything anyway), but the US now imports more food than it exports, and some of that food comes from China, which doesn't hold its food industry to the same rigorous quality-control standards that our FDA does in regards to American slaughterhouses. And while Tyler Cowen, who is smarter than me, isn't all that worried, we should remember that food is not infinite.

We might not end up actually starving, but food could get a lot more expensive if erosion, global warming, and random natural disasters/God start working together. For instance, the price of 40 ounces of beer in my neighborhood was be two bucks in 2006, and now it's three—a huge increase, percentage-wise. We should remember that most of the people who were born on this planet had to deal with food shortages, and this period of plenty is an aberration.

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Why the Double Down Sucks

You've undoubtedly heard of KFC's new “sandwich,” the Double Down. It seems like every yahoo with a web site, from the New York Times to FireDogLake.com to something called CafeMom.com, has written a review tearing apart the latest food innovation from the corporate conglomerate that markets food-like products under the Colonel Sanders brand. Criticizing the Double Down has become a cottage industry whose origins stretch back to 2009, when the Double Down was released in limited markets. I imagine sales at KFC have been on the rise just from the number of bloggers and other rubberneckers ordering one for irony's sake.

Not that I can criticize too much. I, too, went down to my local KFC—for the first time ever—just to order and consume a Double Down, as part of a group of novelty-food enthusiasts. After my post in praise of sandwiches (which mentioned the Double Down), I felt like it was my duty to taste what very well could be the future of sandwiches.

If you haven't heard on another website, or if that picture is unclear, the Double Down consists of bacon, cheese, and an anonymous sauce slapped disinterestedly between two fried chicken breasts. It's basically a product of the Tracy Jordan Meat Machine—meat is the new bread! As should be obvious, this is not a great piece of culinary art. The cheese on mine was mostly flavorless and not melted. The bacon added very little to the sandwich and was probably pumped so full of artificial chemicals it wouldn't have counted as pork for kosher purposes. The chicken wasn't so bad, if a little on the dry side, and the sauce—probably the best part of the experience—was basically thousand island dressing. The whole thing was extraordinarily salty and strangely, not as filling as I thought it would be. In short, it sucked.

But of course it sucked—this is KFC we're talking about. This is the company that gets routinely protested by animal rights groups and mocked by portly standup comedians. The real Colonel Sanders once called the food KFC serves “sludge,” and the company got sued because its food was so unhealthy. So KFC introduced an unhealthy sandwich that doesn't taste all that great. In other news, the sky is blue, rain is wet, and the Catholic Church doesn't know how to handle the large number of pedophiles and repressed homosexuals in its priesthood. Whoop-de-doo.

Actually, I didn't think the Double Down was so bad as modern fast food goes, and one of the people who ate it with me thought it was awesome. It might be unhealthy, but it's certainly edible. The only reason this is worth talking about? The price: it cost about six dollars for the sandwich alone, seven-fifty if you wanted a drink. That's the weird, alarming thing about this sandwich, not those 32 grams of fat or the 1,380 milligrams of sodium (General Tso's chicken has way more sodium) or the sheer grotesqueness of it's appearance—fast food looks bad, tastes bad, and will kill you eventually, this is known by everyone—but the idea that someone would pay the equivalent of 12 Jack in the Box tacos for it.

Food-assisted suicide is old hat in America—remember Super Size Me? or Fast Food Nation? But by creating and marketing the Double Down KFC isn't just assuming that Americans like things that are bad for them, they're assuming that people like life-threatening food so much that they'll pay dearly for the privilege of clogging their arteries. And who's to say they're wrong?

(photo by Scott Tomford) Read more!

Why Light Beer Sucks

Humanity agrees on very little, but we have decided this much: beer is good. Beer is older than democracy, more popular than Jesus, and is enjoyed by Fascists, Communists, Feminists, Sadists, Masochists, Gays, Straights, the Bi-Curious, Polygamists, Polytheists, Monotheists, and Atheists alike. Beer is mentioned in the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, which is the oldest work of fiction in the world. Beer has been regarded as a gift of the gods by the Egyptians and the Germans and was used as currency during the Middle Ages. Beer advertising is everywhere, even on buses, and it's strange to think that beer was illegal just 80 years ago. There are still “temperance advocates” out there somewhere, one imagines, but they must realize that they are fighting a losing battle, like the Lyndon LaRouche for President people.

Light beer has been around a much shorter time. It was invented not by the Sumerians, but by this guy in the late 1960s. Basically, light beer is beer with fewer calories and less alcohol than ordinary beer. You would think that a product like that would have limited commercial appeal—how many calorie-counting alcoholics can there be?--but you would be very, very wrong. Today, light beers dominate the US market, with six of the top 10 best selling beers of 2008 being “light,” including Michelob Ultra Light, whose advertisements feature athletic exercise enthusiasts who probably don't drink beer, and Miller “Lite,” who apparently does not employ a copy editor. The best selling beer of 2008 was Bud Light (even Obama drinks it!), and since I have had Bud Light before, my natural reaction to this bit of information was to wonder why, in Gilgamesh's name, are so many people drinking this beer?

Maybe beer drinkers are actually health-conscious, but if they are, they aren't paying attention to the nutrition facts. Light beer has fewer carbohydrates, but the difference in calories is fairly small: Bud Light has 110 calories to original Budweiser's 143, while Guinness has 120—if you are trying to improve your health, perhaps you should do more than change your beer brand. (Or, as the source of my calorie information puts it, “You were probably fat before you began drinking beer anyway.”)

Could people be drinking light beer for the taste? Taste is subjective, and if I think Bud Light tastes like piss, perhaps that's due to a defect in my palate. Some people enjoy tofu, others eat dog, diff'rent strokes make the world go 'round. But surely, no one thinks of Bud Light as their favorite beer. It doesn't taste exactly like water, but it tastes more like water than beer normally does. It's the beer you drink when you don't like the taste of beer very much, yet you are mysteriously drawn to consume it rather than, say, switching to vodka or not drinking at all.

I doubt that if you polled light beer drinkers they would start extolling the virtues of Bud Light's subtle flavoring, or Miller Lite's aftertaste. They just drink it because it's beer, it's cheap, and you don't need to think about purchasing it. If you want to buy a fancy microbrew you have to spend a lot of time looking at the bottles, picking between them, and you risk picking something that you'll really dislike, like the time I bought Dogfish Head's Raison D'etre without realizing that they made it with actual raisins. There's no risk in light beer.

In some respects, the true inventors of light beer are not the chemists who came up with the idea and tweaked the formula over the years, but the advertisers who convinced people to drink it. There are more chemicals in light beer than in your standard microbrew (at one point Miller Lite had corn syrup in it), and what flavor there is these beers is artificially added (some Bud Light is “Autumn Wheat” flavored, and that's not a naturally occurring taste). Yet we've been conditioned to think of light beer as the norm and ordinary lagers, stouts, and porters as “weird.” Light beer ad campaigns beat you over the head with their popularity—everyone likes it, so you should too—or they compare themselves to other light beers, as if light beer was the only kind of beer in the world. And people buy into the ad campaigns, or they buy the beer at least, which comes down to the same thing.

I'm not going to say that people are stupid for buying light beer, but it should be noted what light beer represents. It's a product that became popular and got incredibly popular because of it's popularity. It can be enjoyed by everyone while loved by no one. And even if it is does sort of taste like piss, you can ignore it and drink a six pack without even thinking about it. Americans get what we deserve when it comes to beer, as we do with so many other things./span> Read more!

Why Tipping Sucks

Tonight, all over the western world, hundreds of thousands of diners in thousands of restaurants will be faced with the most difficult question of their day: how much should we pay for this meal?

Paying for a meal in a restaurant is far more complicated than a purchasing decision like, say, buying a car. With a car you may have to figure out the “APR financing” or whatnot (I clearly don't drive), but in the end you and the salesman figure out how much money you need to exchange for the car. When the waiter puts the check on your table, on the other hand, you have to figure out how much you should pay by asking yourself a series of quesitons that touch on mathematics, altruism, and the very fabric of our existence as social animals.

Was the service good? Was it unexpectedly good? Was the food satisfactory? If everything was good, how much should we tip? Fifteen percent? Twenty percent? Do you calculate that before or after adding the tax? If the service was not good, how much should we tip? Will we come back to this restaurant? Did my wife see me staring at the waittress's cleavage and if so, will she get mad at me if I tip too much? Was our water refilled enough? If I only want to leave thrity-nine dollars, can I ask for change for two twenties, or will the staff think I'm cheap? Do I care what the staff thinks? Does the waittress wear shirts like that just for tips? If she does, should I reward such behavior?

But why do we go through this process? Having to tip makes people stressed out. Couples have arguments over whether they should have tipped more or less. Waiters and waitresses end up resentful of diners' power over them, and get undertipped often enough that they don't like the tipping system either. Cooks, busboys, and other back-of-house staff sometimes don't get tips distributed to them, or individual waitresses will pocket tips instead of splitting them with the rest of the staff—meaning that a good deal of the time, everyone is unhappy that tipping is a part of our culture.

The easy solution would be to pay wait staffs more and work the increased salaries into the menu prices. That way, paying for a meal would be as simple as paying for sneakers, marijuana, or furniture. The only downside to this is waiters and waitresses wouldn't leave work with a bunch of wrinkled cash in their pockets—then again, since they're probably just going to go out and get drunk with that money, is that really a downside? Maybe our young food workers would be more fiscally responsible if we bumped up their paychecks and didn't give them spare change.

The current byzantine estimation process of service and food quality known as “tipping” is the opposite of a “magic eye” puzzle—the more you look at it, the less sense it makes. Waiters suffer when they give good service and they get stiffed; they don't know how much they're going to get paid for their service in advance, which is a pretty demeaning position. Customers suffer from having to deal with questions over who, how much, and whether to tip. Like war and segregation, tipping is a system that harms everyone who comes into contact with it. Normally I consider it outside of this blog's misison to suggest solutions, but here I feel obliged: please, United States Congressmen, take a break from debating health care to make tipping illegal and force restaurants to pay their workers a fair wage. Compared to the other stuff you're dealing with, it'll be easy. Thanks in advance. Read more!

Why General Tso's Chicken Sucks

Does that picture on the left look good? Do you see that and want to call for Chinese take-out? Are you craving a big mound of chicken smothered with anonymous brown sauce? I know, I've been there too. I've wandered into a cheap Chinese place--in my part of Brooklyn you can't avoid wandering into cheap Chinese places--and whatever chemicals I had coursing through my veins at the time told me that I needed the greasiest, least nutritious thing on the menu. And, almost unwillingly, I find myself ordering the General's Tso's Chicken.

When I say "least nutritious," I'm not kidding. This survey of Chinese food nutrition says that an average order of General Tso's chicken has 1,300 calories and a whopping 3,200 milligrams of sodium, which is more sodium than anything listed except the Chicken with Black Bean Sauce, which will kill you instantly. There are no vegetables in an order of General Tso's, except for a few lonely broccoli stalks, and the sauce is loaded with sugar. (This recipe has 3 tablespoons of sugar for a pound of chicken, but I bet some restaurants put in more.) According to this chart, there are nearly 17 grams of fat in a single cup of Tso's. This is not food that a Chinese peasant might eat before a hard day in the fields. This is not food you eat when you want to indulge yourself with a nice meal from a restaurant, or take a date out on the town. This is food you eat when you are loaded, all the decent eateries have closed, and you just need to shovel food--any food--into your mistreated body before passing out fully clothed in your squalid dorm room or apartment.

Maybe there is some General Tso's somewhere that is relatively healthy and doesn't make you feel like you've swallowed a sauce-covered football afterwards. Maybe I'm visiting the wrong kinds of Chinese restaurants and there are fancy Chinese restaurants that offers fancy General Tso's--but then again, I don't think a fancy Chinese place would serve General Tso's--then again, I'm not sure such a thing as a "fancy" Chinese restaurant exists.

Besides the question of whether an upscale Chinese place would serve it, there are two mysteries surrounding General Tso's chicken. The first is the identity of "Tso." Did he inspire fear in his enemies, or just the chickens? How did he find the time to command armies and invent the world's least nutritious sauce?* Did he die in battle or, as I suspect, of clogged arteries?

The second mystery is that Zuo Zongtang's chicken is always one of the more expensive items on the menu. This could be because the sauce is especially expensive to make, but anyone who's ever tasted it knows that's not true. The only reasonable explanation is that there is such a high demand for General Tso's people are willing to pay more for it than other dishes. We're talking about a food that is unequivocally bad for you in the long term, and in the short term, it makes you feel bloated and gross after eating it. General Tso's empire is built on people who are so concerned with immediate gratification (all that sugar and sodium does make it taste pretty good) that they toss out all other concerns.

General Tso's chicken is the siren song of the Chinese take-out menu. It lures us towards its glistening brown rocks of meat with the promise that the first few bites will be delicious, then the next few bites are tolerable, and by the end of it you are simply disgusted with yourself and will throw out the leftovers the next day. When we order it, we know how bad we're going to feel afterwards, and even if we don't have the nutrition facts in front of us, we know that this sauce is destroying our bodies. When we order General Tso's, we're saying, "fuck the future, I'm living for the brown-sauce-covered present." I don't have any data to back this up, but I'll bet that most General Tso's chicken is consumed by college students and other assorted partiers--who in addition to living for the present, are too drunk to know any better. Read more!

Things That Don't Suck: Sandwiches

Despite the title of this blog, we must admit that not everything sucks. Some things simply defy all attempts to criticize them, and we must reluctantly declare them not "good," exactly, but not completely terrible. Today's entry: the sandwich.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, I bet you ate a sandwich today. I know I did: turkey, lettuce and tomato on a roll. It was so good, I might go out and get another sandwich after I finish this post. That's not an unusual day for me either: I've eaten at least a sandwich a day since elementary school, when my mom was making them for me. Since then I've doubled in size, grew facial hair, graduated from high school and college, moved across the country, and discovered sex and recreational drug use. But sandwiches remain a constant presence in my life.

So yeah, I might be biased in this case. But look me in the eye and tell me that sandwiches are a bad idea.

Unless you're even more of a contrarian than I am, you probably aren't inclined to argue that point though. I have no data to back this up, but putting meat or vegetables between two pieces of bread (or wrapping it in a tortilla, or using pita bread--same difference) has to be the most popular idea in the world. Sandwiches are bigger than Jesus: there are only 2.1 billion Christians in the world, but at least that many sandwiches (again, no data) are eaten every day. You can eat them on trains or buses or while walking to work, you can make them in minutes, or buy them at any restaurant or deli. In some big cities, like New York, you have dozens of places per block where you can buy sandwiches--and you'll hardly ever be let down.

Sandwiches have been around for a long time, too. According to Wikipedia, Hillel the Elder, the ancient Jewish sage, was the first to figure it out, putting bitter herbs and lamb between two pieces of matzah, making him the direct ancestor of the modern Jewish deli. Thanks to cultural hegemony, however, we don't ask for pastrami hillels. The naming rights were stolen, like everything else, by the English--we call them after this guy, who didn't invent anything but ate a lot of hillels, like a 18th century Jared. I've always thought that the myth of "Lord Sandwich" was a little unfair, as it claims that the English came up with a culinary innovation that people around the world enjoyed.

But whatever their origins, sandwiches remain cheap, portable, relatively nutritious, and adaptable to any situation. The possibilities are endless--what can't you put between two pieces of bread? You can class things up with a filet mignon and portobella mushroom panini, or you can make peanut butter and jelly and spend seventeen cents. You can overload a reuben with corned beef and sauerkraut or put some hummus to a sundried tomato and roasted zucchini sandwich. The sandwich cuts across all class lines, sexual persuasions, religions, and nationalities. With the right kind of meat, even cannibals can enjoy a sandwich.

This doesn't mean that sandwiches don't suck individually. Some sandwiches are bland thanks to bland ingredients, you can get food poisoning from undercooked meat in sandwiches, the bread can be moldy, or a disgruntled Subway employee can spit swine-flu-infected spit into your sandwich. Or KFC can come out with a disgusting abomination that will kill anyone who eats it. But the idea of a sandwich is good. And I'm about to go eat another one.
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