Tag: food

Tang

Duncan Leave a comment

With a consumer economy that fosters a rampant appetite for new and exciting superficial experiences, it’s not surprising that some of the products appearing on our shelves seem excessive or odd. Found among them: a myriad of synthetically flavored food products.

Synthetic (or artificial) flavoring is the process of simulating a flavor rather than relying on the ingredient(s) from which the flavor is originally derived. This allows us to experience a virtually infinite combination of textures and flavors. An example of this would be orange soda, which contains no oranges, yet tastes, to a limited extent, like an orange.

Artificial flavoring should not be confused with natural flavoring, in which a flavor is added by the introduction of authentic ingredients. An example of this would be chocolate milk, which acquires its chocolaty flavor directly from the chocolate contained therein. Most would agree that synthetic flavoring is the inferior method, but natural flavoring is more restrictive due to the fact that natural ingredients are expensive, don’t always fuse together properly, and may have an undesirable texture. Though artificially flavored food is often lacking in nutrition, there is an even worse process – one which produces items that border on inedibility.

Tertiary flavoring uses existing, recognized food products, not ingredients, as the basis for the creation of flavor. Basically, this means that food is being flavored to imitate other food, instead of a single flavor. Examples of tertiary flavoring include cheeseburger-flavored potato chips, cinnamon bun-flavored ice cream and pizza-flavored salad dressing. However, contrary to what the product’s title implies, pizza is not a flavor.

The term flavor carries a connotation that suggests a raw, elemental state as well as a distinct identity. Although pizza does produce a unique and memorable sensation when in the mouth, what we’re actually experiencing is the combined flavor of a variety of different ingredients, including cheese, tomato sauce and fingernails. To better illustrate tertiary flavoring, let’s take a closer look at the origin of cinnamon bun-flavored ice cream.

cinnamon (flavor) + bun (food) = cinnamon bun (flavored food)

cinnamon bun (flavored food) + ice cream (food) = cinnamon bun-flavored ice cream (food-flavored food)

The idea of food-flavored food is obviously ridiculous. Flavors are colors, not pictures – attributes, not objects. To make things worse, food-flavored food is almost always flavored synthetically, since, as mentioned earlier, it can be costly and difficult to add food to food.

On top of that, everyone knows that food is made of ingredients, not food. If we looked at the back of a bag of birthday cake mix, we would hope that the ingredient list wouldn’t just say “birthday cake.” Birthday cake tastes like birthday cake because it contains the ingredients that come together to form that particular flavor, not because it contains birthday cake. Likewise, if we looked up a recipe for fettuccine Alfredo, we would expect a detailed list of steps and ingredients to help us create the dish, not “acquire fettuccine Alfredo.”

Some claim that pizza and cinnamon bun are legitimate flavors because they are uniquely recognizable, but if we accept this line of thinking, then cinnamon bun-flavored ice cream is also a flavor. And if that’s the case, then one day we could see cinnamon bun-flavored ice cream flavored coffee, or worse.

Don’t buy food-flavored food.

Menu Mayhem: Part II

Duncan Leave a comment

In part I of our exploration into the subject of restaurant menus, we observed that the way in which we read those menus is both chaotic and thoughtless. But for those who do examine their menus systematically, another problem becomes apparent: inconsistent pricing.

To clarify, we’re not discussing the issue of overpriced food, since all restaurant prices are inevitably excessive, nor are we questioning the difference in price between eateries. We’re talking about the inconsistencies in price within the selection of items on a single menu. To begin, let’s look at an example of a typical menu of an imaginary breakfast diner. We are using a diner menu because their simplicity makes the incongruencies more pronounced.

After a brief scan of the selections, it may appear that the pricing makes sense. However, when we begin to break down the meals into their components and price them, it becomes apparent that individual ingredients are priced differently throughout the menu. The Eggs & Toast, for example, is priced the same as the Bacon & Eggs at $5.99. Let’s use some basic algebra to solve for the price of an egg.

  • Let e = egg, b = bacon, t = toast
  • 2e + 2b + t = 3e + t
  • 2e + 2b = 3e
  • e = 2b

So according to the pricing of these two meals, 1 egg is worth 2 strips of bacon. Now let’s compare the Bacon & Eggs and the Meat Lovers meals to get a better understanding of sausage.

  • Let e = egg, b = bacon, t = toast, s = sausage
  • 2e + 2b + t + 1 = 2e + 2b + 2s + t
  • 1 = 2s
  • s = 0.5

So each sausage is worth $0.50, which seems kind of strange, but let us persist in our efforts. According to the Jump Start meal and Side Orders section, bacon and sausage are of equal value.

  • Let b = bacon, s = sausage
  • b = s
  • s = 0.5
  • b = 0.5

Since we know from our first equation that an egg is worth 2 strips of bacon, we can now determine the exact value of an egg.

  • Let e = egg, b = bacon
  • e = 2b
  • b = 0.5
  • e = 1

So a slice of bacon is worth $0.50, a piece of sausage is also worth $0.50, and an egg is worth $1.00. If we plug these values into the Bacon & Eggs meal, we can find the value of toast.

  • Let e = egg, b = bacon, t = toast
  • 2e + 2b + t = 5.99
  • 2 + 1 + t = 5.99
  • t = 2.99

Restaurant menus are clearly weak against algebra. But apart from being mathematically incoherent, there’s another issue which we have ignored up to this point, which is the fact that the Side Orders section has disagreed with every one of our solutions. This isn’t necessarily proof of an inconsistent pricing system, since all businesses intentionally manipulate their pricing in order to create an incentive for their customers to make larger purchases and also to compensate for the inefficiency in taking small orders. However, if we were to construct the Jump Start meal using the pricing from the Side Orders section, we would arrive at a price of $11.95 with hash browns and toast or $12.95 with pancakes. This is nearly twice the price listed on the meal, which is troubling.

So what’s the solution? If we merely sell the components at Side Order pricing, we would no longer be in business. Alternatively, if we attempt to re-work the meal pricing so that it makes sense mathematically, we may end up with some dangerously inexpensive side orders and unnecessary meal options. For if we were to price our meals based purely on components, then there’s no reason to offer multiple combinations of the same items.

The answer is to create a menu of individual items that provides consistent pricing while still rewarding customers for making larger purchases. This could be done by increasing the serving size of components and offering price reductions for purchasing multiple items. Here’s what this might look like. This revised menu includes all of the options of the original menu, yet takes up only half the space and allows even greater customization. And the best part? It makes sense.

Another option could be implementing a minimum order charge, which would ensure that each customer’s visit is at least marginally profitable. But what’s most important is that any customer spirited enough to analyze our menu is blessed with a consistent, sensible pricing system.

Aged Lamb

Duncan 1 Comment

Many North Americans enjoy the taste of lamb. Maybe it tastes so good because lambs are innocent and pure – they haven’t tasted the harsh cruelties of life – or perhaps because the meat hasn’t been sitting out in a field. Whatever the case, we can’t get enough roasted lamb, rack of lamb, lamb chops, lamb shanks or lamb tacos.

Everyone knows that lamb is an acceptable choice of meat that can be found at any supermarket, but why don’t we see mutton along side it? We eat both veal and beef, but in the world of sheep only the young are fit to be devoured, as if the meat becomes garbage once the lamb has a birthday.

A lamb becomes a sheep after one year and its meat can no longer be sold as lamb, instead going by the name hogget; after two years the meat is known as mutton. Obviously the quality of the meat does not immediately disintegrate once the name changes, so there must be another reason for the rejection of this legitimate food source. The answer is found in the question, “Why don’t people eat mutton?” Would you want to eat something called mutton? The word begins with derogatory slang for a dog and makes us think of dark, stringy flesh that smacks of mud and ash. Even hogget, which is not as familiar a term, would cause the curious to cringe after simply reading the label. So what’s the solution?

From now on the meat of any sheep past the age of twelve months shall be known as aged lamb. People like aged things, like wine and cheese, so they will be innately attracted to the idea of aged lamb. It offers the perception of a more robust, chiseled flavor, catering to those of us who prefer more refined cuisine. Now in addition to wearing their hair on our bodies and using their guts for tennis rackets, we can now fill our stomachs with our puffy, bleating friends.

Stop letting sheep off the meat hook and eat aged lamb.

Where Babies Really Come From

Duncan 1 Comment

Want to know where babies really come from? This isn’t about the bedtime olympics or the migration of your micro-salmon up the fallopian river. This is about about how babies are built.

We all know that a baby comes from cells that multiply and divide (which, mathematically, should produce net 0 increase in babies) and how the baby matures during the trimesters in the womb, but where does the matter come from to make a baby’s body?

Imagine a young woman, about 25 years of age. She’s 5’6″, 135 lb and not pregnant. After some late-night antics with her young hubby and nine months of gestation, she’s now a whopping 160 lbs, and about 8 lbs of that is baby. What was that baby made from? There’s only one possibility, and it’s the one way that we take matter into our bodies: food.

Babies are made of food.

When a woman gets pregnant, her body is transformed into a factory which takes in raw materials, such as cheese, bread, Doritos and ice cream, and constructs a baby from those materials. It is likely that you could eat only pizza while pregnant and still produce a marginally healthy baby. If you did, then that baby would be made entirely out of pizza.

So all you pregnant or soon-to-be pregnant ladies should remember that your baby is what you eat… err, your baby is made from what you eat.