Walt at Random

Reading an article in the local weekly about Wal-Mart’s attempt to open a supermarket in a neighboring city, noted some comments about “local” markets, which Wal-Mart is anything but.

The interesting note in those comments is that, after citing a couple of true locally-owned groceries (the kind with one to ten stores in a small area), the article noted that Safeway is in fact “local” since the headquarters are in Pleasanton–the neighboring city in question.

That got me wondering about the other places we might use as supermarkets or grocery stores.

• Lucky, the only one in walking distance, I already knew: It’s part of Save Mart, and Save Mart is headquartered in Modesto, CA, my home down, about 75 miles from here.
• Trader Joe’s is headquartered in Southern California–but it’s owned by a German family.
• Our only other real option is Nob Hill, which is part of Raley’s…which is headquartered in Placerville, probably 90-120 miles from here.

I suppose there’s Target (their food prices are awfully good), and that’s headquartered in Minneapolis. There’s Whole Foods, headquartered in Austin, TX, but even if there was one around here (there isn’t), we couldn’t afford it.

Interesting. Every place we’re likely to buy most groceries is headquartered in California–and, to be sure, we buy most produce at local farmer’s markets.

No deeper significance. I know supermarkets are typically regional: That’s why Consumer Reports food reports include store brands from stores I’ve never heard of, but never Safeway store brands.

One of the few things unfortunate about going to ALA Annual in New Orleans is that it meant four days without this year’s crop of stone fruit–a crop that’s generally been unusually good.

How good? Last year, there were no Bing cherries at all from local orchards. This year, the Bings are first-rate–and the Brooks cherries aren’t far behind.

New pluot varieties keep popping up, and some of this years’ (such as Flavorosa) are wonderful. Ditto the Modesto apricots, not all that much less glorious than Blenheims.

And then there are peachcots.

Peachcots? We’d never heard of them until a year or two ago. At this point, precisely one vendor at one of the two Farmers’ Markets we go to has them–and for all of one week. We got ours last week. We probably won’t get any more. This is sad.

You can guess the cross from the name: A cross between peach and apricot. What you can’t guess is either the look or the taste.

The look? Smooth skin like an apricot, size larger than most apricots but smaller than most peaches…and color like an apricot with red tinges that’s been rendered using oversaturated artificial colors. An apricot the way Andy Warhol might paint one, or perhaps what you’d get taking a picture of an apricot using high dynamic range filtering.

The taste…heaven. Just plain heaven. Very strong apricot flavor, some peach flavor, almost sweet enough to be candy, with a great texture. As with most apricots, it’s a freestone fruit, which makes cutting and serving easy.

I just finished off lunch with two apricots, ten cherries and a peachcot. The apricots were excellent. The cherries were better. The peachcot…well, it was in a category all its own. I’ll miss them.

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Followup, July 8: To our considerable surprise and pleasure, the same booth had peachcots again yesterday. So it will be another week before I start missing them…

Late spring, that is, as in:

Farmer’s market today: Organic apricots, white peaches. (Also cherries, but not yet Bings or Rainiers).

In other words,

It’s stone fruit season!

 

Lifehacker has a story entitled “Why It May Make Sense To Reach for the Cheaper Wine.” It references a BBC report based on blind taste tests among 587 people at the Edinburgh Science Festival, tests indicating that people were only about 50% successful in deciding which of two wines was more expensive, based only on the taste.

The BBC report has a misleading title–”Cheap wine ‘good as pricier bottles’ – blind taste test”–and a highly questionable concluding paragraph:

Lead researcher psychologist Professor Richard Wiseman said: “These are remarkable results. People were unable to tell expensive from inexpensive wines, and so in these times of financial hardship the message is clear – the inexpensive wines we tested tasted the same as their expensive counterparts.”

Without seeing the full study and what wines were involved, it’s impossible to provide a full critique, but right off the bat a couple of things should be obvious:

• As stated, the test was not whether people could tell a difference in the taste of two wines. It was whether they could accurately say which one cost more. Those are entirely different things.
• On the other hand, this paragraph is almost certainly correct–but also almost certainly blindingly obvious: “University of Hertfordshire researchers say their findings indicate many people may just be paying for a label.” Wow! Some people buy more expensive X because of the label, not the quality (or think that because X2 costs more than X1, it must be better). I can think of dozens, probably hundreds of values for X where that’s true; that it might be true of wine as well should come as no surprise.

There’s another related story at StackExchange, and I link to it not so much for the text as for the comments, which are relatively few and in some cases fairly interesting (even if the first one is flatly wrong–some of France’s most expensive and best-known wines are blends, as a fast response points out).  Come to think of it, the third and fourth comments on the Lifehacker story–as I write this–are also worthwhile, if somewhat less formal. (Also the fifth and sixth if you expand the comments.)

I labeled the story and study “silly” in a Friendfeed thread. I did so because, at least as reported, the study doesn’t really lead anywhere.

Why? Because we should know this, and it’s true not only of wines but of many, perhaps most, products that engage subjective evaluation. It boils down to this:

Different people have different tastes and different sensitivity levels–and for many people, subjective response is based on more than a narrow objective reality.

I believe that’s exactly as it should be. I’m occasionally offended by reviews where I believe the reviewer is overstating objective differences because of subjective preferences that may have nothing to do with actual performance–thus, my occasional My Back Pages comments on some high-end stereo reviews.

Which is to say: There’s nothing wrong at all with a wealthy person paying $25,000 for an amplifier with badly substandard frequency response and low wattage because they like the way it looks, or they love the warm glow of tubes, or they like the maker, or they just like having a rare amplifier. I’m mildly offended by reviewers asserting that the $25,000 amplifier is Clearly Superior to a $500 amplifier, and worth every cent, when it appears from the article that they’re as much influenced by their friendship with the manufacturer as by the actual sound. Understanding that blind testing of audio products, as with many other products, is inherently flawed, I’ve always wondered what a “Radio Shack test” would yield–that is, a testing regimen in which the reviewer can take as much time as he or she wants, but the device being tested is encased in a cabinet that makes it indistinguishable from the cheapest device sold by Radio Shack.

The general case: Sensitivity and acuity

On one hand, it should be obvious that most of us aren’t terribly sensitive to differences in most areas of daily life, and that’s probably as it should be.

Would most beer drinkers–or, even worse, most non-beer drinkers–properly guess which was more expensive (or which was “better”) if served Brew 102 (if it still exists) or Fisher and, alongside, the most expensive beer of similar style in the world?

I suspect most people who don’t drink high-end Scotch wouldn’t be better than random chance at determining whether a $10 Scotch or a $250 Scotch was “better” or “more expensive” or even different–I don’t think I would be able to make those distinctions, and if I did, I might well prefer the simpler character of the cheap Scotch. (This may not be a fair comparison–it appears that the price differentials in the wine test were as small as 2:1, not 10:1…or in the case of sparkling wine, only 1.7:1. I suspect I couldn’t reliably tell you which of two sparkling wines, one costing $29 and one costing $46, the dollar equivalent of the stated pounds prices, was the more expensive–that’s a price range in which I’d expect the wines to both be excellent with subtle differences. Given that our favorite sparkling wine, Schramsberg Blanc de Blanc, is in the $24-$27 range, I can comfortably state that I wouldn’t expect to reliably tell whether a $46 blanc de blanc was better or more expensive.)

It’s not just drink. Can you really tell me that most people could tell whether a pair of shoes cost $75 or $150 based on how comfortable or well-constructed they are? (Or, let’s say, a good pair of Rockports vs. a pair of designer shoes costing four times as much.) That most people could tell whether a painting is worth $10 or $200 based on nothing more than the image? That most people hearing a stereo costing $2,000 and one costing $1,000 can tell which is which or which costs more? (Especially if the only difference between the two is in either a digital frontend or the amplification…tell me that the average listener can tell which of a $12,000 CD player or a $200 CD player is more expensive, given only audible clues!)

The specific case: Price in wine is a complex proposition

That’s true in many other fields as well. If you think there’s a direct ratio between cost and either quality or “driving experience” in automobiles, I’d beg to differ. A VW Golf is a 50% better car than a Honda Fit? A BMW 750LI will give you three times the driving pleasure of an Acura TSX and 4.5 times the pleasure of a Hyundai Sonata? Really?

With wine–as with many other products–the price involves a whole bunch of things, all of which can affect worth for some consumers: Rarity (size of producer, size of production), complexity, time spent in production, deliberate marketing decisions…

There are lots of California red wines priced at $75/bottle and up because the tiny little wineries that make them have based their business plans on such high prices. I’m not likely to try any of them, and not worry about what I’m missing. In many cases, those pricey wines are also very high alcohol because that’s what Robert Parker and some other wine critics seem to like; if I was to taste one of these 14.5-15% $75 wines vs. a decently-made $12 wine with 13.5% alcohol, I’d probably prefer the “cheap” wine–and might even assume it was more expensive.

There’s a reason Two Buck Chuck is so popular. It’s not terrible wine. It’s simple wine without lots of pretension. That makes it preferable to more expensive wines for many buyers. I don’t buy it these days, but I don’t disdain it.

I do buy $4 Chardonnays at Trader Joe’s, and $5 Chardonnays and $6 Chardonnays. In general, I find them to be better values and better wines than quite a few $8-$12 name-brand Chardonnays, partly because they’re usually 12.5%-13% alcohol, partly because they’re well-made with no marketing budget. But we also picked up a $26 Chardonnay at a Livermore winery; it’s probably worth the money–but I’d rarely want to drink a bottle that expensive. I’ve certainly had $12 and $15 wines that simply didn’t taste as good as $4 wines–and I’ve tasted $30 and $40 wines that I wouldn’t serve on a bet.

There’s no accounting for tastes–and there’s very little accounting for taste sensitivity. That makes most studies of these sorts not terribly useful, except for those who want to convince themselves that there really aren’t any differences between different products. Sometimes, even that’s true–but not generally.

You love your high-end Cognac? Good for you. I simply wouldn’t appreciate the difference between it and E&J. I might or might not be able to tell the difference but I wouldn’t appreciate it. So, for me, it’s not worth the substantial extra cost. That’s partly because cognac and brandy don’t interest me (same with most booze, actually). It’s also partly because it’s not a sensitivity I’ve chosen to cultivate, and might not have even if I did so. Doesn’t mean there are no differences.

Oh, and as to cars? There’s a reason I’ve never owned anything but Honda Civics, and if that changes, it would change toward a Fit, not a Mercedes or Lamborghini…even if I won SuperLotto.

 

 

 

 

I took part in an odd exchange a couple of days ago on Facebook; I won’t link to it because it was truly trivial. But it did make me think…

The exchange had to do with one person saying they could stop worrying and let the natural expansion that comes with age take place–in other words, pudge out at least a little.

I offered a snarky comeback (knowing the person was a lot younger than I am) noting that I’m 65 and prefer not to allow “natural expansion”: how old did I need to be before weight no longer mattered?

The person responded with their actual age. And another person, just a couple years younger than I am, offered a comment saying that they no longer cared what others thought about how they look or what they weigh.

In all cases, I’m paraphrasing, possibly badly, but I’m also not naming names or offering links. Both of the others involved are good people, and I have no quarrel with either of them.

Not just for others

I do pay reasonable attention to my weight–which is currently, and has been for a couple of years, within two pounds of 160 at any given point, one way or the other. (I’m roughly 5’10″; I was 5’11″, but have shrunk a little, which does seem to be a common consequence of aging.)

Reasonable attention? Only this: I have dessert frequently and eat as much as I want to. If my weight started creeping up past 162 for more than a day or two (or for more than two weeks after a vacation or other trip), I’d probably cut back…just a little. (If my weight started falling below 158, I’d wonder if anything else was going on. Below 155, I start losing energy reserves.)

Although I’m sure my wife wouldn’t be happy if I started “natural expansion” back to the 165-170 I weighed for years or beyond that (175 appears to be my BMI touchstone–that is, above 175 and I’d be in the slightly-overweight category), that’s not my primary reason for staying at a good weight.

My primary reason boils down to wanting to be healthy, active, and ideally still free of prescription drugs when I’m 85, and with luck when I’m 90.

I know I’m lucky: Genetics has a lot to do with all these things. I also suspect that being able to walk far enough, briskly enough and with no assistance when you’re truly getting on in years has much to do not only with how much weight you’re carrying around but with whether you were walking a lot in earlier years. And I’m reasonably convinced that, all else being equal, maintaining a reasonable weight will serve me well in the long run in other ways.

No, I’m not a health nut. I do try to eat at least 2-5 servings of fruit & vegetables every day (but don’t do nearly as well as I should), but I’m also an omnivore, eating meat with some frequency. Bacon? Oh yes, from time to time. Cheeseburgers (well, bacon cheeseburgers)? Not often–maybe once a month–but oh yes. (Fast food burgers? Not so much: I avoid fast food in general, partly as a matter of taste, partly because I think the calorie/enjoyment/nutrition/taste balance is better elsewhere.) Alcohol? Wine pretty much every day with dinner and, very infrequently, with lunch…and that’s about it.  I suppose I’m really lucky in that I lost any taste for soft drinks decades ago. Candy? Similar to fast food: most of it just doesn’t taste all that good any more; I’ll take a handful of my dried fruit mix (five flavors of cranberries, two varieties of dried cherry, maybe a mix of other dried fruit) over most any candy any time. (Exception: Trader Joe’s 72% Dark Chocolate bars, but I rarely even eat those, and savor one-quarter bar at a time instead of chomping through the whole thing.)

(Supplements? Plain old senior vitamin pill, calcium citrate ‘cuz I’m lactose-intolerant so don’t drink milk, fish oil ‘cuz I don’t eat enough fish, and a half-dose glucosamine/chondroitin tablet because, while it might well be a placebo, taking it seems to keep away the shoulder pain I had at one point, and it appears to be a cheap and harmless placebo if it is that.) [As to the lactose intolerance, which is probably a lot more common among adults, even those of Northern European stock, than people think--if you're passing gas all the time, that could be one reason--while I don't drink milk, I do eat things containing dairy: lactase tablets as needed to the rescue.]

As far as I can tell, I’m not denying myself anything that I want. I am making a point to stay active, between the weekly 5 to 7-mile hikes and the 6x/week 1.5-mile “walks around the block” and, of course, walking for errands when that makes sense. I do try to avoid eating as an idle activity, snacking for the sake of snacking, and that turns out to be easy once it’s habitual: you’re not avoiding anything.

I’m not suggesting how others should live. There are lots of reasons for being a given weight, many of them not under personal control (I’m guessing), and I respect other people’s situations.

Incidentally, there are also lots of reasons some people are perhaps thinner than you might consider normal, and in many cases the reasons have nothing to do with vanity or with trying to feel superior. I can assure you that some underweight people would rather not be that way. It’s as offensive to sneer at people who are thin as it is offensive to sneer at people who are fat or fatter than you consider ideal.

I am saying that, for me at least–and, I think, for quite a few others–maintaining a given weight is for ourselves, not for how we look to others.

Yes, I read Heinlein decades ago, including The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He didn’t coin TANSTAAFL, but that novel certainly publicized it.

TANSTAAFL? There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Digression The First: As is so frequently the case with Wikipedia these days, the discussion on the article you wind up at–linked from TANSTAAFL, which apparently doesn’t meet Sacred Wikipedia Article Naming Conventions–is considerably more interesting than the article itself. Particularly when “Chuck” keeps arguing that “ain’t no” is a double negative and, thus, that TANSTAAFL means there is such a thing as a free lunch. End of Digression the First.

But That’s Silly

Yes, I understand the context Heinlein used, as part of the libertarian undercurrent running through much of his work: A saloon that provides free lunch when you buy a drink is likely to charge more for the drinks than one that doesn’t.

But…

• Later this week, probably, I’ll buy one of Safeway’s excellent special sandwiches, hand the checker a coupon, and walk out paying not a cent for lunch. Then, after paying for six sandwiches, I’ll do the same thing in a few weeks. (The ongoing promotion says “buy seven, get one free”–but, in fact, the one that you get free counts as a purchase, so after that it’s really pay for six, get one free.) Yes, it’s a loyalty program; no, the sandwiches don’t cost any more than sandwiches of equivalent quality I buy elsewhere. If they did, I wouldn’t buy them.
• We find that Marco’s pizza is better than any other chain pizza we’ve had, and have it for dinner roughly every other Saturday night. Three Saturdays from now (I think), I’ll walk into Marco’s and hand them a little card with six holes punched in it instead of the $17.50 I’d normally pay for a pizza. Since a medium pizza leaves enough left over for my Sunday lunch, I will indeed have a free lunch on Sunday…and we’ll both have a free dinner on Saturday. Yes, it’s another loyalty program; I think the pizza is fairly priced for its quality.
• “But you’re indirectly paying for those loyalty programs, so, you know, TANSTAAFL.” Maybe–if you can show me that I would get comparable quality for a lower cost (at a business that I’m willing to deal with) elsewhere. If not, then the lunch really is effectively free: I’m getting it for no added cost.
• Let’s take a more extreme case, back from Mountain View days. Pick Up Stix (a chain of “fresh Asian” restaurants, where almost everything’s prepared in woks when you order it) had just opened a new location and sent out cards to neighborhood houses offering a free entree. No gotchas, no “buy one, get one free,” no nothing–just hand them the card and walk out with what turned out to be a pretty good meal. The restaurant did the same thing a few months later. Those free meals were essentially a form of advertising, so somebody paid for them–but I’d be hard pressed to show that the restaurant would or could charge significantly lower prices if it didn’t do advertising. After all, many people probably returned to pay for meals after getting the freebies.

Yes, There are Lots of Other Cases

OK, I know about such “free lunches” as–

• Free meals that come with investment or retirement lectures, where you’re paying for the meal with your time and quite probably hard-sell marketing. Never signed up for one, never plan to.
• Free vacations that require only a mere 90-minute marketing session on time-share vacations. Ditto: Never signed up for one, never plan to.
• “Free drinks” on most ultra-luxury cruise lines and “free shore excursions” and “free airfare” on Regent Seven Seas, where “free” really means included and, for non-heavy-drinkers, the difference in fare may be significantly more than the inclusions are worth.

I’d rather see the third case, and many others like it, listed as “inclusive” rather than “free”–and, in fact, luxury cruise lines tend toward “inclusive,” just as all-inclusive vacation resorts do. In practice, actually, for some lines “free air fare” is an interesting way of handling discounts–the offer’s usually time-limited, but they don’t call it a discount as such.

TANSTAAFL and Win-Win Economics

Yes, I know, I’m being a literalist. Those who use TANSTAAFL don’t literally mean there’s never a free lunch (or maybe they do)–they mean that every form of refuge has its price, that we live in a closed universe, that there must be some form of cost or payment somewhere.

What I find a little too often–and why I’m writing this post (other than procrastinating on something else)–is that various forms of TANSTAAFL are used to argue zero-sum economics. I don’t buy that all or even most transactions must or should be zero-sum games, where A only “wins” because B “loses”: Where the lunch is only free because the business is overcharging, and in the end overcharging by more than the worth of the lunch.

I believe in win-win economics–not always, but often. In win-win economics, A and B make deals that are mutually beneficial: The benefits to each party outweigh the costs. Loyalty programs can work that way. Ideally, public libraries represent win-win economics: The cost to the community to prepay for library services through taxes is more than made up for by the benefits to individuals and to the community as a whole from library services. Benefit to the community as a whole is one reason that some people support public libraries that they don’t use–they recognize that a good library makes their town or city a better place to live. (The same can be said for parks and other non-emergency community services.)

I don’t have some stirring conclusion to wrap this all up. Hey, it’s Monday: Don’t expect miracles.

Last weekend, Safeway had a really good price on Ruby Red grapefruit from Texas–and they looked like pretty good grapefruit as well. So my wife picked up a couple. (Which I eat all of–she can’t cope with the acid in citrus, by and large.) Had one this morning–as usual, with the segments sectioned out as part of the breakfast fruit medley and the remaining juice squeezed into a glass.

The juice was good, in a way that only freshly-squeezed grapefruit juice seems to be–with a fair amount of pulp, an engaging flavor, and only mildly tart.

A year ago, I would have said “wow! great grapefruit juice.”

This time, I said “not bad.” And, later, “probably about as good as Ruby Red gets, at least around here.”

What’s the difference? The yellow organic grapefruit we get at the farmer’s market from Lone Oak Farms–around 40-50 miles from here, I think. I have no idea what the variety is.

I mentioned that grapefruit earlier: The juice really is lemonade-sweet, but also richly flavored, a more complex flavor than you might expect from grapefruit.

That’s raised the bar–it redefines really excellent grapefruit juice. I suspect it’s like having a good “varietal” dark chocolate or even just a good 70%+ dark chocolate when your previous exposure has been Hershey’s Special Dark. Special Dark is pretty good–but once the bar’s been raised, it’s tough to go back.

(After seeing them for weeks, I finally tasted one of the pummelos from the same vendor. The kind way to put it is that it has a subtle taste. The honest way is that, compared to good grapefruit, it’s…well, boring. As always, your mileage–and your pummelos or pomelos–may vary.)

Today’s Farmer’s Market was also a revelation for a highly-desired seasonal change: The first apriums of the season–with cherries on their way next week. In other words, it’s stone fruit time! To my tastes, the most wonderful fruit time of the year, at least in these parts. (The rancher was slicing off pieces of an aprium to sample…it may be early in the season, but it was absolutely first rate.)

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NOTE: A string of comments–none of them from known parties–has been deleted, and comments on this post are closed. If there are those who would like to see this blog shut down, just keep up the good work.

…it helps to know what you’re talking about.

I know, I know, that’s so old fashioned, I’m such a Luddite…

I just finished reading Candyfreak by Steve Almond. Nonfiction, a fast read, amusing, sometimes a little outrageous, mostly having to do with this admitted candyfreak’s tour of a few of the remaining independent candy factories that make regional candy bars (now that most big-name candy bars have been swallowed up by Hershey, Mars or Nestle).

And I hit a passage on p. 135, where he’s noting that one of these small companies survives by devoting most production days to candy bars and other items sold under other companies’ names. At which point, Almond lets go with this:

…it bears mentioning that this product is but one in a tsunami of pseudo-candy bars, variously called PowerBars, Granola bars, Energy Bars, Clif Bars, Breakfast Bars, Snack Bars, Wellness Bars, and so on, all of which contain roughly the same sugar and fat as an actual candy bar–with perhaps a dash of protein sawdust thrown in–but only half the guilt, and stand as a monument both to shameless marketing and the American capacity for self-delusion…

That’s only a part of the lengthy sentence, but it includes the part that struck me.

To wit, I thought to myself, “bushwah.” (Not the term I used, but the “bu” and the “sh” are right.)

So, apparently unlike Almond, I did a little research–very little, since it doesn’t take much. I happened to have Clif Bars, Zone Bars, Nature Valley Granola Bars, Odwalla Bars, and Quaker True Delights on hand, and it didn’t take long to look up a selection of Hershey and Mars and Nestle bars online. (Mars and Nestle make it varying difficult to get to nutritional information, so most of what I got is from Hershey.)

Candybar calories, fat and sugar

Here are a selection of calories, fat, and sugar content for candy bars (typically the regular-size bar):

• Almond Joy: 220 calories, 13g fat, 20g sugar
• Hershey: 210 calories, 13g fat, 24g sugar
• 5th Avenue: 260 calories, 12g fat, 29g sugar
• KitKat: 210 calories, 11g fat, 22g sugar
• Mounds: 230 calories, 13g fat, 21g sugar
• Mr. Goodbar: 250 calories, 17g fat, 23g sugar
• Payday: 240 calories, 13g fat, 21g sugar
• Reese’s: 210 calories, 13g fat, 21g sugar
• Snickers: 280 calories, 14g fat, 30g sugar (apparently the best-selling candy bar, and notably the one with the most calories, most sugar and, other than Mr. Goodbar, most fat)
• Butterfinger: 270 calories, 11g fat, 29g sugar

“Roughly the same”?

• Clif (Oatmeal Raisin Walnut; others are similar): 240 calories, 5g fat, 20g sugar.
• Zone Fruitified: 200 calories, 6g fat, 15g sugar
• Nature Valley Apple Crisp Granola: 160 calories, 6g fat, 11g sugar
• Odwalla Berries GoMega: 210 calories, 6g fat, 16g sugar
• Quaker TrueDelights: 140 calories, 3.5g fat, 10g sugar (or, another variety, 4.5g fat, 8g sugar)

Notice something here? None of these bars has even half the fat of a Snickers or Almond Joy, and none has significantly more than half the fat of the lowest-fat of this group.

As for sugar–well, yes, the Clif bar has as much or about as much sugar as Almond Joy or Mounds or a couple of others. (But that sugar doesn’t come from high-fructose corn syrup, and there’s roughly one-third the fat.)

Sure, Trader Joe’s 72% Cacao Dark Chocolate Bar has 280 calories and 19g fat (but only 13g sugar)–but nobody would mistake it for anything but a high-fat candy bar!

Self-delusion? Maybe Almond is protesting too much… Nothing wrong with a good candy bar now and then, but the better energy bars and food bars really are different products.

I just saw the same ad twice in today’s paper–once in the national “magazine” as a full-page ad, once elsewhere.

From Del Monte.

Urging people to avoid fresh fruit in favor of canned fruit.

Because, you know, that fresh fruit might go bad, and there’s another dollar down the drain. Where with canned, you get all that wonderful goodness with no chance of spoilage…

I honestly don’t know what to say. Well, I do, but this is a polite blog, so…

[I had an organic navel orange for dessert with lunch, grown less than 50 miles from here. I had organic grapefruit, from the same ranch, with breakfast--so sweet it was like lemonade. Both purchased from the grower at yesterday's farmer's market. Tell me to eat canned fruit instead? Right... Now, if decent fresh fruit simply isn't available, or it has to be flown halfway around the world, that's one thing--but as a general argument, Del Monte should be ashamed of itself.]

Calm down. It’s a food post.

Our local weekly had brief notes on all the candidates for council this fall–an unusual election in which there are no sitting councilfolk running for re-election.

One (of quite a few) apparently moved to Mountain View fairly recently, and this person has a complaint.

Namely, that downtown Mountain View doesn’t have diverse dining choices.

Now, if you’ve been in downtown MV–which I’ll take as being Castro Street and two blocks either side of Castro–this may seem like an odd complaint. Just from memory, I know of:

• Several Chinese restaurants, mostly region-specific, with one or two pan-Chinese.
• Several Indian restaurants at various price points.
• A couple of Thai restaurants.
• Several Vietnamese restaurants–some Pho places, some not.
• Some Japanese restaurants
• At least three good Mexican restaurants (probably more), various cuisines
• At least three Italian restaurants
• A couple of mediterranean places–at least one halal kebab grill, at least one mostly-Greek
• A good brewpub with an expansive menu–burgers, excellent fish, salads, what have you
• An “Irish” pub and an adjacent “Irish” nightclub
• A good “East coast” pizza place and a good California pizza/calzone/grill place
• A very-high-end California/continental restaurant.
• A fairly high-end fish place
• A tapas & large-plate place
• And I’m sure I could go on for a while. I believe there are at least 80 restaurants in the six-block stretch.

Ah, but there was another sentence explaining what this person meant by “diversity.” She said there weren’t enough places serving traditional American food.

And, you know, I think I know what this person means by “traditional American food”–and it is indeed in short supply in downtown MV, although readily available with a minute or two’s driving, to such an extent that snobbish San Franciscans delight in claiming that the Peninsula has nothing but this kind of restaurant.

What we don’t have in downtown MV:

• Denny’s
• IHOP
• McDonald’s
• Burger King
• Sizzler
• Macaroni Grill
• Applebee’s
• Cheesecake Factory
• Olive Garden
• Chili’s
• and all the rest…

Not saying anything negative about those, but it is true: Castro and adjacent streets are low on chain outlets, other than (of course) overpriced over-roasted coffee places (both Starbuck’s and Peet’s).

Too bad the candidate doesn’t come out with her true platform: “Downtown Mountain View needs more Chain Restaurants! We need more predictable food!”

Somehow, it doesn’t sound like a winning platform. There are loads of these chain outlets all around downtown–but the more distinctive places seem to be doing just fine in the heart of downtown. I have problems feeling bad about that.

It’s that wonderful time of the year…the weather’s pretty much settled down to “summer conditions” (which here means most days have highs in the mid-70s, maybe into the low 80s: our hot spells are still considered atypical) and it’s stone fruit season!

Last year was a disappointment. I seem to remember there being very few cherries, and most of those not very good. Our apricot tree produced just a little fruit… But we managed, with peaches, plums, etc.

This year, so far, much better:

• My wife had to hand-pollenate the apricot trees (near-absence of bees earlier in the year), but that worked. She thought the apricots were all going to ripen while we were on vacation, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, there was loads of fruit ripening in late June and early July. Too much fruit, really–and I missed a few days of great Blenheim apricots because of ALA Anaheim. Still, for a couple of weeks, we were getting more first-rate apricots (the only kind that really taste like apricots, the ones picked directly from a tree) than we could eat. A few neighbors got bags of apricots… And we’ve seen one or two trees in the neighborhood that make us sigh: Heavy with fruit, in one case ripening now (two weeks later than ours)…and apparently nobody using that glorious fruit. Sigh. (Our second apricot tree isn’t doing well: One bearing branch.)
• The Bing cherries from California growers were good, but they’re gone. The Bing cherries from Washington are here now, and they’re great. (Not as cheap as in some years, but plentiful and excellent.) Dunno how much longer we get them–two weeks? Three?–but I’m enjoying them while they’re here.
• Rainiers, on the other hand… There were some decent local ones at the farmer’s market in early July, but the California season’s been over for a while. We have yet to see any northwest Rainiers that we’d buy–apparently they’re just not holding up to shipping very well. (Too many of them bruised.)
• Peaches. Ah, peaches. They’ve ranged from very good to the kind you can smell six feet away and are just incredibly satisfying.
• As usual, some new-to-us varieties of nectarines and other stone fruit–mango nectarines, black apricots, what have you. Some of them excellent. Some not so much.

If you love apples and don’t care about buying local, I suppose you always have good fruit available. Neither of us do well with apples. So for us, the absolute best fruit season is stone fruit season…and I hope it stays around at least a month more.

‘brary web diva points to a new blog about wine, from a former library worker. One of the first posts at that blog discusses the many “hidden” Gallo wines.

As a wine drinker (and as one whose family home was eventually purchased by Gallo to make part of a parking lot, allowing my parents to move to a nicer place), I’ve been aware of the Gallo-created regional brands such as Anapamu for some time, and certainly aware that Gallo–and especially Gallo of Sonoma–makes a lot of excellent wine, along with some cheap stuff (the really cheap stuff such as Carlo Rossi never saying Gallo on the label). Gallo’s also picked up a surprising number of well-established wineries through the years, including Mirassou.

I also knew one “trick” to identify some, but by no means all, Gallo brands that don’t say Gallo: UPC codes starting with 85000. (“Modesto on the label” is a particularly bad way to locate the best Gallo wines, since most of them have Healdsburg on the label, that being the headquarters for Gallo of Sonoma.)

Turns out there’s a much easier trick. Gallo’s not trying to hide its brands. This page leads to descriptions of all Gallo-owned wines, broken down by category.

So, for example, Gallo doesn’t hide the fact that Burlwood and Copperidge (and Liberty Creek) are hotel/restaurant brands; you may have been poured Copperidge at Midwinter receptions (or at Embassy Suites, for example). Nor do they hide the fact that they import Black Swan, Ecco Domani, Red Bicyclette and others. And in the premium category (other than the ones with Gallo on the label, some of which are world-class wines), there are the ones I knew about–Rancho Zabaco/Dancing Bull, Anapamu, Marcelina–and a couple I didn’t realize Gallo had acquired (e.g., Louis M. Martini).

Yes, the page also lists the cheap stuff…but only ones that are more-or-less varietal wines, not the fortified and fruit stuff. So you’ll find Carlo Rossi and Peter Vella, but not Thunderbird. (Ripple? Gone. Not missed.)

Three-quarters of a mile from my almost-former-place-of-work (I’m terminated as of 9/30 and in any case the remainder will be moving to new smaller quarters) is a block with two food facilities. One building (and big back lot, with a decent-size parking area) is a sports bar that’s mostly a restaurant during the day. I think I’ve written about it before: good food, inexpensive, particularly noteworthy for the $2 freshly-made “cup” of soup that’s most restaurants’ bowl-size.

The other building is a big rectangle with five food places: A Subway with maybe half a dozen seats (almost entirely takeout); Bueno Bueno, a very good burroteria (like taqueria but their specialty is burros) with no inside seating at all (but two outside tables); a small corner place that’s been through four different iterations in the three or four (?) years we’ve been here, most recently the second iteration of a Japanese restaurant; a fairly good-size sit-down place that was Indian when we moved here, has been a Hawaiian lunch-plate place (and a couple of others), and is now a wrap/falafel/gyros place.

And a big sit-down space, probably 150 or so seats in all, that was always New Ma’s, a Chinese Muslim restaurant that served very good food and frequently had busloads of tourists *from* China visiting. (By unfortunate happenstance, the first time I tried it must have had an assistant cook on a really off day–but after staying away for a year, I went back and found the food quite good, as did my wife.) No sweet & sour pork, of course, or pork of any kind; all meat Halal; they did compromise enough to have a beer & wine license.

About a year and a half ago, New Ma’s closed for remodeling. The process turned the light, airy space into more of a nightclub space–black walls, heavy curtains, flat-screen TVs up on the wall. Eventually, after what seemed like way too long (and with an incongruous permit application for a full liquor license), it reopened–sort of. As a Japanese restaurant with almost no menu. They said “Oh, we’ll have Chinese too, next week.” By “next week” it was closed.

Then it reopened as an Italian restaurant with the emphasis on 5-9 p.m. happy hour. Tried it once for lunch. Wholly dispiriting “buffet” (four items, I think) or half a dozen menu items. The only thing I could plausibly imagine eating was the burger. It was OK, but seriously overpriced. That restaurant lasted for oh, three or four weeks.

Now…well, last week the doors opened again, this time as a different Chinese restaurant, with its name followed by “@ Green Lantern” (Green Lantern was the name of the shortlived Italian restaurant), and with the Green Lantern “grand opening” banner above the Chinese restaurant “grand opening” banner. Oh, and the building still says “New Ma’s”–the other rapidly-changing spaces always manage to replace the building-mounted signs, but maybe the management(s) here know something…

So, to get to the second part of an absurdly long lunchtime post, I tried the place today…after all, I’ll still be here three weeks…

Huge menu, but the lunch specials were the usual list, most of them $6.25. Ordered one. What I got: slightly gloppy hot-and-sour soup (plenty good enough for many suburban areas, way below what you’d expect in Mountain View) with a standard metal soup spoon. Then, a platter of the chosen entree (really too much for one person) and a cup of white rice. Fork and knife: No chopsticks, no separate plate for dining, no hot tea offered. The food? Again, adequate for some suburban areas (I think), but gloppy and dreary by local standards. $6.25. I won’t return.

At which point I thought about the little (50-60 seats) shopping-strip Chinese restaurant I went to last Friday, and will probably go to every week or two from the end of this month until we move out of Mountain View (if we do that, which we might if job possibilities continue to, um, pan out so well–we can take some money out of our house), and what I got there for $0.30 less:

• Cup of light, non-gloppy egg flower soup (with porcelain spoon)and
• Nice little salad and
• Plate of fried wonton strips.

after which, you get

• Slightly oversize dinner plate with a rational-size serving of your chosen entree, fresh, not gloppy, nicely prepared
• Plenty of vegetables added to the entree if needed–and the broccoli, at least, is just properly cooked, still bright green and al dente
• A good-size scoop of either white or vegetable fried rice
• A crisp, light, small egg roll
• A small serving of vegetable chow mein

and, of course, both chopsticks and fork–and tea unless it’s a hot day and you indicate you don’t need it.

Oh, and with the check:

• Orange slices
• Fortune cookie

Let’s see. Big-deal big restaurant versus inconsequential little neighborhood restaurant. No contest. At all. China Cafe (the one near home) actually belongs in Mountain View. The new place might just belong in Modesto…I give it a month, two tops, but I won’t be around to find out.

[We have Saturday dinner fairly frequently at China Cafe, even though it's a slightly shorter walk than we might prefer, 0.7 miles each way. All of the dishes we've had are lively, fresh, well-prepared, "ungloppy"...]

Hmm. Wonder how the neighborhood Chinese places are in Fremont or Livermore or, maybe, McMinnville or Portland…

The question’s simple enough, aimed mostly at people outside the U.S. “far west”:

Have you ever heard of tri-tip? Do supermarkets in your area sell it?

Here’s the background. Two Sundays ago, my wife and I attended a biannual get-together of a distantly-related family (she’s doing genealogical research, located these folks, answered some questions from them, got invited). In the Altamont pass wind-farm country (near Livermore). The primary barbecue was tri-tip–marinated and seasoned.

Last Sunday, my wife and I went to my brother’s first-anniversary party, at his house in Livermore. He provided the barbequed meat and drink. The meat was tri-tip, marinated and seasoned.

We were in Santa Maria year before last, and of course I had tri-tip for dinner, since Santa Maria tri-tip is a key local dish.

At the get-together and again at the first anniversary, people familiar with the meat industry said that tri-tip is unknown outside of the West–that it gets used for hamburger or sold as parts of different cuts elsewhere. It’s a tricky cut: It really needs thin-slicing and typically marinade to avoid being too tough to eat. But it’s also a great barbecue meat when it is marinated and thinly sliced. (One of my favorite lunch spots, years ago, used to serve a tri-tip sandwich once in a while: Great.)

So: Is this a Western urban legend? Do you get tri-tip in New York or Texas (well, Texas may count as “the west”) or Illinois or Great Britain or Australia or Toronto or Wisconsin?

(We’re finishing a trifecta today, really unusual for a not-terribly-sociable couple: Going to brunch today with a dear long-time friend…once again, in Livermore, but this time in a restaurant. I suspect tri-tip won’t be on the menu.)

Beyond that: We seem to be well into stone fruit season, and the local farmer’s market is rich with great peaches, superb plums, wonderful apricots, and magnificent cherries. We’re hoping to get a few Blenheim apricots from our own tree, but the birds may beat us to it… I do love stone fruit season, particularly as it ends the several-week near-drought of fresh local fruit!

Shortly after we moved to Mountain View nine years ago, we started walking to dinner every Saturday night–either some place really close (0.7 miles each way), some or one of many further away (about 1.2 miles to Los Altos, about 1.5 miles to downtown Mountain View).

For a while, there was really only one “nearby” restaurant: a local pizza parlor that also happened to produce really good food–calzones with no grease on the plate, pizzas with vibrant flavors, a small assortment of very well made Italian dishes. Local (not part of a chain), and a “neighborhood pizza place” to the extent of sponsoring youth soccer teams and having a banquet room where various kids-league teams would hold end-of-season dinners.

We went there anywhere from once every two weeks to once a month–more often in the winter (when the longer walks are less desirable), a little less often once we discovered that the Chinese restaurant in the same neighborhood center was really quite good.

The last year or so, we started encountering situations where we really couldn’t enjoy our meal: In addition to the big group in the banquet room, there would be another big group in the main dining room, with parents making no efforts to keep their kids from shouting. So, for a while, we’d call before going, ask if there were going to be multiple parties coming in during the time we were planning, and plan accordingly.

That started breaking down a couple of months ago and finally broke down entirely last Saturday. First we’d call and the person answering the phone either didn’t understand my question (being only marginally English-speaking) or just said “No problem.” We’d arrive, the place would be intolerably loud with parties that had made reservations, and we’d go eat Chinese food.

Last Saturday, we called. The person wouldn’t or couldn’t answer the question. We went over. Walking in, we asked; the hostess said “Just one party, and it’s in the banquet room.” Good enough. We ordered.

And the kids started trooping in. By and large, the kids moved along to the banquet room, but some of the parents wanted to stand around with their kids, and one of the kids was literally whooping every few seconds. (Eventually, that parent took the kid outside…and then came back a couple of minutes later, and the whooping resumed.) But as it turned out, this time the kids weren’t the main problem–or at least not the underage kids.

This time, apparently many of the parents didn’t want to be with their kids. So they stood three-deep around the “bar” (beer and wine, but they weren’t ordering anything), talking loudly and MORE LOUDLY and EVEN MORE LOUDLY as more of them gathered. (There was about 3 feet between the bar and the booths; we retreated to the most distant booth, 6 feet away, but that made no difference.)

We could not and did not enjoy the meal. We finished it, paid (yes, with a good tip), and left. And my wife said “We’re not going back. Ever.” I can’t disagree.

The owner has obviously chosen to give precedence to big groups–and not to make any effort to remind them that it’s also a restaurant and that others may not be as excited as they are. I think that used to be different. As my wife said, it’s probably the right decision–for the 12 weekends/24 days a year when there are team banquets. But if enough regular customers feel the way we do, it may not be such a hot decision for the other 288 days. Used to be, we’d see half a dozen or more couples and family groups there when we were there. This time? One other couple, and they didn’t look real happy either. (This is actually passing strange, since the owner also recently switched from one-sheet paper menus to nice multipage menus with an expanded menu–seemingly trying to attract the same diners he’s driving away.)

I noted that, the previous Saturday when I’d planned to have lunch at the Chinese place, there was a sign on the door: “Banquet in progress. Takeout only.” Those owners decided that they really couldn’t handle both at the same time, and didn’t attempt to. Unquestionably, they would have answered a phoned question correctly…and we would have come back another day.

Library implications? Maybe. Meredith Farkas posted about her husband’s experience seeing a favorite magazine go bad because it shifted its attention and resources to the web. (An excellent post, by the way, which you should go read if you haven’t already.) Part way through, Farkas adds this note:

(Aside: As I’m writing this, I realize this offers another lesson that librarians need to heed. While it’s important that we provide better services for teens and those in their early 20s, we shouldn’t do it at the expense of services to the rest of our patrons. We do not want to lose that core audience any more than we want to lose the Gen Y folks.)

Yep. Don’t look for a denunciation of gaming in libraries here because such a mass denunciation would be as absurd as saying that every library needs a gaming librarian (which I’m sure nobody would actually say). But I do wonder: Are those wonderful at-the-library gaming tournaments, particularly ones with such quiet pursuits as DDR, driving out older patrons who have loyally supported the library? If so, will they come back or will they just give up–and vote against the next tax override?

I don’t know the answer. Well, that’s not true: I do know that there is no single answer. I’m sure some libraries, maybe even every single one that does these gaming nights/tournaments, have set things up so that the noise and disruption from one activity doesn’t upset the browsers and readers in the rest of the library.

But I also know that it would not be an answer to say “We need the gamers, so we’ll just have to let the old folks go.” And, just to clarify, I haven’t heard anyone say that either.

Oh, and Meredith? That magazine isn’t the only one. PC Magazine has dropped almost all specs and details from its printed reviews, substituting glossy columns and big pictures; effectively, the print magazine is now sort of a sideshow to the web version. Except, of course, that I’m not interested in the web version…and will think long and hard before renewing the print version. (After all, I get the web version free anyway…)