SLOW Movement

NY Times: Pancakes, Prosperity, Peace

January 5, 2010

Op-Ed Columnist

Pancakes, Prosperity, Peace

By ROGER COHEN

HOI AN, VIETNAM — After the war and failed flight overseas, after her father’s persecution and the knowledge of hunger, it was the miracle of the crispy pancake that changed things for Trinh Diem Vy.

That pancakes save lives is not sufficiently known. That Vy’s family pancake — a savory rice-flour creation turned a warm yellow by turmeric and stuffed with shrimp, pork, bean sprouts, star fruit, mixed herbs, green banana — can reconcile a war-ravaged nation like Vietnam is a truth this woman has lived.

Hurt still inhabits her eyes. Vy’s father worked with U.S. forces during the war. When America lost, retribution came for him in the form of Communist “re-education.” Unable to put food on the table, he would bang his head against the wall in frustration. Attempts to flee in 1975 and 1978 failed.

“The second time we got as far as a fishing village and there was this woman with blackened teeth, spooky-looking,” Vy tells me. “She offered us clams in a broth with sweet potatoes, and I did not want to eat it but my mother made me. And the comfort of it spread through me. I guess I learned early that when I feel a deep stress, the only place that brings me back is the kitchen.”

It was a quiet morning in Hoi An on the central Vietnamese coast, a scent of lemon basil in the air. Old folk were dusting porches with brooms of bound thatch.

Just up the coast, at Da Nang, the first American marines landed in 1965, and the war soon escalated. Vy smiles at me: “During the hunger, I understood that food was life. Now I look at all the fresh ingredients and it brings back my energy.”

I’m a big believer in the stress-dissipating, difference-bridging kitchen. Nothing dissolves angst as fast as culinary creation. I look forward to the first Israeli-Palestinian food festival and the inaugural Indian-Pakistani gastronomic fair. Visceral enemies betray themselves in the similarity of their foods. We know from the Bible how blood brothers slay each other.

Vy, now 40, saw all the killing as a child. She knows the millions of dead beneath the shimmering green of the rice paddies. She saw how the collectivization of the Communist victors could keep rice from tables. Survival, she understood, comes first; then comes the rest.

The rest began with that crisp pancake, the signature dish of the tiny restaurant her family opened in 1980. From the first, it was about balance of taste and texture. For Vy, there are five essential elements of taste — sweet, sour, hot, bitter and salty. But they demand the five elements of texture: crispy, crunchy, chewy, soft and silky. In their marriage lies the harmony that reconciles.

Locals came. They chewed and talked. So did occasional visitors. The yin-yang pancake was deemed good. Former foes agreed on that.

Vy liked the feel in her hands of the mangos blotchy from the sun, the coarse-skinned pomelos, the turmeric root gnarled as ginger, the crinkly rice paper and crisp-stemmed morning glory. She mused on her future — and took a practical romantic step.

He was from the North, of “clean background,” and so he opened party-controlled doors. “My husband gave me space, I was able to do things,” she says. Was it a loveless marriage? “Let’s say we are modern friends.”

So it was that the daughter of a man who fought with the Americans married into a family that fought against the United States: of such compromises has Vietnam’s fast-growing prosperity been built. And so it was that Vy got authorization to open her own restaurant, “Mermaid,” in 1990, about the time that the Communists were deciding socialism was really whatever made the people happy.

Vy now has four restaurants. She’s a successful entrepreneur in a country where communism is capitalism. She dreams of the quiet life but “is riding the tiger” for now.

That takes balance, which is what her food is about. She explains texture. A pear or bean sprout is crunchy. Deep-fried is crispy. Chewy is, well, Vietnamese meat. Good rice is soft and silky. American food, by contrast, tends toward uniformity of texture and instant, illusory satisfaction.

Vietnam induces wonder. All the French blood, American blood, Vietnamese blood, the decades of war, has been conjured away. Nations where women are succeeding and compromise is prized are capable of that. Vy has balanced out the past. Women do that a lot better than men.

She worries about the speed of development now, tells me “we are selling the young rice” (a Vietnamese metaphor for being impatient), losing the life of the spirit to globalized material things. Prospective daughters-in-law need no longer prove their worth by preparing a good “pho” — the national broth. “People want shortcuts, but in cooking there are no short cuts,” she says.

With that Vy offers me a wonderful banh mi op la, that marriage of the French baguette, eggs, chili, fresh herbs and spices that in itself seems almost worth a colonial war. The banh mi is an act of balance like Vy’s inspiring life.

Copyright 2010

FT: Lunch with the FT - Tristram Stuart

Lunch with the FT: Tristram Stuart

By William Leith

Published: December 23 2009 23:11 | Last updated: December 23 2009 23:11

I’m waiting for Tristram Stuart in Wahaca, a noisy Mexican restaurant in Covent Garden, in the middle of London. Stuart, a campaigner and author, is well-known for two things. The first is that he’s a freegan – he regularly takes food from bins outside supermarkets, and eats it. The other is that he has, in conjunction with charities including Action Aid and Save the Children, just staged an event in Trafalgar Square called “Feeding the 5,000”, where people ate food that would otherwise have gone to waste. Stuart, whose book Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal was shortlisted for this year’s FT’s Business Book of the Year Award, is an authority on food wastage – a natural genius of frugality.

Still, he’s not a genius of punctuality. But never mind. I sit alone at my table in Wahaca, which is the phonetic spelling of Oaxaca, an area of Mexico with a diverse cuisine. I’m in a huge, rambling basement full of loud Christmas lunchers, many wearing bright paper hats. The season of excess, I can see, is picking up speed. The menu is big – a flapping sheet of paper that looks like satellite TV listings. Masses of choice. Tender, marinated this and that, with a wide variety of salsa. Beef, chicken, fish, chorizo. I order a dark beer and an aged tequila, which is described as being “like a malt whisky”. It’s surprisingly delicate, and comes in a playfully chunky little glass.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Lunch with the FT - Jun-12

When he arrives, Stuart, 32, looks exactly as you’d expect – a tall, handsome, unshaven saviour of the homeless and the hungry. But he also looks like a man who would not be afraid to rummage for food in supermarket dustbins. In fact, he has compiled a detailed chart on the subject, setting waste statistics against gross takings. Later, he will tell me that one of the things he has found most satisfying is compiling lists and charts of statistics concerning food waste. He may know more about the subject than any man on earth.

He takes off his duffel coat with its big toggles. Underneath he is wearing a white collarless shirt and a grey jumper. It’s the day after the Trafalgar Square event. He is exhausted but full of adrenalin. He picks up the menu. “The thing I like about this menu”, he says, “is that it doesn’t make a song and dance about being sustainable, but it takes it for granted. I’m not saying everything is perfect. But you can tell there’s an effort being made to source things in a sustainable way. It doesn’t say at the top a big thing about sustainable fishing. And it doesn’t say anything at all about the effort being made to recycle food waste. It’s just done. And that’s what you want – for these things almost to be taken for granted.” The chef at Wahaca is Thomasina Miers, who performed a cooking demonstration at Stuart’s Trafalgar Square event.

The waiter appears. This is one of those places where the waiter does a lot of smiling and explaining of the complexities of the menu. You can share things, or not; or have lots of little things, or a couple of big things. The plates are a funny shape, like little trays. There are sauces. “This one is mild citrus. This is smoky. And this is evil – believe me.”

Then he says to Stuart: “I think I saw you on the TV.”

“Yes,” Stuart says, “you know what happened yesterday? We fed 5,000 people for free in Trafalgar Square. We served 3,200 curries, three tons of free groceries, and I think half a ton of smoothies.” The figures are, he explains, estimated, partly by counting unused plates. Later, he revises the number of curries upwards to 3,500.

We look again at the menu. Stuart says, “Pollock, of course, is relatively sustainable.” I order the pollock. Stuart orders a burrito of seasonal vegetables with avocado salsa. His first book, The Bloodless Revolution (2006), was a history of vegetarianism, although he is not one himself. He lives on a farm in Sussex and shoots and eats squirrels. He also keeps pigs. He boils their heads, to eke out every bit of goodness. In fact, he is passionate about pigs, to the extent of dedicating Waste to his first sow – Gudrun.

“Do you mind sharing drinks?” he asks.

“Uh, no.”

“Well, let’s order an almond one and a hibiscus one.” He also orders a coffee with milk on the side. I order a double espresso.

Raising his voice to be heard above the festive atmosphere in the restaurant, Stuart tells me about the Trafalgar Square event. “We brought enough food to feed 5,000 people, and all that food would otherwise have been wasted. I spend most of my time making arguments and explanations for why it matters that we waste food, and what we can do about it. And yesterday I didn’t need to say anything. The food was there. People were queueing up and taking away bagfuls of free groceries. And when they got to the front of the line – it’s just a joyous sight – people were saying, ‘What’s wrong with this? Why was this going to be wasted?’ I didn’t need to say any more. Exactly.”

I say I heard people talking about it on the radio. They loved the food – and the idea. “Did they? Did they? Brilliant! I watched it unfold. I was overwhelmed. The thing that I completely failed to anticipate was ... the magic. I couldn’t see the end of the queue. They were queueing right around Trafalgar Square. In the snow. They would get to the end of the queue, and get this plate of delicious curry, and bread. Their faces just changed colour.”

We discuss Waste, which is shocking, and also quite straightforward. In the book he explains, using figures extrapolated from a “protracted examination” of 2,000 household bins by the Waste and Resources Action Programme, how we produce too much food. We chuck a lot of it away uneaten. The bread and grain products we throw away in this country every year would help 26m people to avoid starvation – we dump 2.6bn slices of bread every year. And also 484m unopened yoghurts. And 1.6bn apples. In all, we throw away more than 30 per cent of the food we buy.

Why? Because, as Stuart points out in Waste, human beings have always loved excess. “Surplus has been the foundation for human success for 10,000 years.” A tribe with too much food increases in size, and also in strength. Human beings have always believed that having too much is better than the frightening alternative of not having enough.

This also seems true of today’s food economy. Stuart says, “Let’s completely hypothetically say you have an article of food, cost price 50p, retail price £1. It becomes financially much more attractive to overstock, and lose the cost price, than understock and lose...”

“The sale?”

“Yes. The sale. Now, that’s a tightrope that any supplier of any product would have to tread. Something that is less excusable is when they overstock beyond the requirement to avoid the risk of missing out on sales. In other words, they fill the shelves in order to create the image of abundance. Because that is what customers expect. They’ve been led to expect this. In fact, it’s a recent phenomenon. Bare shelves in supermarkets were a common sight in the 1980s. But now, food is not being put on a shelf just to feed people but to create a display...”

I nod.

“...a display of cornucopian abundance. Um, I’m just wondering whether that was a tautology. I think it probably was.”

Our food arrives. The pollock is wrapped in tinfoil, and comes with spicy vegetables – peppers and onions. Pollock is a dense white-fleshed fish, rather like cod, but not as over-fished. Stuart has written about the vast amount of waste perpetrated by the global fishing industry. In trying to catch fish that are attractive to wholesalers, trawlers must catch vast numbers of fish that are not so attractive, but which die anyway, and are then thrown back unused.

Stuart is getting stuck into his food. “I’m a big fan of street food,” he says. “And that’s what this is. I like that – what’s the word? – colloquial food culture. Whenever I go to any part of the world, one of my windows on to the culture is to just go out and eat whatever is put forward by whoever is on the street. And to completely disregard the warnings of getting hepatitis in Kazakhstan from eating horse tripe stuffed with horse meat in railway stations made by locals in their own kitchens and brought out when they know the train from Moscow is about to go through...”

Stuart grew up in Sussex, in the Ashdown Forest. There were rocky times in his family life – his parents got divorced, and his father, Simon, was ill for a time with kidney disease. There were two older brothers. For a time, when his father was ill, Stuart went to boarding school in Sevenoaks, which he didn’t like. Or at least, when I ask him if he liked it, he remains silent, and then says something like it was good to get home, back to the Ashdown Forest.

For a time, when he was in his teens, he lived with his father. “The heyday was when I lived with my dad. It was just him and me. And I bought pigs. I bought Gudrun.” Keeping pigs taught Stuart about food waste. He collected canteen scraps from his school, and soon joined a network of farmers and shopkeepers who would give him potatoes and cauliflower leaves and tomatoes for his pigs. The pigs “had lovely, long bacon-backs” – the meat, he says, was great. When the pigs ate tomatoes, the seeds would pass through them, and Stuart got a field full of tomato plants. Then he made chutney.

“I had my pigs and my father had this fantastic vegetable garden and I got chickens,” says Stuart. “We were trying to be organic and self-sufficient. Not in a self-conscious way. It was just a wonderful, wonderful time.” Stuart’s father had been a progressive schoolteacher. “When he came into the classroom, the first thing he would do was tell all the children to rearrange the desks into a circle.”

When Stuart left school, he went to work on a farm in rural France. “They were some of the last true peasants – a real inspiration to me,” he says. Next, he read English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he met Alice Albinia, whom he married in 2001. The moment he finished his finals, he dashed over to Kosovo “to do some humanitarian aid”. Then he joined Alice in India, where she was working for the Centre for Science and Environment. He worked there, too.

The burritos are pleasantly bland – the flatbread exterior soft and doughy. I wonder if I should try the sauce the waiter described as “evil” but decide against it. Stuart and Alice, who is also an author, have moved back to the Ashdown Forest. They have pigs, chickens, “and bees, which I’ve always wanted”. I ask him whether they plan on having any children. He ponders the question, eventually saying, “I think there’s a strong case, environmentally, for delayed reproduction.”

We swap drinks. I’ve had the almond one. Now I sip the hibiscus one, which is like Ribena but not so sweet. We talk global food production. About too much fertiliser being put into the soil, to increase yields. About forests being chopped down, to make way for fields of soya beans, so that we can feed cattle, so that we can eat beef. The fact that beef cattle are raised on maize and soya, says Stuart, “turns the entire rationale of the domestication of animals on its head. When humans first domesticated animals, it was to increase the net food supply – because domesticated animals were able to convert otherwise unusable resources into...”

“Calories?”

“Yes, calories. But also into other products. Like traction – pulling ploughs – milk, meat ... and heating! In northern climates, you kept your animals indoors. They were radiators. No, seriously! Those peasants in France that I lived with – you had your cow in your living room, literally with their heads sticking in your living room. No way were you going to allow all that wonderful heat to...”

The waiter appears again. Do I want anything else? I look at the menu for a while. My mind goes blank. Stuart says he’s full. But why don’t I have something? I point to a dish. It turns out to be beef tostada – cold, shredded beef on small tortillas, which are like crackers. A ball of cold beef on a cracker. Not bad, actually.

And as we eat, we talk waste, and more waste. Quite simply, the western world is producing too much food. We don’t understand how expensive this might eventually become. The soil will wear out. Or else we’ll chop all the trees down. Or else we’ll deplete the fish stocks. These things will happen, if we don’t change our ways. There’s a lot we can do. Write shopping lists to plan meals. Buy less. Use leftovers. Don’t peel vegetables. Eat less meat...

He looks at his phone. He is running behind schedule again. “It’s 2.40! My wife has been waiting for me outside! That’s fine. I was late. But I should at least tell her I’m here.” He talks on the phone for a minute. Then he puts on his duffel coat with the big toggles, and shakes my hand.

.......................

Wahaca
66 Chandos Place
London WC2

Beer x 2 £7.60
DJ Anejo (tequila) x 1 £4.50
Double espresso x 3 £5.25
Hibiscus Agua drink x 1 £1.30
Horchata almond drink x 1 £1.30
Vegetable burrito x 1 £6.00
Pollock x 1 £9.95
Beef tostada x 1 £3.85

Total £39.75

.........................................................................................

Feeding the 5,000: ‘Food waste seems so irrational’

Sherif Moursy
Hotel worker, London (originally from Egypt)

“We waste so much food where I work. Probably half is thrown away. It should be given to charity, because this amount of waste is unethical. I will definitely try to change my lifestyle now.”

Bill Souster
Unemployed actuary, London

“My parents brought me up never to waste food, so I detest waste and try not to throw anything away. I’m unemployed at the moment so I have plenty of spare time for a free lunch.”

Hannah Spens-Black
Theatre producer, Somerset

“I’m from the country so I’m used to wonky vegetables, and I’m sure the food will taste exactly the same as from the supermarkets. Food waste seems so irrational, so this event is an awesome idea.”

Gordon Brown
Retired, London

“Consumers have been pre-conditioned to expect their food to look perfect. If we adjusted our tastes, [supermarkets] like Tesco would flex their muscles a bit more to respond to the problem of food waste.”

Kiraz Aslan
Volunteer at Feed the 5,000, student, London

“I decided to volunteer today. I’m hoping it will encourage people to change the way they think about food.”

Sonia Krylova

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NewScientist: The perfect way to slice a pizza

The perfect way to slice a pizza

• 11 December 2009 by Stephen Ornes
• Magazine issue 2738. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink Topic Guide

Solving essential life problems (Image: Eric Savage/Getty)

1 more image

LUNCH with a colleague from work should be a time to unwind - the most taxing task being to decide what to eat, drink and choose for dessert. For Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann it has never been that simple. They can't think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. "We went to lunch together at least once a week," says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. "One of us would bring a notebook, and we'd draw pictures while our food was getting cold."

The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza - and if not, who will get more?

Of course you could estimate the area of each slice, tot them all up and work out each person's total from that. But these guys are mathematicians, and so that wouldn't quite do. They wanted to be able to distil the problem down to a few general, provable rules that avoid exact calculations, and that work every time for any circular pizza.

As with many mathematical conundrums, the answer has arrived in stages - each looking at different possible cases of the problem. The easiest example to consider is when at least one cut passes plumb through the centre of the pizza. A quick sketch shows that the pieces then pair up on either side of the cut through the centre, and so can be divided evenly between the two diners, no matter how many cuts there are.

So far so good, but what if none of the cuts passes through the centre? For a pizza cut once, the answer is obvious by inspection: whoever eats the centre eats more. The case of a pizza cut twice, yielding four slices, shows the same result: the person who eats the slice that contains the centre gets the bigger portion. That turns out to be an anomaly to the three general rules that deal with greater numbers of cuts, which would emerge over subsequent years to form the complete pizza theorem.

The first proposes that if you cut a pizza through the chosen point with an even number of cuts more than 2, the pizza will be divided evenly between two diners who each take alternate slices. This side of the problem was first explored in 1967 by one L. J. Upton in Mathematics Magazine (vol 40, p 163). Upton didn't bother with two cuts: he asked readers to prove that in the case of four cuts (making eight slices) the diners can share the pizza equally. Next came the general solution for an even number of cuts greater than 4, which first turned up as an answer to Upton's challenge in 1968, with elementary algebraic calculations of the exact area of the different slices revealing that, again, the pizza is always divided equally between the two diners (Mathematics Magazine, vol 41, p 46).

With an odd number of cuts, things start to get more complicated. Here the pizza theorem says that if you cut the pizza with 3, 7, 11, 15... cuts, and no cut goes through the centre, then the person who gets the slice that includes the centre of the pizza eats more in total. If you use 5, 9, 13, 17... cuts, the person who gets the centre ends up with less (see diagram).

Rigorously proving this to be true, however, has been a tough nut to crack. So difficult, in fact, that Mabry and Deiermann have only just finalised a proof that covers all possible cases.

Their quest started in 1994, when Deiermann showed Mabry a revised version of the pizza problem, again published in Mathematics Magazine (vol 67, p 304). Readers were invited to prove two specific cases of the pizza theorem. First, that if a pizza is cut three times (into six slices), the person who eats the slice containing the pizza's centre eats more. Second, that if the pizza is cut five times (making 10 slices), the opposite is true and the person who eats the centre eats less.

The first statement was posed as a teaser: it had already been proved by the authors. The second statement, however, was preceded by an asterisk - a tiny symbol which, in Mathematics Magazine, can mean big trouble. It indicates that the proposers haven't yet proved the proposition themselves. "Perhaps most mathematicians would have thought, 'If those guys can't solve it, I'm not going to look at it.'" Mabry says. "We were stupid enough to look at it."

Most mathematicians would have thought, 'I'm not going to look at it.' We were stupid enough to try

Deiermann quickly sketched a solution to the three-cut problem - "one of the most clever things I've ever seen," as Mabry recalls. The pair went on to prove the statement for five cuts - even though new tangles emerged in the process - and then proved that if you cut the pizza seven times, you get the same result as for three cuts: the person who eats the centre of the pizza ends up with more.

Boosted by their success, they thought they might have stumbled across a technique that could prove the entire pizza theorem once and for all. For an odd number of cuts, opposing slices inevitably go to different diners, so an intuitive solution is to simply compare the sizes of opposing slices and figure out who gets more, and by how much, before moving on to the next pair. Working your way around the pizza pan, you tot up the differences and there's your answer.

Simple enough in principle, but it turned out to be horribly difficult in practice to come up with a solution that covered all the possible numbers of odd cuts. Mabry and Deiermann hoped they might be able to deploy a deft geometrical trick to simplify the problem. The key was the area of the rectangular strips lying between each cut and a parallel line passing through the centre of the pizza (see diagram). That's because the difference in area between two opposing slices can be easily expressed in terms of the areas of the rectangular strips defined by the cuts. "The formula for [the area of] strips is easier than for slices," Mabry says. "And the strips give some very nice visual proofs of certain aspects of the problem."

Unfortunately, the solution still included a complicated set of sums of algebraic series involving tricky powers of trigonometric functions. The expression was ugly, and even though Mabry and Deiermann didn't have to calculate the total exactly, they still had to prove it was positive or negative to find out who gets the bigger portion. It turned out to be a massive hurdle. "It ultimately took 11 years to figure that out," says Mabry.

Over the following years, the pair returned occasionally to the pizza problem, but with only limited success. The breakthrough came in 2006, when Mabry was on a vacation in Kempten im Allgäu in the far south of Germany. "I had a nice hotel room, a nice cool environment, and no computer," he says. "I started thinking about it again, and that's when it all started working." Mabry and Deiermann - who by now was at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau - had been using computer programs to test their results, but it wasn't until Mabry put the technology aside that he saw the problem clearly. He managed to refashion the algebra into a manageable, more elegant form.

Back home, he put computer technology to work again. He suspected that someone, somewhere must already have worked out the simple-looking sums at the heart of the new expression, so he trawled the online world for theorems in the vast field of combinatorics - an area of pure mathematics concerned with listing, counting and rearranging - that might provide the key result he was looking for.

Eventually he found what he was after: a 1999 paper that referenced a mathematical statement from 1979. There, Mabry found the tools he and Deiermann needed to show whether the complex algebra of the rectangular strips came out positive or negative. The rest of the proof then fell into place (American Mathematical Monthly, vol 116, p 423).

So, with the pizza theorem proved, will all kinds of important practical problems now be easier to deal with? In fact there don't seem to be any such applications - not that Mabry is unduly upset. "It's a funny thing about some mathematicians," he says. "We often don't care if the results have applications because the results are themselves so pretty." Sometimes these solutions to abstract mathematical problems do show their face in unexpected places. For example, a 19th-century mathematical curiosity called the "space-filling curve" - a sort of early fractal curve - recently resurfaced as a model for the shape of the human genome.

Mabry and Deiermann have gone on to examine a host of other pizza-related problems. Who gets more crust, for example, and who will eat the most cheese? And what happens if the pizza is square? Equally appetising to the mathematical mind is the question of what happens if you add extra dimensions to the pizza. A three-dimensional pizza, one might argue, is a calzone - a bread pocket filled with pizza toppings - suggesting a whole host of calzone conjectures, many of which Mabry and Deiermann have already proved. It's a passion that has become increasingly theoretical over the years. So if on your next trip to a pizza joint you see someone scribbling formulae on a napkin, it's probably not Mabry. "This may ruin any pizza endorsements I ever hoped to get," he says, "but I don't eat much American pizza these days."

There are a host of other pizza problems - who gets more crust, for example, and who gets most cheese

Stephen Ornes is a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee

FT: The graceful revolution

The graceful revolution

By Harry Eyres

Published: December 12 2009 00:41 | Last updated: December 12 2009 00:41

The emblem of the McDonald’s chain is carried during a protest surrounding José Bové’s trial in 1999

I don’t often feel tempted to raise my hand in salute but I’m making an exception for the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Slow Food Manifesto in Paris in December 1989. This is a fraternal greeting to the inspired organisation which, at the tail end of the most violent century in history, provided the perfect antidote to that lamentable paean to speed, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Slow Food has not merely mobilised the beneficent force of slowness (which can be surprisingly powerful, like the tree-men Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) but has also provided one of the bases for a new politics of food and environmental quality.

Slow Food’s founder Carlo Petrini, as Italian as Marinetti but in every other way his polar opposite, saw – and set about resisting – the implications of a world and an economy in which food was being turned to industrialised fodder. Ultimately that means no less than a defence of the human and of nature, of cultural diversity and biodiversity.

But if Slow Food is a revolution, it is one conducted with style and grace, not violence. Almost everything about Slow Food is encapsulated in its first act, the protest Petrini organised against the opening of a McDonald’s hamburger joint at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Where the French activist and Roquefort farmer José Bové dismantled a half-built McDonald’s in Millau, Petrini showed he had learned more from the situationists than from the sans-culottes. Instead of breaking glass he set up some trestle tables and assembled a bunch of Italian grannies to load them with home-cooked penne.

Some might also say that act pointed to the limitations of Slow Food as a movement. It was essentially Italian and unserious. Certainly Petrini is a delightfully witty man, but just because someone is witty it does not mean he or she cannot be serious. And in terms of Italianness, it may still be the case that half of Slow Food’s 106,000 members are Italian but the movement has spread slow-growing but sturdy tentacles all over the world, from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh.

Slow Food is particularly strong in North America. That may sound strange but follows the poet Friedrich Hoelderlin’s logic that “where the danger is, there grows also the saving power”. The US is the centre of the global fast food or food-as-fodder industry; it is also the site of resistance movements, from Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ seminal Berkeley restaurant based on local, seasonal produce, to the organic supermarket chain Whole Foods.

But let’s return to seriousness. In the UK, where the movement has not really taken hold, I get the impression Slow Food is still regarded as consisting of a few Islington foodies drizzling Ligurian olive oil over stone-baked ciabatta. It is seen as both elitist and frivolous – the concern of pampered metropolitan sophisticates with no relevance to the junk-food-eating masses.

This is both a grave misrepresentation of what Slow Food is about and a sad reflection of the hopelessly self-defeating nature of British class-based politics.

Slow Food is as much about farming as about foodiness; it is based on the American farmer-poet and essayist Wendell Berry’s observation that “eating is an agricultural act”.

Slow Food celebrations have been held this month in countries as diverse as Uganda, Chile, Mexico and India in defence of threatened local food traditions, crop varieties, artisanal methods of production and sustainable agriculture in general. This may sound quaint but it is also a matter of life and death. As BBC News reported last year, thousands of farmers have committed suicide in the Indian state of Maharashtra alone in recent years (the figure for the whole of India is estimated to be 10,000 a year), saddled with debts they could not repay. Many connect the debts with seeds and fertilisers sold on credit by large agribusinesses.

Ultimately, though, Slow Food is about pleasure. The pleasure of eating, eating as pleasure, is not an exquisite refinement reserved for the elite but an essential component of all human culture. Eating, even more than an agricultural act, is a cultural act, an act that gives meaning, that connects us to the earth and the seasons, and sustains community and conviviality.

Conviviality is at the heart of Slow Food’s philosophy, which is wonderfully non-utilitarian and, it has to be said, non-Protestant. The fast-food and food-as-fodder industries regard food as a means to an end; so too, in a different way, as the brilliant American writer Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food has shown us, does the ideology of nutritionism, which holds that food is not really food but a collection of nutrients which make people healthy (but not necessarily happy or joyful).

There are no more intimate acts than eating and drinking, when we take the produce of the cultivated and uncultivated earth into our bodies, to sustain not only ourselves but a compact with nature. Slow Food’s revolutionary achievement is to remind us that everything starts with that communion, and we must work to make it joyful and responsible again.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

BusinessWeek: The Accidental Hero

In Depth November 5, 2009, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

The Accidental Hero

Subway's $5 footlong, the brainchild of an obscure Miami franchisee, is the fast-food success story of the recession

By Matthew Boyle

Stuart Frankel isn't what you'd call a power player in the world of franchising. Five years ago he owned two small Subway sandwich shops at either end of Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital. After noticing that sales sagged on weekends, he came up with an idea: He would offer every footlong sandwich (the chain also sells 6-inch versions) on Saturday and Sunday for $5, about a buck less than the usual price. "I like round numbers," says Frankel, a brusque New Yorker who moved to Miami in 1972 and owned a drugstore before opening his first Subway outlet in 1988.

Customers liked his round number, too. Instead of dealing with idle employees and weak sales, Frankel suddenly had lines out the door. Sales rose by double digits. Nobody, least of all Frankel, knew it at the time, but he had stumbled on a concept that has unexpectedly morphed from a short-term gimmick into a national phenomenon that has turbocharged Subway's performance. "There are only a few times when a chain has been able to scramble up the whole industry, and this is one of them," says Jeffrey T. Davis, president of restaurant consultancy Sandelman & Associates. "It's huge."

In fact, the $3.8 billion in sales generated nationwide by the $5 footlong alone placed it among the top 10 fast-food brands in the U.S. for the year ended in August, according to NPD Group. That puts the $5 menu's success just a notch behind KFC (YUM) and ahead of Arby's and Domino's Pizza (DPZ). It helped privately held Subway, of Milford, Conn., lift U.S. sales 17% last year at a time when most restaurant chains, save for industry leader McDonald's (MCD), struggled. Actually, make that soon-to-be-former industry leader McDonald's. Subway's low-cost franchising model and mainstream appeal have allowed it to add 9,500 locations in the past five years, for a total of about 32,000 outlets. At its current growth rate of 40 new stores a week, Subway is poised to surpass McDonald's in worldwide locations sometime early next year. (Measured by total sales, McDonald's $30 billion still dwarfs Subway's $9.6 billion, although Subway has now supplanted both Wendy's (WEN) and Burger King (BKC) in market share.)

"A LIFE OF ITS OWN"

Frankel's $5 footlong idea illustrates how a huge company can wake up and eventually seize on a good idea that's not generated at headquarters. Frankel, along with two other local managers in economically ravaged South Florida, ceaselessly championed the idea to Subway's corporate leadership amid widespread skepticism. Once it was approved, Subway's marketing team quickly generated a memorable campaign that firmly established the $5 footlong nationwide. The promotion's success spawned imitators and created an unprecedented demand for staple ingredients such as turkey, ham, and tuna. "The whole thing took on a life of its own," says Jeff Moody, CEO of Subway's franchise-owned advertising arm, the Subway Franchisee Advertising Fund Trust.

The fact that a sandwich, the quintessential American food, has grabbed the spotlight right now comes as no surprise to some. Its appeal goes beyond the low sticker price—you can share a footlong with a co-worker or a friend (something that's not quite as easy with a Big Mac). "People are not eating out as much anymore, so anything that brings people together through food is much more compelling nowadays," says Michelle Barry of the Hartman Group, a Seattle consultancy that employs anthropologists and sociologists to ferret out consumer perceptions for such companies as Kraft Foods (KFT) and Wal-Mart Stores (WMT).

For Frankel, the biggest surprise from his $5 promotion was that his profit margins didn't decline. Many promotions are so-called loss leaders designed to draw customers in the hope they'll buy higher-margin items alongside the featured special. That's one reason most offers have a time limit. Frankel's food costs did rise as a percentage of sales, but that was offset by the overall boost in volume and the increased productivity of his employees, who had less down time. Even after adding two new staffers, Frankel made money on each $5 sandwich.

Frankel kept the weekend promotion going for more than a year. At the same time, Subway's top brass was growing tired of a national ad campaign that featured spokesman Jared Fogle, who had lost 245 pounds almost a decade earlier by eating Subway six-inch subs for lunch and dinner. Company insiders envied the success of McDonald's dollar menu and wanted a "value" offering of their own. In September 2007, Steve Sager, a Subway development agent who oversaw about 225 franchises across South Florida, heard about the success of Frankel's $5 deal. He decided to try it in a troubled Fort Lauderdale outlet on Commercial Boulevard, a gritty thoroughfare dotted with strip malls. On the first day of the promotion, the store nearly ran out of bread and meat. Sales doubled.

Sager called Subway co-founder Fred DeLuca, who lives in the vicinity, and excitedly shared the news. An intrigued DeLuca came by the shop and, Sager says, "saw the potential instantly." (DeLuca declined to comment.) Charlie Serabian, the owner of 50 South Florida Subways, decided to launch the promotion in some of his stores. To advertise, he slapped crude homemade signs in the windows that spelled out "ALL FOOTLONGS $5." DeLuca joked that they looked like ransom letters. It didn't matter: Sales rose as much as 35%. Some locations, such as those housed inside Wal-Mart stores, did even better.

Moody, the marketing chief, hopped a flight to Fort Lauderdale a month later. He arrived at one store at 11 a.m. to find a line out the door. Frankel and Sager, who accompanied him, jumped behind the counter to help make sandwiches, while Moody talked to customers. Most were buying footlongs, and some were saving half for later.

Clearly, the South Florida crew was onto something. The question was whether it would resonate elsewhere. "Unless it was in your store, you were skeptical," Moody says. At a meeting of the franchisee marketing board that fall, Frankel presented his idea. Many owners thought the promotion would send food and labor costs soaring, erasing any hope of profits. A motion to roll it out nationally failed.

ANNOYING JINGLE

But others picked up on Frankel's idea and tried it in locations ranging from Washington to Chicago. Right before Christmas 2008, the board voted again, and the motion passed. (Franchisees still had the option to not do it.) Moody pushed ahead with a national campaign, despite having no market research to back up the idea. "It violated all our normal processes," says Moody, whose annual ad budget is around $500 million.

Subway soon brought in its ad agency, MMB of Boston. "Let's not overcomplicate this," MMB managing partner Chad Caufield recalls thinking. The idea was to use hand gestures and an irritatingly addictive jingle to convey both the price (five fingers) and the product (hands spread about a foot apart). MMB also shot on a soundstage, giving the commercial a stylized, campy look. "We wanted to create the feeling that this was a movement taking hold," Caufield says.

The campaign was launched on Mar. 23, 2008—the same month that Bear Stearns collapsed into the arms of JPMorgan Chase (JPM). "The timing could not have been better," says Dennis Lombardi, executive vice-president at restaurant consultancy WD Partners. Over the first two weeks, franchisees reported that sales shot up 25% on average. Within weeks, 3,600 videos of people performing the jingle appeared on YouTube (GOOG). Fogle, attending the NCAA Final Four college basketball tournament soon after the launch, was serenaded with the song by students. The $5 footlong was mentioned on ESPN, The Tonight Show, and celebrity gossip site TMZ (TWX). The North Carolina State Fair even held a $5 Footlong Song Challenge—an American Idol-style event for the 4-H crowd.

The franchisee marketing board quickly voted to extend the four-week promotion to seven weeks. When that ended, Subway kept it going but limited the number of $5 sandwiches to just eight, removing items with high ingredient costs, such as the Chicken & Bacon Ranch sandwich.

Suddenly Subway needed 50% more food supplies. Bread shortages became a problem, as the ratio of six-inch sandwiches to footlong orders, normally 2 to 1, flipped. Subway's franchise-owned Independent Purchasing Cooperative, or IPC, had to scramble to find new sources of bread. Even mundane items, such as plastic sandwich bags from China, nearly ran out. "I was in a panic," recalls IPC CEO Jan Risi, who furiously worked the phones, cajoling her network of suppliers to run extra shifts.

EVEN CHEAPER

Soon, copycat offers emerged. Boston Market offered 11 meals for $5 each, while Domino's sold sandwiches for $4.99 and KFC launched $5 combo meals. T.G.I. Friday's began selling $5 sandwiches. "Five dollars is the magic number now," says restaurant consultant Malcolm Knapp. "It's become a price point that consumers respond to," says Judy Cantrell, Boston Market's chief brand officer.

The question now is when the campaign will run out of steam. MMB's Caufield admits the issue keeps him up at night: "Are we riding this pony too long?" Tony Pace, a senior executive who works with Subway's marketing arm, replies bluntly: "If you had a brand that represented nearly $4 billion in sales, would you plan an exit strategy for it?"

Pace says the footlong will remain "as long as it makes good economic sense," so a decline in footlong sales could force price hikes, or limits such as $5 after 4 p.m. (Serabian has gone the other way as the South Florida economy has worsened, offering footlongs for $4 in his stores.) There are also concerns that Subway's focus on the footlong could distract it from new growth areas, such as a planned push into breakfast items or international expansion. (Save for some tests in Australia and Canada, the $5 footlong hasn't gone beyond the U.S.)

Meanwhile, Frankel has moved on to a new idea. Now he's pushing for Subway loyalty cards that let purchasers accrue points toward free sandwiches. Driving down Interstate 95 toward Jackson Memorial on a cloudy autumn day, Frankel chronicles the frustrations he's had convincing DeLuca and others that this could be a hit. Maybe now that Frankel is the Father of the $5 Footlong, they'll listen.

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

No Wait for a Table

Customer traffic in the $566 billion restaurant industry fell 3.6% this summer vs. last, says researcher NPD Group. Even fast-food chains, which took business from sit-down restaurants early in the recession, are seeing sales slide as unemployment continues to rise. Visits to fast-food outlets dipped 3%, the worst summer in decades.

To view the NPD report, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/restaurant-industry/

Boyle is deputy Corporations editor for BusinessWeek.

FT: Big lessons we can learn from Little Chef

Big lessons we can learn from Little Chef

By Stefan Stern

Published: November 2 2009 22:03 | Last updated: November 2 2009 22:03

Hard work and relentless attention to detail: that’s management for you. Talk is cheap. Visions can inspire, for a moment or two. But without graft – and competence – things go wrong. Any business, no matter how successful, will struggle if it forgets this. There are no quick fixes for organisations that have big commercial and cultural problems.

That is the lesson to draw from the story of Little Chef, the 51-year-old British roadside restaurant chain. For generations, these little cafés, with their red and white signage, have formed a familiar part of the UK landscape. “Fat Charlie” is the diminutive chef in question, smiling out at travelling businesspeople, families and lorry drivers from the side of motorways and A roads.

At its peak, in the 1970s and 1980s, Little Chef enjoyed a dominant market position. But you did not seek out a Little Chef for a thrilling culinary experience. You went there for a reliable cooked breakfast, for plaice, chips and peas, for something acceptable to tired and hungry children. It worked.

What happened? Change happened. Customers got more sophisticated in their tastes. Cheaper competitors offering US-style fast food won new fans. And our Little Chef? He fell asleep at the griddle pan, offering an increasingly tired-looking selection of relatively pricey meals.

He also fell prey to financial engineers. Between 1970 and 1996 Little Chef was owned by Forte. But in the wake of one the most spectacular takeover battles of the 1990s, Little Chef became part of the Granada group. Over the next 11 years, the company had four different owners, before going into administration in 2007 with losses of £3m. Its current owner is R Capital, the turnround specialist.

So why bother telling this story? Because Little Chef is currently going through a potentially transformative relaunch, following advice from one of the world’s most distinguished real-live chefs, Heston Blumenthal. It has all been played out in front of a television film crew at a specially chosen Little Chef site. Last week, the second documentary covering the company’s rebirth was shown, and the management lessons in it were striking.

The fact that a Michelin-starred chef has dedicated time to a struggling restaurant chain tells you something about the affection in which Little Chef is held. But nostalgia is part of the problem here. The business’s current boss, Ian Pegler, worked for the company in the early 1990s and, as the cameras revealed, he has struggled to grasp how sad Little Chef’s offering is.

The fish in the fish pie is “cooked to buggery”, according to Mr Blumenthal. Little Chef, he observes, is “hardwired into spending as little as possible on ingredients”. Even after he has shown the kitchen staff (and Mr Pegler) a better way of doing things, standards drop once he is no longer there. Real chips are replaced by the oven-baked variety. Elegant sauces lose out to instant gravy granules – “an interim solution”, according to Mr Pegler. Presumably no pun was intended.

The superchef puts his foot down, and at the end of episode two all is well. The prototype branch of the reinvigorated restaurant chain wins the unexpected accolade of inclusion in the Good Food Guide 2010.

So, they all lived happily ever after, then? Not so fast. No sooner had the film crews gone away than your columnist, and family, rolled up at the now celebrated branch of Little Chef just off the A303 one lunchtime a couple of months ago. And our experience was not quite the joyful one that Mr Blumenthal had.

Service was poor. The waiting staff were distracted and inefficient. The food, which had delighted Mr Blumenthal only a few weeks earlier, was mainly pretty bland. This was not what you expect from a new Good Food Guide entrant.

Signs of that hardwired approach to costs already reasserting itself? Perhaps so. More important, here was more evidence that success in business is down to getting the basics right. Supervision, that unfashionable term, is vital.

Management is hard work. Attention must be paid. Change can only be driven through by well trained and motivated staff, who understand what they are supposed to be doing, and believe in it.

What happens at branches of Little Chef when Mr Blumenthal and his camera crew are not there and the hype from the series dies down? That is the question that matters. Customers will find out.

For more on management or to comment, visit www.ft.com/managementblog

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My very first Thanksgiving in Salt Lake City! :)

 
Doodle for Google featuring Snoopy :) Found on www.google.com on Thanksgiving Day.

===

 

November 26, 2009

Editorial

A Thanksgiving Toast

Sitting down with friends and family today, there will be thanks for the steady currents, flowing out of the past, that have brought us to this table. There will be thanks for the present union and reunion of us all. And there will be prayerful thanks for the future. But it’s worth raising a glass (or suspending a forkful for those of you who’ve gotten ahead of the toast) to be thankful for the unexpected, for all the ways that life interrupts and renews itself without warning.

What would our lives look like if they held only what we’d planned? Where would our wisdom or patience — or our hope — come from? How could we account for these new faces at the Thanksgiving table or for the faces we’re missing this holiday, missing perhaps now all these years?

It will never cease to surprise how the condition of being human means we cannot foretell with any accuracy what next Thanksgiving will bring. We can hope and imagine, and we can fear. But when next Thanksgiving rolls around, we’ll have to take account again, as we do today, of how the unexpected has shaped our lives. That will mean accounting for how it has enriched us, blessed us, with suffering as much as with joy.

That, perhaps, is what all this plenty is for, as you look down the table, to gather up the past and celebrate the present and open us to the future.

There is the short-term future, when there will be room for seconds. Then there is the longer term, a time for blossoming and ripening, for new friends, new family, new love, new hope. Most of what life contains comes to us unexpectedly after all. It is our job to welcome it and give it meaning. So let us toast what we cannot know and could not have guessed, and to the unexpected ways our lives will merge in Thanksgivings to come.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company 

Forbes: The Snack King of China - Want Want

On The Cover/Top Stories
Extending His Reach
Russell Flannery, 10.19.09, 12:00 AM ET

At age 19 Tsai Eng-Meng took over his father's food business and promptly came up with an idea for a new product: crackers made from rice flour. It was unconventional--back in 1977 most crackers in Taiwan were made from wheat flour and took far less time to make. Then, when he traveled to Japan in search of technology from the Iwatsuka Confectionery Co., the 65-year-old boss told Tsai that he was too young to work with.

Tsai kept trying for two and a half years and finally landed a deal. Soon the family's Want Want rice crackers became a hit as gift packs for Chinese New Year and other holidays. They also became popular offerings at temples as Taiwanese asked for favors from deceased ancestors and powerful spirits. "Want Want relied a lot on people's prayers to ghosts and spirits at temples," he says. "When you go, you have to bring a gift. The spirits know what you want and what you leave behind."

Today the onetime teenage entrepreneur has turned the rice cracker maker into a snack empire. He moved into China in 1992, and, switching the focus to children (and their parents), Want Want China is now unrivaled in the country's rice cracker market, with a two-thirds share. It also has scored with flavored milk, where it controls 40% of the market, and has won 30% of the soft-candy business; it is also China's biggest maker of flavored frozen treats on sticks. Sales last year rose 42%, to $1.6 billion, and net profit, buoyed by its grip on high-margin rice crackers, climbed 30% to $263 million.

That performance helped propel Want Want onto our Fabulous 50 list of the best large listed companies in the region this year. Tsai, now 52, owns 47% of the company and ranked No. 246 on the Forbes Asia list of the world's billionaires in March with a fortune of $2.6 billion. On the list of Taiwan's richest people in July he placed No. 3, and his wealth had risen to $3.6 billion. His businesses, which include hotels, financial services firms, real estate and media companies that aren't part of Hong Kong-listed Want Want China (see box, p. 24), employ 45,000 people.

The road ahead for Tsai may get a lot tougher. Want Want, which is pronounced "Wang Wang" and means prosperity and fortune, is moving deeper into the beverage industry. Here it might face much bigger rivals such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo from the U.S. and Tingyi, another Fab 50 member, from Taiwan. Tingyi is big in ready-to-drink tea and mineral water. (At the same time Want Want is planning to expand in instant noodles, Tingyi's mainstay.)

Yet Tsai is confident. He entered the fray with sweet milk for children in the 1990s, and today he sells it in unconventionally small kid-size packages; he charges twice as much per ounce as domestic rival Mengniu's white unsweetened version. And he says the company is "just getting started" in beverages. In his sights: fruit juice. This is a segment that's already crowded, plus dominating the $750 million rice cracker market is a lot different from barging into the $7.85 billion juice market. But juice sales are growing fast--8.6% this year--and because he already sells to China's booming hypermarkets and convenience-store chains, he should get good economies of scale from adding juice to the mix.

Tsai thinks his trump card in juice will again be customer convenience and packaging. This year Want Want started selling juice in soft, aluminum-based containers that feel like small bags and are popular in the U.S. "We're the first in China," he says proudly in an interview at the company's headquarters in Shanghai; Want Want relocated from Taiwan in 2001. Targeted at young women on the go, the new drinks fit into backpacks and pockets more easily than bottles. And the small nozzle means "you don't have to open your mouth as wide as with bottles," a point popular with women, he says, seated at a table lined with the company's snacks and drinks.

The way Tsai sees it, Want Want isn't going to be facing many new rivals in China. It's not easy for foreigners to gain entry--Coca-Cola's bid to add to its share of China's beverage market by buying juicemaker China Huiyuan was turned down by the Chinese government this year. Last month, after a long dispute, France's Groupe Danone pulled out of a joint venture that made the popular Wahaha soft drinks.

Yet the players already in the market are potent, and Tsai says he has to run hard as per capita income grows and the world's most populous country eats more. "If I can't increase sales to $10 billion within ten years, I may be squeezed out," he says. "Larger companies will look at each other and worry that they need to be bigger themselves."

The growth will come from drinks, and the key to success, he says, is to focus on profitable goods. "If your gross profit margin [for a new product] isn't 40%, you shouldn't to it," he says. "If it's that much, then you have the money to do enough advertising."

Tsai hasn't avoided failure. Mr. Bond coffee, launched in 2003, has been a dud. The company expected coffee to do well after the Beijing Olympics last year, but it didn't take off.

Underscoring the stakes if his margins don't hold up, Want Want's shares took a 10% dive in August after the company posted a rare loss in the first half. It blamed the early arrival of Chinese New Year this year, meaning that many orders for gift packages were on last year's books; a one-time gain in 2008 made the year-on-year comparison look even worse. With his stock still trading at 30 times last year's earnings, clearly few investors are willing to bet against Tsai.

Want Want traces its roots to 1962, when the company was founded in the northern Taiwan city of Ilan as I Lan Foods Industrial. Tsai's father, Tsai A-Shi, was a partner and semiretired when the owners decided to auction the company in 1977. The elder Tsai made the only bid and assigned his son, who had started working there as an assistant to the president a year earlier, to lead the business. Today the younger Tsai's own son, Tsai Shao-Chung, sits on the board.

Tsai succeeded with his cracker idea in part because Taiwan has ample, low-cost supplies of a key ingredient--rice. But the pivotal development for the company was Tsai winning over as a mentor the Japanese businessman who had initially spurned him. A statue of Iwatsuka's then leader Maki Keisaku graces the first floor of Want Want's 16-story headquarters. An Iwatsuka representative still sits on Want Want's board. The maiden flight in 2006 of Want Want's corporate jet, a Gulfstream ten-seater, was a sentimental journey back to Iwatsuka's head office. (Today Want Want is far bigger--its market capitalization of $7 billion dwarfs Iwatsuka's $125 million.)

Other symbolic gestures to the past abound at Want Want. Just outside of Tsai's office is an enormous painting of his childhood dog, Happy. While he was raising Happy as a teen, the dog was hurt in an accident. It bounced back, though, and today under the name "Yappy," his image is part of Tsai's collection of brands and mascots aimed at young consumers, promoting the rice crackers as well as products such as Aiyou yogurt drink, QQ Gummy sweets and O-Bubble fruit milk.

The common denominator across all of Tsai's products is Hot-Kid, the smiling cartoon boy in a tank top that serves as the company mascot. Overlooking the entrance of Want Want's headquarters hangs a pure gold 34.4-kilogram Hot-Kid logo.

Want Want's move into China changed everything for the company. It says that in 1989 it became the first Taiwan company to apply for a trademark on the mainland as decades of tension between the two sides began to lift. Citing a Chinese expression, he says of the move to the mainland: "The timing was right, the location was advantageous, and people were in harmony."

While most Taiwanese opening factories on the mainland looked to Guangdong and Fujian provinces because of easy access to ports or a similar dialect, contrarian Tsai in 1992 picked a spot in inland Hunan Province. The local government offered cheap land, but the town's name was an attraction, too: "Wangcheng," which sounds like "Want City." At first it was a disaster. "We didn't know what we were doing," says Tsai. The company had a hard time getting paid, even though consumers gobbled up its rice crackers as the flavor popular in Taiwan caught on quickly in China and there was little competition.

Want Want solved its collection problems, in part, with people such as Xiao Hujie. Xiao started with one truck in 1995 and went into business with his wife and one employee. Now he has ten trucks, including two that Want Want gave him, and a staff of 63. Tsai, says Xiao, is personable but doesn't waste much time on small talk. "He likes to ask about what's selling and what's not," he says. The original Hunan factory is still cranking out rice crackers, loading shipments into 70 trucks a day. Plaques lauding the company as one of the city's biggest taxpayers line the doorway. Changsha, the provincial capital, has a Want Want hospital. Now Want Want has 106 other factories around China and 10,000 distributors like Xiao.

Tsai says he ended up targeting kids in China partly because Want Want couldn't play up the religious element of its sales to templegoers that it used in Taiwan--the Communist government didn't allow it. It's turned out just as well, given China's huge population. "Where there are lips, there is a market" for his products, he says. And a big advantage was the similar taste in food across the Taiwan Strait. Aside from Want Want and Tingyi, Uni-President Enterprises also has been a big Taiwan winner in the mainland's food-and-beverage industry.

Over the years Tsai has tried his luck at different financial markets. He listed in Singapore in 1996 under the Want Want China name, making I Lan Foods a subsidiary. But the listing included his hotels, an approach that didn't interest investors, and the valuation never got very high. He restructured and listed in Hong Kong last year, and his shares have gained two-thirds since. The company also this year listed Want Want back in Taiwan. China is going to be a good bet for companies such as Want Want for years to come, he says, and that means his company should be a good bet for investors. "Compared to people from other countries, Chinese love to eat," he chuckled. "I have a lot of confidence."

MARKET SQUEEZE

Want Want is breaking into China's $7.85 billion fruit-and-vegetable juice manufacturing business, which is highly fragmented. Market shares of the top players for 2008:

China Huiyuan Food	6.0%
Yantai North Andre	5.5
Shanghai Jilong	4.5
China Haisheng	4.0
Shandong Tianfu	3.1E
Thai Beverage/Thailand	2.5

Sources: IBISWorld; All China Marketing Research.

===

On The Cover/Top Stories
Nibbling on the Media
Russell Flannery, 10.19.09

It's not unusual for powerful businesspeople looking to ensure a public outlet for their views to invest in the media. In Taiwan legendary billionaire Y.C. Wang was successful in plastics and ran a marginal newspaper, too. Property developer Lin Rong San, who ranked No. 8 on the Taiwan rich list with $2.3 billion, owns the Liberty Times, a popular independence-leaning daily.

The latest entrant into the island's freewheeling media market: Tsai Eng-Meng. Using private money rather than funds from his publicly traded Want Want China, the snack billionaire bought publisher and broadcaster China Times Group from the Yu family for an undisclosed sum last year, outbidding Hong Kong's Next Media. Tsai followed that up with an investment in Hong Kong moneylosing broadcaster ATV.

Tsai says the main reason for his media foray is simple: He enjoys the industry. "Media is entertainment for me," he says. "My main business it still my main business. If Want Want is in trouble, I'm in trouble, too." So, says Tsai, investors don't need to worry that he'll be distracted from his core business.

Yet there's a profit motive to Tsai's media spending, too. He thinks the industry has good long-term investment prospects in the mainland's now-protected news arena. "Chinese have more and more money, and they will enjoy leisure," benefiting media companies that provide entertaining content, he says. He also sees synergy between Want Want's business and his media companies--at least some spending on snack ads will now flow back into Tsai's own pocket.

In divided Taiwan, where pro-China and anti-China groups can't agree on much, Tsai's purchase of the China Times sparked worries about free speech. Since his wealth now comes almost entirely from the mainland, critics worried he will try to turn the China Times Group into a mouthpiece for Beijing in Taiwan. Tsai disagrees, and so far, both he and his critics may be partly right. The newspaper has tilted its coverage toward China, yet the entertainment-oriented broadcasting business that Tsai coveted more than the newspapers is little changed, says Antonio Chiang, a longtime Taiwan media industry executive.

FT: A detached style of leadership

A detached style of leadership

By Peter Marsh

Published: October 25 2009 22:12 | Last updated: October 25 2009 22:12

Enlightened: Bulent Bulgurlu looks for consensus when dealing with the family behind Koç Holdings

Bulent Bulgurlu, the chief executive of Koç Holding, Turkey’s biggest industrial group, is enthusiastic about a novel machine made by its Arcelik domestic appliance subsidiary. Retailing for about $200, the machine makes cups of “perfect” Turkish coffee.

“This is a device that uses some special mechanisms to boil the water and treat the coffee in such a way that when you taste it you know you are drinking Turkish coffee, not Italian coffee,” says Mr Bulgurlu during a visit to London.

Dressed smartly but soberly in the manner of a professor, Mr Bulgurlu likes to talk in studied phrases and without showing too much emotion.

It is a style that seems to have worked well for a man who during a 33-year stint at Koç has gradually worked his way up to the top position, getting on with the members of the Koç family who own the business and, by his own account, never giving way to any show of naked ambition.

“I was always the last one [at Koç] hearing about my promotion,” says the 63-year-old engineer, who has been in the top job since May 2007.

Beyond the family

When Bulent Bulgurlu was made chief executive of Koç Holding in 2007, he became the sixth person who was not a member of the Koç family to be given the role.

The company, Turkey’s biggest industrial group, was set up in 1926 as a retailer by Vehbi Koç, who stewarded it for most of his life and had the reputation of being Turkey’s most prominent business person of the past century.

Koç expanded into industry, most notably through a joint venture in 1948 with General Electric to set up a Turkish light bulb factory. Today, Mustafa Koç, Vehbi’s 49-year-old grandson, is chairman. Rahmi Koç, Mustafa’s 79-year-old father who has worked at the company since 1958, is officially retired from executive responsibilities but remains on the 15-member board.

The Koç family, which also provides two other directors, owns 80 per cent of the company, with the remaining shares being traded on the Istanbul stock exchange.

In such a company, the relationship between the professional chief executive and the members of the family is highly important, and in the case of Koç, the interactions between the two sides seem good. A person who knows about Koç says of Mr Bulgurlu: “My impression is that they [Rahmi and Mustafa] listen to him. He is always very well prepared and knows the complex structure of the company and its many activities very well.”

Mr Bulgurlu is likely to retire next year and the company is now mulling over a successor, who once again will almost certainly come from outside the family.

With sales last year of TL56bn ($38bn) and 68,000 employees, Koç is an unashamed conglomerate. It operates Turkey’s only oil refinery, which is also Europe’s eighth biggest, it owns the country’s fourth-biggest banking network and, via joint ventures with Ford and Fiat, is responsible for almost half of Turkey’s car production.

The company also mines coal and metals, makes tractors and owns a chain of petrol stations.

Outside Turkey – in activities that contribute about a quarter of the group’s revenues – the company’s best-known products are its “value for money” washing machines and refrigerators, sold under the Beko brand and especially popular in the UK, France and Russia.

To complement the company’s existing operations in operating fossil-fuel and hydro-electricity generation plants, Mr Bulgurlu says that at some stage Koç could play a part in a network of nuclear power stations in Turkey – an as yet unexplored technology for the country.

One person who counts himself a fan of Mr Bulgurlu is John McArthur, a former dean of Harvard Business School, who has been a non-executive director of Koç for the past 10 years. “Bulent is a global player who understands the context of all the areas of industry the company is involved in,” he says.

It is not uncommon for chief executives of such broadly based and complicated groups to require a somewhat detached style: one in which attention is focused on the key performance indicators of different parts of the group, rather than on the details of specific products and services.

In this regard, Mr Bulgurlu seems to fit the bill, notwithstanding his occasional foray into describing the specifics of gadgets such as coffee machines.

In a previous job at Koç running the company’s tourism division, which was sold off some years ago, he recalls that he surprised his more junior employees by not being very interested in their descriptions of what they did all day.

“At the first meetings with general managers of my group, I was always asking questions about financial performance, while they were talking about ambiance [of hotels], the quality of their tour programmes, and so on,” he says. “We had some difficulties finding a common ground at first, but after that we overcame all of this and got along very well.”

Mr Bulgurlu says a six-year spell in the unhurried atmosphere of Norway probably contributed to what he says is his generally “tranquil take” to life. He was persuaded to go to Scandinavia in 1971 to do a PhD in hydraulics engineering, followed by a job as a research engineer – by his Norwegian girlfriend, who is now his wife.

Even though he enjoyed his time away, he found Norway a little too calm, even for his laid-back personality, and missed his family and friends. On his return to Turkey, he got a job in Koç’s construction division – another part of the company that now has been hived off.

He eventually moved on to running its Arcelik subsidiary, which is now the world’s eighth-biggest maker of white goods by volume, and the fourth-biggest in Europe.

Of the decisions made at Koç around the time he took over as chief executive in 2007, perhaps the most important was the drive to reduce the breadth of the company to make it somewhat more focused.

While some moves had been made to do this in the past, for instance, through selling off activities in construction and tourism, the company had also in some ways broadened out. It moved heavily into the oil industry, for instance, by buying its first refinery, a formerly state-owned plant, in 2005.

“We realised we’d spread ourselves a little too much, and there was also the need to [sell off operations to] reduce debts,” Mr Bulgurlu says.

As a result, between 2006 and 2008, Koç sold its stake in 11 businesses for $3bn, ensuring that today the company has a net cash surplus of $700m.

The biggest of these transactions was the sale of its 50.8 per cent share in Migros, Turkey’s largest supermarket group, for $1.6bn to a venture capital group.

In the event, the timing of the move could hardly have been better, since the asset sales took place before the broad economic slowdown and when transaction prices were still high.

“I’m not saying we knew the financial crash was coming, but we had the idea the world economy was going to slow down,” Mr Bulgurlu says. “It seemed a prudent thing to do to move into a position of having cash in the bank and looking back I am glad we did it.“

Asked about how he shares decision-making with the members of the Koç family – who are heavily represented on the company’s board (see box) – Mr Bulgurlu answers with his trademark tact.

“We generally arrive at a consensus at to what is in the group’s best long-term interests,” he says. “I normally find that when you deal with good and intelligent people, a consensus of views is possible.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

FT: India serves up gherkins

India serves up gherkins

By James Lamont in Bangalore

Published: October 13 2009 11:27 | Last updated: October 13 2009 11:27

Over a rain-swept corner of a field in the southern Indian state of Karnataka, dark monsoon clouds are massing. Farm workers scuttle along muddy embankments heading for the shelter of a nearby seed store as strong winds pull at their clothes and a heavy shower begins to fall.

Yet the gherkin farmers of Medleri village in Rannebanur district are taking no chances with the monsoon. Their fields are criss-crossed with small rubber hoses fed by Israeli drip irrigation technology. Next to the seed store is a newly dug reservoir and a shiny pump.

It is not just the water that is different. Gherkin plants are sown and fertilised according to European methods. Experiments are tried from far afield. In one row, gherkins are grown up poles as they are in Vietnam. In another, the ground is under plastic sheeting, similar to what is found on the so-called Costa del Plastico in southern Spain. Mechanisation is also being slowly introduced, and Global Green, the company the farmers work for, has already developed a harvester to suit small acreages of its Indian operations.

However, gherkins – otherwise known as cornichons or pickled baby cucumbers – are shunned by Indian consumers.

Instead, the crops, which were once the preserve of US and European farmers, are now produced exclusively for export to suit the tastes of consumers in the US, Canada, Israel and Europe.

While India’s outsourcing prowess has become well known during the past decade in areas such as IT and back office business processing, the same trend is now under way in the global food supply chain – thanks to low labour costs and a climate that allows for three crops a year.

“Cheap labour and climatic conditions are the key drivers of agricultural production being outsourced to another continent,” explains Vineet Chhabra, Global Green’s managing director (pictured above).

Global Green digs deep in search for its next super crop

In Global Green’s boardroom, executives are searching for another crop to match the company’s success with the gherkin in global export markets.

The jalapeno pepper has shown the most promise. Favoured among the world’s Hispanic population, the pepper is one way of making further inroads into the US market. The company already has a prized contract supplying between 300 and 400 containers of jalapenos a month to the US prison service.

However, Vineet Chhabra, Global Green’s managing director, says that the jalapeno is too specialised and he is after a higher-consumption product.

The tomato is the crop that could really propel Global Green into the big league, he says, and into competition with farmers in California. The tomato tops fresh retail produce sales in the US.

Alternatively, the company might wait for demand for processed foods to rise in India as the urban middle class expands. He expects retailers such as Tesco and Carrefour to overcome regulatory obstacles in India to set up store.

“When they come in they will be like another cylinder of oxygen for us,” says Mr Chabbra.

“It’s more than about quality when you are supplying to the developed markets. You have to be 50 per cent better than others. The cucumber out of India is a wonder. It’s nothing to do with me. It’s the climate and the weather.”

Large supermarket groups are seeking out the cheapest agricultural suppliers and India is among a competitive peer group that includes Turkey, Ukraine and Mexico. Food company executives talk glowingly of the opportunities of “arbitrage at the Indian farm level”, where a day’s wage is a little above $1.

In Global Green’s sorting and bottling plant on the outskirts of Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital, bottles spin off the production line labelled for Lidl, the German discounter, Sobey’s, the US supermarket chain, and Safeway.

Global Green, a subsidiary of the Delhi-based Avantha Group, markets itself as the “World’s Pickle Packer”. It entered the gherkin business 15 years ago. Then, says M.R. Chandra Mouli, the company’s head of agri-business, it was a “small business”. Now, Global Green, which is headquartered in both Bangalore and Belgium, is the largest gherkin supplier outside of the US, the third-largest in the world, and accounts for a third of India’s production. Rival local producers include Natural Fresh Fruits, Green Pickles and Balaji Agro.

Global Green’s €26m ($39m) acquisition of InterGarden in 2006 gave it assets in Belgium, Turkey and Hungary. In addition to gherkins, the company supplies customers in 50 countries with onions, capers, peppers, cherries and sweetcorn. International expansion is still on the cards. In pursuit of year-round crop availability or four growing seasons a year, it is weighing acquisitions in Chile, Peru and Vietnam.

The company’s forecasts are bullish. It expects to treble turnover in the next four years from current revenues of $130m. When equity markets recover, it also has ambitions of a public listing on a stock exchange, possibly a foreign one. Gherkins will feature prominently in the prospectus. Last year, the company produced 65,000 tonnes of gherkins for global markets; 55,000 tonnes came from India. And, in spite of the global downturn, orders have held up. “Pickles are recession proof,” says Mr Chandra Mouli. “People are eating much more at home . . . Pickles sales – like peanut butter – are going up . . . But India has to be competitive. The yields have to be better.”

As a result, a productivity revolution is under way among the contract farmers of Rannebanur, most of whom tend small holdings. At one level they are like many farmers in India, concerned about the water table, subsidies, the availability of credit and labour shortages. But at another level they are at the sharp end of agricultural experimentation, contracted by a company pushing out middlemen with “seed-to-shelf” control and trying to bring them up to European standards.

Greater productivity among these farmers will widen Global Green’s profit margins. That quest has been championed in the Avantha boardroom where Gautam Thapar, group chairman, speaks of the benefits to be reaped by making Indian farmers even a little more like their highly productive German counterparts. The founders of India’s globally known IT companies, such as Wipro, Genpact and Infosys, once had similar conversations about how Indian graduates could take on the characteristics of their US counterparts.

If India’s “seed-to-shelf” agricultural outsourcing story seems to good to be true, it probably is. Mr Chhabra acknowledges the swift success of India’s gherkin crop and the bankable relationship it has opened up with big retailers. But he is under no illusions about the sheer unpredictability of farming. “It looks like a simple business. You grow a few cucumbers and put them in a jar,” he says. “It’s far more complex than that because there are so many moving parts. There’s the rain, the weather, fruit flies, the logistics, warehouses, barrel prices, foreign exchange and the customers. It’s hugely variable.”

The heavy reliance on nature, in a country where farmers depend on seasonal monsoon rains, makes some investors nervous. One UK-based analyst says India’s vulnerability to changing weather could dull investor appetite in Global Green if it tried to raise capital on global equity markets. But that caution is unlikely to slow Indian agri-business. Almost 200 years after the jar of pickled gherkins became a commercial product in France, at least one Indian company has taken it for its own.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

NY Times: 'Boneless' Wings, the Cheaper Bite

Chicken wings in my part of the world is nothing near the category of "lowly". In fact, I personally feel that this part of the chicken is tastier and more tender as compared to drumsticks or breast meat.

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October 13, 2009

‘Boneless’ Wings, the Cheaper Bite

By WILLIAM NEUMAN

Just in time for football season, the Lion’s Head Tavern in New York City stopped selling 25-cent chicken wings on Monday nights. In Tucson, a sports bar called O’Malleys on Fourth scrapped its fall special of a dozen wings on Monday nights for $4.

And in restaurants from Sarasota to Seattle, an improbable poultry part is showing up on menus: a little chunk of chicken breast that is fried and sauced and sold, with marketer’s brio, as a “boneless wing.”

All this is happening because wholesale chicken prices have turned upside down. The once-lowly wing is selling at a premium over what has long been the gold standard of poultry parts, the skinless boneless chicken breast.

Like the tail that wags the dog, the wings are now flapping the chicken.

Mike Bell knows chicken prices. The logistics and purchasing manager for Buffalo Wild Wings, a national chain with about 600 restaurants, Mr. Bell will buy 57 million pounds of chicken wings this year. Describing recent conversations with poultry processors, he said: “Basically a whole bunch of them are throwing their hands in the air and saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. We’ve never seen it this way.’ ”

In seven of the last 11 months, wholesale wing prices have been higher than breast prices, a reversal in a market where breasts usually reign supreme. In September, the average wholesale price for whole chicken wings in the Northeast was $1.48 a pound, according to the Agriculture Department. Yet skinless boneless breasts were $1.21 a pound.

A year earlier, wings sold for 94 cents and breasts for $1.15, and as recently as May 2008, skinless boneless breasts were selling for 57 cents more than wings.

The wholesale price shift has generally not been reflected in supermarkets, where grocers appear to be trying to preserve their margins on breast meat. Nationally on average, breasts are $2.80 a pound at retail, still 83 cents more than wings. However, some grocers are exploiting the wholesale price drop to run aggressive sales on breasts.

The recession is the cause of the price flip-flop.

Restaurants, normally big buyers of breast meat, slashed orders as millions of people cut back on eating out, and breast prices slumped. But demand for wings has remained strong, partly because people perceived them as a cheap luxury.

Adding to the demand: the brisk growth of restaurant chains focusing on wings, like Atomic Wings, Wingstop and Wing Zone. Several chains have been remarking this year about how much business is up in the recession. The major public company in this group, Buffalo Wild Wings, reported a 27 percent earnings jump in the first half of the year.

Eventually, as the economy improves, wing and breast prices may return to their traditional places. But for now, the triumph of wings over breasts has wing partisans celebrating.

“Everybody was into breasts because it’s lower fat,” said Andrew F. Smith, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. “But to me the breast is tasteless. I like fat, and most people do. The wings have fat.” Yet the high price of wings has also accelerated a development that bothers wing purists: that oxymoron dipped in hot sauce, the boneless wing.

Boneless wings, increasingly promoted by restaurants, are not wings at all, but slices of breast meat deep-fried like wings and served with the same sauces — a bit like a spicy Chicken McNugget.

Buffalo Wild Wings began selling boneless wings six years ago, and the item has grown to 19 percent of sales, compared with 20 percent for regular wings. As wing prices rose and breast prices fell this year, other chains emulated the move. Wingstop, a 450-restaurant chain, began offering boneless wings in all stores this summer. Even Wendy’s, which does not sell regular wings, added boneless wings in June.

For wing-centric restaurants, boneless wings are a way to attract customers who may not like the messiness of wings, which have to be chewed off the bone. And with prices upside down, the boneless wings now act as a hedge, with the lower-cost breast meat offsetting higher wing costs.

But wing lovers sneer.

“A wing is a wing, and a wing has a bone,” said Anita Freedlander, the owner of Rusty’s Family Restaurant and Sports Grille in Tucson, which specializes in wings and does not sell the boneless variety.

Ms. Freedlander said she would most likely be forced to raise prices before the end of the year. Already her ingredient costs have risen to 45 percent of the menu price for wings, well above the 30 to 35 percent that many restaurants favor.

Restaurants pay extra to buy their wings pre-cut. Adam Lippin, the owner of Atomic Wings, a 10-restaurant chain based in New York, paid $1.70 a pound for wings this month. Last year, he said, his average wing cost was about $1.10 a pound.

“It’s at a really scary kind of place,” Mr. Lippin said of the price today.

At the Lion’s Head Tavern, near Columbia in Manhattan, the owners recently ended a long tradition of cheap wings on Monday nights.

“The whole idea of the discounted wings is to sell beer,” said the co-owner Gust Hookanson. “It became a little too much of a cost.”

The story was the same at O’Malleys in Tucson, which last fall had a wing special to go along with “Monday Night Football.” “We couldn’t afford to do it anymore,” said Rick Cano, the general manager.

Buffalo wings, as they are commonly called, are said to have started in Buffalo in the 1960s, when a bar owner took the unloved chicken parts, cooked them up and added sauce. They have become a classic American finger food — and a standby in bars during football season.

Most experts predict that wing prices will continue to rise at least until the Super Bowl in February, when a lot of wings are sold and prices peak.

Even afterward, demand looks set to remain strong. Pizza Hut announced this month that it would expand the availability of its wings menu, which it calls WingStreet; in 3,000 stores today, the menu will be added to 2,000 stores in the near future.

Adam J. Scott, a founder of Wing Zone, an Atlanta-based chain with 80 restaurants in 20 states, said the days of cheap wings might be gone forever. That is, unless something changes on the supply side.

“If they can figure out how to grow chickens with four wings,” Mr. Scott said, “we’d be in really great shape.”

John Collins Rudolf contributed reporting.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Calvin and Hobbes: Hungry Tiger

Roink!

 

FT: Catching Fire

Catching Fire

Review by Harry Eyres

Published: October 5 2009 05:06 | Last updated: October 5 2009 05:06

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human
By Richard Wrangham
Profile £15, 309 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12

This lucidly written and accessible popular science book argues that cooking was crucial in the evolution of the human race. Its thesis is not just that some experimentally minded members of homo erectus got the idea of cooking food, but that the epochal evolution of the homines from habilines (big-brained apes) can only be explained by the move from eating raw to cooked food. Cooking, according to Richard Wrangham, accounts for our small guts, our big brains, and the sexual division of labour prevalent in nearly all societies; in effect, the beginnings of human economy as well as our particular pair-bonding and culture itself.

That may sound like the wishful thinking of a gourmet or a French cultural theorist, but Wrangham is a level-headed Englishman who is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard. What makes his thesis so gripping to read is that it is elegantly argued, step by step, using evidence from palaeontology, primatology, the anthropological study of hunter-gatherer societies and the science of food digestion.

The first step is to establish that raw food, including raw meat, often touted as the crucial factor in turning apes into men, is unsatisfactory as a human diet. This may well have been already obvious to most people other than raw food fanatics, especially salad-hating males, but Wrangham cites the Giessen Raw Food study conducted on 513 volunteers in which half of the women fed on raw food stopped menstruating. Counter-intuitively, he says, cooked food produces far more energy and nutrition than raw food because it is easier to chew and digest. This permits the development of the big human brain, almost four times the size of a chimpanzee’s.

But cooking brings difficulties too. The basic problem is simple: who will do the cooking – guarding the vulnerable food that (before the days of ready-meals) requires hours of preparation? No prizes for guessing that the answer in more than 97.8 per cent of the 185 cultures studied by the anthropologists Murdock and Provost is women.

Having a woman to keep the home fires burning enables the male hunter, in hunter-gatherer societies, to spend all day hunting in the knowledge that a sustaining meal awaits him. In these societies, cooking seems to be a stronger bond than sex.

Wrangham agrees with those, from John Stuart Mill to contemporary feminists, who regard this as a raw deal for women. So though cooking may make us human, the sexual division of labour it has produced also “trapped women into a subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture”.

He ends, leaping rather abruptly from the neolithic to the digital age, with a chapter on the health problems caused in affluent societies by eating too rich a diet. What he doesn’t examine is the question of whether, if cooking has made us human, giving up cooking in favour of eating pre-prepared food might be making us less human once more.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Commercial: Carre de chocolat_Non Blink Eye

Heh... I love chocolate! Moink! :)

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A hilarious TV commercial from Japan. This Japanese lady in the story is challenging the world's record to keep her eye non-blink as long as she can. Bravo to DENTSU, the agency produced this wonderful spot. I just can't stop laughing even after viewing it so many times.

WSJ: Can a Ballclub's Record Justify Its Beer Prices?

THE COUNT

SEPTEMBER 11, 2009, 10:01 A.M. ET

Can a Ballclub's Record Justify Its Beer Prices?

In an ideal world, beer prices at the ballpark would be based solely on the quality of the team. Only the very best ballclubs would jack up the prices, while the mediocre teams would offer bargains ... and the Washington Nationals would give beer away for free. Regrettably, we don't live in an ideal world.

 According to data collected by Team Marketing Report for the 2009 season, beer prices vary dramatically among big-league teams. A 21-ounce beer costs $4.75 in Pittsburgh, but you'll shell out $8.75 for a 20-ounce brew at San Francisco's AT&T Park. This led us to wonder: Does quality have anything to do with beer prices?

Surprisingly, it does. A team with a .600 winning percentage charges, on average, about $1.30 more for a 16-ounce beer than does a team with a .400 percentage.

So which ballclub offers the best value based on its team's winning percentage? At Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia, you'll pay a modest $6.75 for a 21-ounce beer while watching one of the best teams in the National League. And for all their losing seasons, at least the Pirates allow their fans to drown their sorrows at a decent price. Even after factoring in their dismal record this season, that 21-ounce beer they sell at PNC Park is still 32% less expensive than it should be by this measure.

On the other end of the spectrum there's Nationals Park where, in exchange for watching baseball's worst team, fans get to spend $7.50 for a 20-ounce beer. Of course, nothing compares to Boston's Fenway Park. There, you'll pay $7.25 for just 12 ounces—a rate that is, ounce for ounce and win for win, the worst beer value in baseball.

—Justin Merry

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Boing Boing: Stuck Tic Tac gallery

Stuck Tic Tac gallery

Posted by David Pescovitz, September 25, 2009 6:18 AM | permalink

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Stuck Tic Tac gallery

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

NY Times: Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

September 23, 2009

Culinary Diplomacy With a Side of Kimchi

By JULIA MOSKIN

GREAT NECK, N.Y.

BEYOND THE KOREAN BBQ Kim Yoon-ok, the first lady of South Korea, flips a savory pancake stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers during a demonstration in Great Neck, N.Y.

TALKING about food is built into the job for first ladies: cookie recipes, menus for state dinners and, now, organic farming are all in their sphere of influence. But Kim Yoon-ok, the wife of the South Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, seemed to go beyond the call of duty on Sept. 21 when she picked up a spatula to cook pajeon — savory pancakes stuffed with seafood, scallions and slivered red peppers — for a group of American veterans of the Korean War.

To the consternation of her bodyguards, and in a moment that seemed more inspired by Rachael Ray than by Michelle Obama, the first lady plunged into the rows of guests to hand-feed bites of her pajeon to some silver-haired veterans and their wives.

“I wanted to give them a new taste of Korea as something positive and delicious,” she said in an interview afterward, her first with a member of the Western news media since her husband took office last year. (She spoke through an interpreter.) “From the war, they do not have many pleasant food memories.”

Mrs. Kim, along with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the chef; Moon Bloodgood, a Korean-American actress; and Salvatore Scarlato, a local war veteran with a flamboyant cooking style, were all taking part in the South Korean government’s mission in the United States this week. While Mr. Lee met in closed sessions at the United Nations, his wife, 62, embarked on a new career in the field of culinary diplomacy.

The government’s Korean Cuisine to the World campaign began in April, with official goals that include quadrupling the number of Korean restaurants abroad and lifting Korean food into the “top five rank of world cuisines” by 2017. Putting aside that such a ranking system does not exist, the campaign shows how seriously food is now taken by many governments, especially in Asia.

As sushi has served as a kind of cultural crowbar, opening doors for Japanese tourism, culture and exports, the South Korean Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has high hopes for bibimbap and bulgogi.

Bang Moon-kyu, a ministry official who is leading the campaign, said that it has about $10 million to spend in 2009, including grants and scholarships for South Koreans to travel and attend culinary school. The campaign has already established a research and development lab devoted to the popular street-food dish called tteokbokki, a garlicky, richly spiced dish of rice cakes bathed in red chili paste. Tteokbokki (pronounced duck-bo-key) got its own festival in March, spinning off from the larger annual Seoul festival of rice cakes, or tteok. “And tteokbokki is only the beginning,” he said.

“First was Chinese food in the U.S., then Japanese and Thai,” said Min Mon-hong, director of tourism for Korea. “Korean is the next big boom.”

At least seven arms of government, including the military, were represented at the Sept. 21 event, which took place at Leonard’s in Great Neck, a local venue for proms, weddings and bar mitzvahs. The catering, by the New York restaurant KumGangSan, was vastly more flavorful than the usual kosher fare.

As the cameras of the Korean news media clicked, Jean-Georges Vongerichten showed off his one-handed pajeon-flipping abilities. “I’ve been teaching him some sauces and marinades,” said Mr. Vongerichten’s wife, Marja, who is Korean-American. “I think he would do great things with gochujang,” she said, referring to the spicy, fermented paste of ripe red chili peppers that is one of the basic seasonings of the Korean kitchen.

New York City is viewed by the campaign’s officials as a vast field of opportunity for shaping world opinion about Korean food. Although the city lacks a truly ambitious, transporting Korean restaurant, the flavors have made major inroads here. At the Momofuku restaurants, David Chang made his name by layering the intense flavors of Korea into Japanese and American dishes; at Ssam Bar, his version of tteokbokki is crossbred with Italian gnocchi in a light, fiery, herb-spiked pork sauce. New York Hotdog in Greenwich Village serves hot dogs topped with bulgogi (redundant, but tasty) and burgers with kimchi.

For many years, authentic Korean food was perceived, even among Koreans, as too spicy, too garlicky and too sour for the world stage. (The strong smell of kimchi was a running joke among the American veterans on Monday). In South Korea, exotica like pizza and hamburgers became fashionable once the country began to recover from the devastation of the war years.

But high-end restaurants in Seoul are now turning away from Western food and toward Korean tradition, drawing on both everyday snacks like pajeon and painstaking arts like the making of tteok, sticky rice pounded into a dizzying array of shapes, colors and flavors.

Making tteok, like almost all cooking in Korea, was traditionally done by women; hundreds of female slaves and workers were employed by the kitchens of the royal court during the Joseon dynasty, which ruled Korea from 1392 to 1910. “The court cuisine has become trendy in the last few years,” said Michael Pettid, the author of “Korean Cuisine: An Illustrated History.” “More people can afford to eat things once reserved for the elite, like tteok.”

Last week on 32nd Street in Manhattan, where Korean restaurants are clustered, Eun-joo Song, a Korean-American student at Parsons the New School for Design, expressed doubt about the need for any official campaign. “I think the restaurants here can speak for themselves,” she said, gesturing at storefronts advertising barbecued beef, organic tofu and handmade dumplings. “Governments can’t tell people what to like.”

Although Mrs. Kim’s official role was to promote Korean food, she did use her platform to raise a tender political topic. “You all look very healthy to me,” she said, gazing out at the veterans in their blue dress uniforms. “You might live to see the reunification of the two Koreas.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

NY Times: E-Kitchens Can Get Crowded

September 23, 2009

E-Kitchens Can Get Crowded

By KIM SEVERSON

AS the digital age seeps into the kitchen, it’s time to reconsider whether too many cooks spoil the broth.

Crowd-sourcing recipes — corralling a group of strangers on the Internet to create and edit a bank of recipes — is gaining popularity and investors.

The idea is that a thousand cooks can come up with a better recipe than any single chef.

Some cooks argue that the collective process strips recipes of their personality and their provenance. But backers believe they are creating a new authority for cooking: the Wikipedia of recipes.

“Food is untapped,” said Barnaby Dorfman, a former Amazon.com executive who a year ago started Foodista.com, one of a handful of recipe sites that let anyone make additions or changes. “We’re just starting to get into a phase of truly leveraging the Web as a medium for recipes and cooking knowledge.”

These sites are still young, and not as complete or reliable as a good cook might hope. But you can already get an idea of how they work and of their potential.

Take, for example, a tabouleh recipe posted by someone called “Shiftyenomis” on the recipe section of Wikia, a separate company started by the Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. At some point, an anonymous user changed the amount of bulgur wheat to 1 1/2 cups from 1 1/2 tablespoons. Then “Blacksteallion” changed it back.

“Rloperena” jumped in, changing the bulgur back to 1 1/2 cups. Commenting that too much parsley can make the salad unpleasant, she reduced it to four cups from seven. She also added cucumber and green chili, and better directions for soaking the wheat. That was in August. No one has challenged her yet. (To make this even more confusing, readers should note that a search for “tabbouleh” will produce an entirely different recipe.)

At this rate, creating the world’s greatest collective tabouleh recipe could take years. But then again, things move fast on the Internet.

Recipe Wiki, one of 50,000 communities, or topic areas, on Wikia.com, already has 40,000 recipes and lots of information about ingredients and techniques. It began in 2005, and lately has been one of the fastest-growing areas on Wikia.com, jumping 60 percent in traffic since January.

Like Foodista.com, it has strong backing from investors, including Amazon. The site has 6.5 million unique visitors a month in the United States. For users, being part of the community is more valuable than any individual recipe. Allowing some stranger to mess with a recipe just is no big deal.

“As long as the original is up there, I don’t have a problem with people adding to it,” said Jo Stougaard, who runs the blog mylastbite.com. “We all tweak recipes.” Ms. Stougaard, from Studio City, Calif., contributes regularly to Foodista, which in turns drives traffic to her site.

One of her contributions — a “porn burger” of Spam, prosciutto and beef — was deleted because it invited too many X-rated additions. Malicious vandalism is a constant worry. Substituting body fluids for ingredients is a favorite prank. A mix of staffers and volunteers police sites to catch bad edits. I tested this, adding “one small plastic car” to the ingredient list for barbecued pork on both Foodista.com and Recipe Wiki.

Two days later I got a kind slap on the wrist from Danny at Wikia.com: “If you’re new to wikis, I know how tempting it is to try out something silly and see what happens. It’s not a big deal; I took the plastic car out, so now the BBQ Pork is going to have to call for a taxi if it wants to get anywhere. :) ”

At Foodista.com, the car was taken out of the recipe two days later by Mr. Dorfman.

Still, anyone who has used Wikipedia understands the value of information that can be collectively massaged by a wide circle of people. But are recipes the same as, say, the history of Seattle or the properties of copper?

In other words, is a recipe a fact?

“Our idea is that there is this notion of a dish which is a culturally shared idea of a recipe,” Mr. Dorfman said. And people think recipes vary more than they really do. He makes his point with apple pie. Stop a hundred people and ask what goes into an apple pie and you’ll get a predictable list of flour, apples, cinnamon and sugar. Even the variations, like whether to use butter or lard in the crust, aren’t really that different.

The advantage, lovers of the wiki model say, goes beyond the chance for the collective opinion of a crowd to create a recipe. At its best, a wiki site is like being able to call up your really smart friend who can cook every dish imaginable and knows its history.

The content is, also, free of editorial interference or commercial pressure. The model, enthusiasts say, has a unique ability to capture “the long tail” — providing useful information on a wide swath of esoteric subjects, like how to make pasta in a paper shredder. And wiki contributors often search out government agencies and obscure sources for recipes hidden in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. They even use early recipe exchange databases, like those created at Yahoo.com, to seed their sites.

It’s too soon to tell whether any of the new sites will overtake Epicurious, arguably the most popular source for recipes online. The site’s 27,000 recipes come largely from the test kitchens of Bon Appétit and Gourmet magazines, but they are rated by users. Some have hundreds of comments by cooks with varying levels of skill and dedication to following the recipe. The site also has about 114,000 recipes submitted by users, some of which are original and all of which can be rated by the masses.

Tanya Wenman Steel, editor in chief of Epicurious.com, says she is “a big believer in the democratization of recipe creation” but also thinks people like to know that a prize family recipe won’t be tampered with.

Mr. Dorfman says Foodista.com has a section where contributors can “lock down” their recipes. On other recipes, readers can track what changes were made and who made them. The same is true for the Wikia recipe site, but it’s more cumbersome to use.

For many cooks, recipes are too unique to be tampered with by a mob. The creators of a Food52.com, a new cooking site that straddles the line between cookbooks and crowd-sourcing, say wikis can lead to voiceless recipes and an industrial approach to cooking.

“We felt like there was a middle ground between the old-media, top-down approach and the completely open-ended, voiceless mass recipes you get on these big databases,” said Amanda Hesser, a former editor at The New York Times who writes about food for the Times magazine. She developed Food52.com with Merrill Stubbs, who helped Ms. Hesser on her forthcoming book of New York Times recipes.

The Food52.com goal is to create a bank of well-curated recipes from good cooks who submit recipes on a theme, like beef salad or end-of-summer cocktails, and then vote for the best.

To make an informed choice, people can cook the recipes themselves and watch Ms. Hesser and Ms. Stubbs test them in a series of videos. At the end of the year, the best recipes will become a book.

Jennifer Hess, a food blogger from Providence, R.I., was an early Food52 member. Her smoky pork burger with fennel and red cabbage slaw won the “Your Best Grilled Pork Recipe” contest. Because Food52 recipes are curated and well tested, they appeal to her more than recipes from crowd-sourced sites, she said.

“It’s nice to be judged by people who also have some chops and aren’t going to say, ‘This is wonderful’ because they are your friends, or not follow it and then leave a comment saying they hated it,” she said.

Some think a crowd shouldn’t go anywhere near a recipe. Among them is Christopher Kimball, publisher of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and host of the public television show “America’s Test Kitchen.” Crowd-sourced recipes can’t be relied upon because skills and kitchens vary too much, he said. His site’s 270,000 subscribers want recipes from a reliable kitchen.

For others, crowd-sourcing removes an intangible part of a recipe: the story behind it. Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel wrote “The Recipe Club: A Tale of Food and Friendship,” a novel that traces a friendship between two women, much of which involves sharing recipes. The authors started clubs for people to share recipes and the stories behind them — about as far from anonymous recipe Web sites as you can get.

At one recent gathering in Brooklyn, a woman in her 50s brought “the dullest chicken recipe you could ever imagine,” Ms. Garfinkel recalled. Her mother had been mentally ill and never cooked. But sometimes, her grandmother did.

“This was the dish her grandmother cooked for her,” she said. “It was a recipe but it was about her loneliness and her grandmother. I made that chicken, and I tasted the story of her life.”

Even for those steeped in crowd-sourcing culture, cooking can get personal. Nicole Willson, an experienced wiki administrator who has worked on recipe sites, sometimes just improvises a stir-fry or gets a recipe off a box of pasta, or even gets real old school.

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s easier to get out a cookbook.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

BusinessWeek: The challenges for McDonald's Top Chef

Voices of Innovation September 14, 2009, 12:18PM EST text size: TT

The Challenges for McDonald's Top Chef

Dan Coudreaut, McDonald's head culinary innovator, has to incorporate new dishes into the menu without turning off a Big Mac-loving nation

By Michael Arndt

The contestants on Iron Chef have it easy compared with Dan Coudreaut, director of culinary innovation at McDonald's (MCD). Sure, the TV duelists have just an hour to whip up five dishes incorporating the same ingredients. But check out Coudreaut's constraints: He's only allowed to prepare dishes that can be made by entry-level help at every one of the chain's U.S. 14,000 locations and from ingredients available in industrial quantities year-round. And, oh yeah, the food has to appeal every day to millions of customers who don't have a lot of money or time or the stomach for anything too unusual.

His challenge is apparent after a few minutes in his test kitchen, which is housed behind glass walls near a row of cubicles in McDonald's suburban Chicago headquarters. Dressed in a chef's smock, Coudreaut mixes toasted coriander and cumin with cilantro stems, lemongrass, ginger, and chilies in a blender. He stirs the spicy paste into coconut milk, which he reduces over high heat and adds to a pan of sauteed eggplant. And what might become of his red curry eggplant? After playing around more with the recipe, he says, some of the flavors might make their way into a ranch sauce in a few years.

Coudreaut, or Chef Dan as he's called within McDonald's, has navigated pretty well within his straits. Since hired on in 2004, he has led the creation of the Snack Wrap, the latest iterations of McDonald's chicken-topped salad entree, the Fruit and Walnut Salad, McCafé espresso-based coffees, and, most recently, the 1/3-lb. Angus burger. (He has blown it, too. McDonald's dropped the too-adventurous Hot 'n' Spicy McChicken sandwich in 2007 after just six months on the market and disappointing sales.)

Angus Burger Advantage

The stream of new products is paying off. While restaurant sales have been sinking industrywide since the recession hit in 2007, McDonald's quarterly same-store sales have continued to climb. The string, which began in 2003, continues into the third quarter, with a 1.7% increase in the U.S. in August and 2.6% in July. CEO James A. Skinner credited the gains to premium coffees and the Angus burger.

The Angus burger followed a typical course, Coudreaut says. After seeing rivals such as Burger King (BKC) and Hardee's (CKR) boost sales with heavyweight cheeseburgers, McDonald's franchisees petitioned the company in early 2007 to come up with a premium sandwich of its own. Coudreaut invited chefs from McDonald's suppliers, including Cargill and Kraft Foods (KFT), to his test kitchen in Oak Brook, Ill., and together with his four-person staff they began cooking. They started with 20 types of patties, in various sizes and made from different cuts of beef, and 30 buns.

They tried a ciabatta roll and Italian flat bread, for instance, but the company's marketing team steered them back to a traditional bakery bun. "Americans have a sense of what a burger is," Coudreaut notes. "They want a sesame-seed bun."

Worth $3.99

After six months of team cooking and market research, Coudreaut weeded the choices down to one basic sandwich, with three sets of toppings. Then restaurant owners in key markets began testing the product to see if employees could follow the recipe reliably­—McDonald's kitchens weren't using bacon, sliced red onion, or sauteed mushrooms—and if customers liked it enough to spend $3.99 on a fast-food sandwich. Turns out they could, and they did—the third-pounder was introduced across the U.S. in early July.

The burger, like the Snack Wrap and the Premium Salad, isn't simply a one-off product; it's a "platform." While the Big Mac's makeup hasn't changed since its invention in 1967, the Angus burger can be topped with something new whenever Coudreaut hits on another recipe, providing McDonald's a quick, low-cost way to refresh its menu. In fact, the company is already testing a chipotle BBQ bacon version in Southern California.

Coudreaut, 43, may seem out of place in fast-food. After earning an associate's degree in business administration and management, he became a sous chef in a French bistro in New York. Returning to school, he trained at the Culinary Institute of America and graduated at the top of his class in 1995. He then moved to Dallas where he worked his way up in fine dining to club chef of the Four Seasons Hotel. He recalls that even his mother shook her head when he told her he was moving to McDonald's.

Looking for Inspiration

Coudreaut figures he spends 70% of his workweek in the kitchen; the rest of his days are filled with corporate chores and field trips to McDonald's outlets. He eats out often, but bypasses other quick-serve chains. Instead he goes to independent restaurants, from street vendors in Austin, Tex., to four-star places like Daniel or Per Se in New York, where he says the food is more inspired and inspirational.

And he cooks at home. "It's sad­—my profession is my hobby, too." Family meals are usually simple, he says. He's got a 75-sq.-ft. vegetable and herb garden that his 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son help him tend.

Coudreaut is cagey about what he's cooking up next. He's no longer restricted to fried meat. As the company's top chef, he has had a big part in expanding McDonald's fare, of course. Though the McDouble cheeseburger is still the company's top product by volume, McDonald's sells more apples than any other restaurant.

Across from Coudreaut's kitchen, there's a sign that his boss, Jeffrey Stratton, McDonald's chief restaurant officer, put up. It reads: "It's not real until it's real in the restaurant." Coudreaut says it stares him in the face every day. "That's the challenge," he says. "We can push the box a little bit. We can expand it. But we cannot break it."

Arndt is editor of BusinessWeek's innovation and design coverage, overseeing its Innovation channel as well as the magazine's quarterly IN: Inside Innovation section.

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The meal you'll never eat at McDonald's: Dan Coudreaut's recipe for red curry eggplant

Copyright 2000-2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

NY Times: Michelin Builds a Campaign Around Its Secret Reviewers

September 17, 2009

Advertising

Michelin Builds a Campaign Around Its Secret Reviewers

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

HERE’S a piece of advance information from the Michelin guide for New York City 2010: 18 new stars will be awarded to restaurants. Michelin is rigorously tight-lipped about the information in its guides until they arrive in stores, and requires similar discretion from its reviewers, who are anonymous.

But in this Facebook era, when privacy and anonymity seem like vestiges of a bygone time, Michelin is making itself a bit more accessible as it prepares for the New York guide’s fifth edition, scheduled to be in stores on Oct. 6, and San Francisco’s fourth edition, scheduled for Oct. 20.

It is running an ad campaign for the guides highlighting its “famously anonymous” professional reviewers. Michelin protects the identities of its reviewers to the point that they generally are not allowed to do interviews with the press, and must invent cover stories about their profession so that even friends and family don’t know what they do.

Despite those precautions, with this campaign, Michelin is peeling back the mask of its reviewers. They will post items on Twitter at @MichelinGuideNY and @MichelinGuideSF, including items about places they are dining, advance critiques of chefs and complaints about service.

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“One of the things we realized when we started to question people in New York, they realized what Michelin was about, but they didn’t realize that this was about a team of professionals,” said Jean-Luc Naret, director of the Michelin guides. “We’re trying, really, to make sure that people understand they are on the road, they are out there and maybe they could spot them.”

The Michelin guide was first published in France in 1900 as a free directory that offered listings of hotels to promote road travel, which would in turn help sales of Michelin brand tires.

It was distributed at garages and tire dealerships until 1920, when, according to company lore, a co-founder of the guide, André Michelin, noticed stacks of the guides piled up under a garage workbench, and decided that people respected only what they paid for. He began charging for the guide and added restaurant coverage around the same time. By 1931, Michelin was using the three-star system for its restaurants that it still uses today.

Michelin entered the United States with the 2006 New York edition. But New York already had its own restaurant guide. The Zagat Survey was founded in New York City 30 years ago, and surveys regular customers to compile its ratings and reviews.

That is one reason Michelin is emphasizing its professional restaurant and hotel inspectors this year, to differentiate itself from Zagat. Ryan Lynch, senior brand strategist at the advertising agency Cliff Freeman & Partners, which worked on the campaign, said he was also fascinated with the secret life of inspectors.

For instance, inspectors book reservations under fake names, Mr. Naret said. They surreptitiously scribble notes while they are in the bathroom or type them on their BlackBerrys. And they take pains to blend in, even recruiting people to pose as paramours when reviewing certain romantic restaurants.

“They are not going to go by themselves to a restaurant where everyone looks like a couple,” Mr. Naret said. “They have to be a chameleon.”

That got Mr. Lynch thinking that Twitter clues about where the reviewers were eating would intrigue food enthusiasts.

“There’s kind of a ‘Da Vinci Code,’ a little James Bond feel, to who they are and how they go about working and your imagination tends to run wild with it,” Mr. Lynch said. Knowing something about inspectors — from what standards Michelin sets for them to more specific details like where they have been eating — could be a nice piece of trivia for diners, he said.

The Twitter posts from the reviewers so far are along the lines of, “Lunch at Jaiya, renovations still under way but lookin’ good. Yummy spring roll.” But Michelin does not want the Twitter element to be too successful. Crowds are notoriously good at solving online puzzles: people who commented at the site Consumerist.com tracked down the makers of a Domino’s Pizza gross-out video earlier this year, and brands like McDonald’s and Wired magazine have set up online mysteries that crowds solve together. If readers figured out who an inspector was, the inspector would be out of a job.

•

Michelin is taking the precaution of having inspectors send Twitter updates to an editor who posts them, but Mr. Lynch said there were still some worries.

“With technology being what it is, and the advancements in being able to locate people, we open ourselves up for a potential chance of that anonymity being broken, and at the end of the day that can’t happen — it’s got to be a very slow and steady process to find how much these people give away,” he said.

The print ads accompanying the Michelin guide are running in the October editions in San Francisco and New York-area issues of magazines like Bon Appétit, Time Out New York and Architectural Digest. The ads show a handful of urbane young people in a restaurant, watching and being watched, and asks, “Who’s the famously anonymous inspector?” Below, smaller print gives the answer: “You’ll never know, because Michelin inspectors visit restaurants without revealing their identity.”

Michelin is also running the Web site FamouslyAnonymous.com, which includes information about the jobs of reviewers.

“This whole idea of anonymity is the end-all, be-all for what this guide is,” Mr. Lynch said. “To finally start to open up these inspectors to the world is going to be a minute-by-minute learning experience.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company