Matthew DeBord takes aim and fires:

Salmon also makes it sound as if the average American eats primarily at off-the-freeway fast-food joints in between trips to the supermarket to fill their car with huge amounts of groceries. They nourish themselves by “absent-mindedly shovelling down an unknown quantity of something random while watching the TV.”…

Oy! Talk about an east-of-the-Hudson River, blinkered mindset. There are plenty of cities in the U.S.—and the rest of the world—where the urban concentration isn’t that dense, people own cars…and remain thin while eating both restaurant cuisine and keeping the pantry stocked, preparing delicious, unfattening meals at home. That’s right, they have restaurants! And they don’t eat their ice cream by the gallon while watching Survivor! Some of them even use their cars to transport their bikes to the (beach, mountains) to ride them for…miles and miles! Or they drive someplace rugged and scenic to take a hike. Or they take frequent walks while also owning a car!

No argument at all, DeBord is right. An active lifestyle on the outskirts of somewhere like Boulder or Portland or San Diego trumps a relatively sedentary life of pork-and-butter-heavy NYC expense-account dinners any day.

On the other hand, if you’re an overweight suburbanite there’s a good chance that you don’t live an active lifestyle. And for the large number of people without the “personal discipline” that DeBord writes about, ceteris paribus they’re likely to be thinner if they live in an urban center. Although buying a bike and heading for the local foothills on a regular basis would be cheaper, more convenient, and more effective.

James Fallows has a correspondent who drives a lot, and is overweight, and who writes:

Car culture is terrible for public health. Again, I’m significantly overweight. Always trying new exercise and diet programs that never result in sustained weight loss. What has? Spent two months in London without car, relying on public transit and walking, no attempt at dieting or exercising. Weight loss: 22 lbs. Six weeks in NYC without car, relying on public transit and walking, no attempt… Weight loss: 19 lbs.

In general, the urban no-car diet is a very good one, and not just because you’re getting incidental exercise from walking more than you otherwise might. If you don’t have a car, you generally have much less food at home, because you don’t have access to “free” transportation in which you can transport hundreds of dollars’ worth of food from your local supermarket and deposit it in a monster-size refrigerator.

Dense urban centers also tend to offer much more expensive dining options. Sure, you can find fast food if you want it. But the fast food is surrounded by restaurants you actually want to go to, and since they’re just as convenient, you don’t have the “no choice” excuse that you have when you stop off next to the freeway. So you gravitate to the more expensive (and generally intrinsically healthier) options. And as any economist will tell you, the amount you consume goes down as the price goes up.

More generally, living car-free in a dense urban environment forces you to spend effort and money on eating, which makes you appreciate food more, rather than absent-mindedly shovelling down an unknown quantity of something random while watching the TV. Which makes me wonder: could even suburban people with cars lose a significant amount of weight simply by getting rid of their televisions?

The latest issue of my favorite obscure periodical, Meatpaper, has just arrived in the mail, and features this wonderful chart, in an article by Chris Ying:

Put the attractiveness of a food-TV host on a scale from 1 to 10, says Chris, and put the repulsiveness of the food that host eats on another 1-to-10 scale. Then the product of the two numbers will always equal 10 — Gianna Giada De Laurentiis, for instance, is a 10 on the attractiveness scale, and eats only beautiful food.

Ying adds, in a footnote, that TV executives could actually use this formula normatively:

If our hypothetical TV host is a 2.1 in attractiveness, and we’ve got him going around the world eating macaroons and tea sandwiches, we’ve got to bring the repulsive level of his food to 4.76 before that show gets off the ground.

Ying never quite answers his own implied question, though: why is it that repulsive food is good for ratings if the host is not attractive, but bad for ratings if the host is attractive?

Julia Moskin reports on Manhattan street vendors:

Of all the gray areas for food vendors — who are regulated by a cluster of agencies including the Department of Consumer Affairs, the Police Department and the New York State sales tax authority — permits are the murkiest. The Health Department set the number of full-time food vending permits at 3,100, in 1979. (In the fall, the City Council will vote on a proposal that would increase the number of permits to 25,000.)

The $200 permits are valid for two years and can be renewed indefinitely by mail. Their black-market value is tremendous: up to $15,000 for two years, according to a report released Tuesday by the city’s Department of Investigation. The new vendors are openly questioning the black holes of the system. “Every day, the city is leaving thousands of dollars on the table” by not taking control of the illegal trade in permits, said Mr. Yang, of the Cravings truck.

Yes, the permits are probably being priced too cheaply — there’s no reason why they shouldn’t move to a system closer to that of taxi medallions. But the other thing being priced far too cheaply here is prime midtown street-level real estate. Note what happens when the city does start auctioning off vendor permits: the food-vending rights to the north-side entrance of the Metropolitan museum sold for $362,201 per year, rising to $384,371 in the final year of the five-year contract.

The kind of fights detailed in Moskin’s article are inevitable when a highly-valuable resource — street parking — is massively underpriced or even free. The city should start making vendor permits location-specific, and then auctioning them off.

I’m a huge fan of OpenTable, and I’ve always imagined that restaurants are, too. They don’t need to spend hours on the phone telling people what’s free and what’s not, special instructions don’t get garbled, and it’s very easy to cross-reference the diner to previous visits. But apparently Raoul’s didn’t get the memo:

I can no longercontinue putting off talking about the back room. I’d prefer it didn’t exist, since I love the rest of Raoul’s. Actually, I’d prefer the ma√Ætre d’ didn’t exist, either.
On my second visit, with tables empty everywhere in the front and middle rooms, he instructed the hostess to take us to the garden. I begged him: Please don’t.
He looked down at us in the French style, and said, “You made your reservation online.” Indeed, my friend had used OpenTable, listed on the restaurant’s website. The ma√Ætre d’ informed us that OpenTable had assigned us to the back room, and that was that. As we were led away, no happier than prisoners in leg irons, he sneered, “Next time you should call.”

Raoul’s is an old-fashioned restaurant — that’s a large part of its charm. But if it doesn’t want diners to use OpenTable, it shouldn’t offer them the option.

I do occasionally wonder, though, what to do with my Dining Rewards Points. I somehow can’t see myself redeeming them on the website, waiting up to six weeks for delivery, taking a Dining Cheque to a restaurant, and then using it to pay for (some of) my meal. It would be great if I could somehow donate them to charity — help treat some non-profit workers to a very nice lunch every so often. But then I suppose more people would redeem them, and the business model might not work any more.

Joe Wiesenthal is a well-known finance blogger. But he will surely go down in history as the person who used the internet to close what he calls "the biggest arbitrage of all time", with the earth-shatteringly groundbreaking website that is beetswap.com.

The problem?

Some people like beets and don’t eat the greens. And some people love those iron-rich greens, but have no use for the sugary roots.

The solution?

Buyers and sellers of beet and beet greens can swap the part they don’t like with internet-speed efficiency.

This, my friends, is the true upside of the financial crisis. If the entire global economy hadn’t imploded, beetswap.com might never have seen the light of day. And then where would we be?

Reprinted from Portfolio.com

We’re just ten short days away from R-Day — the day at which tariffs on imported Roquefort surge to 300%, and the incomparable French sheep’s-milk blue becomes, to all intents and purposes, unavailable in the USA. Liz Thorpe of Murray’s Cheese does the math, and explains how a product which wholesales for €5 per pound in Europe becomes a cheese retailing for something in the $60 range by the time it reaches American shores, thanks to this horrible tariff. Isn’t repealing this tariff a no-brainer for the food-friendly Obama administration? Why hasn’t it been done yet?

Reprinted from Portfolio.com

Justin Fox has an interesting breakdown of global stimulus packages by country: the US, China, and Spain have big ones, while the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to be trying so hard. He writes:

The concern is that if we in the U.S. do lots of stimulating and other economies don’t, much of the money will just leak out overseas as we spend on imports but others don’t buy our exports.

He’s right, and no amount of "buy American" provisions in the bill will prevent money from leaking overseas in a globalized economy. Liquidity, you might say, always finds its level. At the margin, it does seem that countries such as the UK are freeloading on the US bailout — both in terms of the stimulus package and in terms of the bank bailout.

Here in London, the streets are still vibrant and the restaurants still full: there’s lots of talk of massive pain, and the stock market is down a whopping 64% or so from its highs, in dollar terms. But somehow none of this is obvious, at least to my eyes: the main thing I’m feeling here is just relief that finally I can afford to visit my home country again, after being priced out for years when the pound was worth about $2: it’s now $1.40.

At those levels, Brits aren’t going to be buying much in the way of US exports with or without a stimulus package. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that the main British export of late has been financial services, and there’s not a huge amount of demand for that Stateside at any exchange rate. But maybe Britain can start working on its tourist trade: I can highly recommend Wheelers Oyster Bar in Whitstable if you want to eat some astonishingly wonderful seafood at a quintessentially English seaside town. Make sure to reserve in advance: it fills up quickly, and the pound is weak!

Reprinted from Portfolio.com