Growlers are back!

Photo by Erwyn van der Meer, on flickr.

 According to Young & Hungry, Mayor Gray signed the omnibus alcohol bill yesterday. The process for Sunday sales might take a few weeks, but hopefully growler sales will start earlier. I'll let you know if I hear anything more.

Death to Foodies: A defense of epicurean culture

Steven Poole of the Guardian recently posted a diatribe against foodies. Apparently, they've replaced famine as the third horseman of the apocalypse. "Western Industrial Civilization is eating itself stupid," he writes. I find more telling his description of a Jamie Oliver stage appearance.

Food festivals (or, if you will, "Feastivals") are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking. As one dumbfounded witness of a stage appearance by Jamie Oliver observed: "The girls at the front – it's an overwhelmingly female crowd – are already holding up their iPhones […] A group in front of me are saying, 'Ohmigodohmigodohmigod' on a loop […] 'I love you, Jamie,' yells a girl on the brink of fainting."

So the burgeoning food culture is the new rock and roll? Wouldn't that put Mr. Poole in the age-old position of septugenarian critic, looking down his nose at kids these days? That doesn't seem that far off the mark.

On a crisp autumn evening in a north London street, a rôtisserie trailer is parked outside a garden flat, green fairy lights blinking on and off, warm chickens perfuming the air. A thirtyish hipster wanders out to where I'm standing with a friend on the pavement and drawls his unimpressed judgment of what is going on inside. "I think the arancinis are not quite spicy enough," he informs us, with an eaten-it-all-before air. "Could have more flavour, not really exotic." Right now I haven't the faintest idea what "arancinis" are (or that arancini, like panini, is already an Italian plural) . . . .

I think we can all agree that hipsters are annoying. But what does this really say about epicures as a whole? The people I've met who have loved food have generally been generous souls, more eager to share their new finds than to declaim how they liked that dish before anyone had heard of it. But to be fair, Mr. Poole's problems seem to extend further than old-man-syndrome. He complains that food has become a new religion:

Food is not only a safe "passion" (in the tellingly etiolated modern sense of "passion" that just means liking something a lot); it has become an obligatory one. The unexamined meal, as a pair of pioneer modern "foodies" wrote in the 1980s, is not worth eating. Most cannily, the department of philosophy at the University of North Texas announced in 2011 its "Philosophy of Food Project", no doubt having noticed which way the wind was blowing, and presumably hoping that it would be able to trick food-obsessives into hard thinking about other topics. One can of course think philosophically about food, as about anything at all, but that is not what is going on in our mainstream gastroculture. [. . .]

Everywhere in the ideology of foodism we see a yearning for food to be able to fill a spiritual void. Food is about "spirituality" and "expressing our identity", claims modern food-knight Michael Pollan. His celebrated catechism of modern foodism, The Omnivore's Dilemma, speaks of eating with a "full consciousness", and claims that every meal has its "karmic price"; it ends with the declaration that "what we're eating is never anything more or less than the body of the world". And so chewing on pork products becomes a sublime union of self with planet, a Gaian eucharist.

 Kant defines art as something which provides the occasion for much thought, and while he likely would not be happy with the idea of food as art, I don't see anything self-contradictory in the idea. "The unexamined meal is not worth eating" may be a bridge too far, but there can be value in thinking about what we eat. And the spiritual essence of food, far from being absurd or Gaian, is obvious. When we celebrate a meal, we have communion with those with whom we share it. It is not for nothing that the most prominent religion in American (and England) has the consumption of bread and wine at it's center.

And even to the extent a meal is purely an aesthetic experience, there's nothing wrong with that. Philosophers as diverse as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche have seen the aesthetic life as being in many ways closer to the best way of life than the blander life of ethics and duty. Having something outside of ourselves that we value leads us outside of ourselves, even if that thing is simply good food, well-prepared. And, unlike Rock 'n' Roll, the best epicures value healthy food as much as tasty food. (Not that the two are mutually exclusive.)

Mr. Poole seems to inadvertently hit on some of these themes when he talks about the linking of food and culture:

In an experiment, two psychologists gave different groups of people Heston Blumenthal's "Crab Ice-Cream" while describing it differently: one group was told it was about to eat a "savoury mousse", the other was expecting "ice-cream". The people given savoury mousse liked it, but the people thinking they were eating ice-cream found it "digusting" and even "the most unpleasant food they had ever tasted". The psychologists add that most food tastes "blander" without the "expectation of flavour caused by the visual appearance or verbal description of what is going to be eaten". One is reminded of Terry Gilliam's film Brazil, in which the plates of homogeneous brown muck at the restaurant are differentiated by the colour photos stuck in them and the savouring announcement of their names: "Numero deux, duck à l'orange", "Numero une, crevettes à la mayonnaise". (Slavoj Žižek calls this comic disjunction the "split between the food's image and the real of its formless excremental remainder".) The "exercise of vocabulary" in a menu, then, is never merely "abstract", as Robbe-Grillet thought. You eat their words.

To repeat a line: And what is wrong with that? Of course our experience is mediated through language. Who would deny otherwise? I remain unclear about what Mr. Poole's problem is. He seems to be upset that some restaurant have clumsily written menus, or perhaps that they engage in marketing; what he seems not to realize is that epicures just want to enjoy food.

Omnibus Alcohol Beverage Regulatory Act

Photo by Katy Watts, on flickr.

Over at Prince of Petworth is a discussion of the new Omnibus Alcohol Beverage Regulatory Act. It appears  that they're not looking to authorize retailers like D'Vines and D'Vinos to sell growlers.

Oh yeah, back to the original request, if anyone wants to comment on whether stores like D’Vines should be able to sell growlers again, you can do so here. The current language looks like only full-service grocery stores and brew pubs will be able to sell growlers.

I encourage to comment here, and write your councilmember!

To Ban or Not to Ban

Photo by Sifu Renka, from flickr.

Mayor Bloomberg's recent edict banning the sale of large sized soft drinks once again brought up the question, what role should the government play is what foods we should eat. Baylen Linnekin, of Keep Food Legal, has an answer: none.

We want you to have the right to grow, raise, produce, buy, sell, cook, eat, and drink the food of your own choosing. We’re opposed to subsidies that skew those choices and bans that clear those choices off the board. People are not stupid. They can make their own choices and live with the consequences.

This doesn't mean, however, that he thinks that the government should have no role.

There is one area where Linnekin agrees some government regulation is appropriate: “I’m flatly opposed to the hunting of endangered species for food purposes,” he says. But even that comes with a caveat. “If you’re dying in the desert and it’s you or the endangered snake, then a person should be free to eat an endangered species.”

He discussed this with Nevin Martell over Sharks' Fin Soup. I suppose I mostly agree with him. The government shouldn't be involved in banning foods that are supposed to be unhealthy, their role in regulating drugs aside. Protecting endangered species, on the other hand, is pretty important, as are regulations protection the stock of food we can draw on for the future -- fishing and hunting regulations, that sort of thing. I'm not sure I'm completely with Mr. Linnekin when it comes to subsidies, though. Subsidizing some crops, like corn, in order to help farmers seems to have worked out poorly in practice. I'm not opposed in principle, however, to a subsidy designed to make healthy food cheaper, a sort of libertarian paternalism as it's called. It doesn't have the same flat interference with people's preferences that a ban does, it merely encourages those preferences to follow different, more vegetable shaped lines.

The interview with Mr. Linnekin was originally published in the Washington, DC City Paper.

It could be worse: Chicago Food Truck regulations

I'm not too much of a fan of the proposed food truck regulations. Business in DC is to tightly regulated as it is; we should really let a thousand food trucks bloom. But it's nice to see that it could be worse, in a schadenfreude kind of way:

Under the new proposal, truck owners would be able to cook food to order, park at designated food truck stands across the city, operate around the clock, and stay in a location for up to two hours. Trucks would have to undergo regular health department inspections, and at lease one employee on site would have to have sanitation training.

No wonder, as the article notes, the food truck scene in Chicago is years behind LA! Designated food truck stands make food trucks compete with brick and mortar restaurants with one hand tied behind their backs. But, again, it could be worse, and I'm sure Chicago's food trucks are happy for what they have.

Original story from Atlantic Cities.

Blue Laws; or, it's Sunday and I need a beer

Photo by Don Nunn, from flickr

From the Washington Post, Mike DeBonis reports on the latest proposal to ease moralistic blue laws in the District.

D.C. Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) said today he is likely to recommend allowing Sunday sales for holders of Class A (liquor store) licenses as part of the city budget. The additional $710,000 in sales tax revenue that would be generated by dropping the restriction would go some way toward the $3.2 million Graham needs to find to kill MayorVincent C. Gray’s proposal to extend bar hours as late as 4 a.m.

There's some criticism of this proposal on the grounds that it won't raise as much money as the proponents claim it will. I think that's beside the point. Blue laws like those restricting alcohol sales on Sunday are part of an outdated moralism about drinking. The law should be repealed, not because it might net DC additional revenue, but because it's a bad law. States that restrict alcohol sales on Sunday are down to a handful: Indiana, Connecticut, Minnesota, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. It's high time DC joined the 44 states that allow people to buy a perfectly legal product whatever day of the week it might happen to be.

h/t: Greater Greater Washington

Almost Alcoholic? The Atlantic thinks we all are.

Photo by Michal Sänger, from flickr.

The Atlantic posted an article recently purportedly suggesting a revision in how we classify alcoholics to recognize a spectrum of alcohol abuse. The old, strict definition of alcoholism relied on physical dependence to make its diagnosis. If you didn't need alcohol in your system all the time, you weren't an alcoholic. Later, alcohol abuse was added to the DSM, defined as having had an episode where you suffered serious consequences due to your drinking, such as a DUI or losing a job. Joseph Nowinsky and Robert Doyle suggest that rather than a bi- or trivalent notion of alcoholism, we need to consider it more as a spectrum.

We believe that, as opposed to thinking only those men and women whose drinking has progressed to the point where they need help, that many people in the mid-range may also be suffering as a result of drinking. That suffering may take the form of declining job performance and declining health so that the individual does not yet recognize it as being related to drinking.

Well and good. There's undoubtedly a spectrum of alcohol abuse and dependence, and ill effects can occur long before they become noticeable. So guidance for doctors and psychologists that doesn't rely on an overly simplistic schema can be helpful. But Nowinsky and Doyle's list of symptoms seems over-broad. They list:

• You drink to relieve stress.
• You often drink alone.
• You look forward to drinking.
• Your drinking may be related to one or more health problems.
• You drink to relieve boredom or loneliness.
• You sometimes drive after drinking.
• You drink to maintain a "buzz."
• Your performance at work is not what it used to be.
• You aren't comfortable in social situations without drinking.
• You find that drinking helps you overcome your shyness. 

This seems excessive to say the least. Most of these are signs, not of alcohol abuse, but of alcohol enjoyment. There's a certain line of thinking that tends to believe that any drinking is pathological; these are the same people that say that splitting a couple bottles of wine with your wife over a five course meal is binge drinking, or that a glass of wine during pregnancy makes you a bad mother. No doubt if drinking is your only stress-reliever or if you're driving after putting down a fifth, you have a problem, but the authors seem to think that if any of these apply to you, you're almost an alcoholic.

The key line is this one: "That research has resulted in a number of strategies that individuals can use to either stop or reduce their drinking." It's a problem if you see the only goal of your research as reducing or stopping drinking, rather than accurately measuring when it's a difficulty rather than a hobby.

Are You Almost Alcoholic? Taking a New Look at an Old Problem - The Atlantic