Bad Lunch

April 1999, one o’clock in the afternoon. I was cooking on the 150-foot motor yacht The Rental Cow when Megan, our chief stewardess, swooped into the galley to tell me our guests were displeased with their lunch.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. A petite, blond Australian who often made bawdy jokes, she didn’t wear her usual smile. Instead she looked slightly frightened, which told me this was no ordinary complaint. Our two guests were paying $30,000 a day to sit on the top decks and take in the Mediterranean views. Like every set of guests on board that yacht, this couple needed the food to be perfectly suited to their tastes, which caused me hours of nail-biting anxiety as I sent up plate after plate, taking note of what they devoured or ignored.

It was the midpoint of their sixteen-day trip. Ten of their friends had departed that morning, and we expected ten more to arrive in a few hours.

“Should I go up?” I asked.

Megan nodded, and I threw off my apron and scaled the stairs two at a time. We were tied to a dock in Saint-Tropez, a coastal city in the south of France known for its beaches and fancy nightclubs frequented by celebrities.

Our guests, Mr. and Mrs. J., were seated on the upper aft deck, murmuring to one another over untouched plates of sweet potato gnocchi. Mrs. J. was statuesque, with pale skin and red-orange hair that fell like a cape over her shoulders. She looked like a hippie version of Nicole Kidman. Mr. J. was a silver-haired music-industry executive who exuded wealthy chic with his funky sunglasses and pastel, high-water slacks.

Mrs. J. smiled at me: a cold curl of the lips. Then she launched in, explaining she was disappointed—not just in her lunch but in me.

“We’re paying a lot of money to rent this yacht,” she said, enunciating like royalty with a Los Angeles accent. “We’ve had a terrific go of it until now, don’t you think? All week long your food has been exquisite. This should have been the easiest lunch, not the most disgusting. Why didn’t you just come talk to us?”

By now I had my hands behind my back, my body bent toward her in a gesture of contrition. Thankfully she kept talking, so I didn’t have to speak. At one point Mr. J. held his hand out flat in the air as though pushing Mrs. J.’s argument down—a gesture she appeared familiar with, as she cinched her lips.

“Let’s do a reset,” Mr. J. said. “How about you clear these plates? My wife mentioned she’d be happy with a simple green salad: lettuce, tomatoes, carrots—”

“GREEN ONION,” she interjected.

Mr. J. ignored her. “I’ll have a plate of prosciutto and some of your homemade baguette. And a small dish of your mustard dressing. Do you think you can handle that?”

It was not a question. He’d spoken breezily, but there was enough of an edge in his voice to serve as a warning. Despite all the special handling I’d provided that week—ninety hours of catering to their every culinary need—I was not forgiven. 

Once upon a time, in another life, I had sat on a green shag carpet as close as possible to the television to watch The Love Boat, a show about crew members on a cruise ship with a revolving roster of celebrity guest stars. I especially loved the unflappably cheerful cruise director, Julie McCoy. Another show I watched religiously growing up was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, hosted by nasal-voiced Brit Robin Leach, who escorted viewers through the properties of the extravagantly wealthy.

At the time, my family lived in rural Washington State, in a double-wide trailer on a crabgrass lot. We’d never been flush with money, but after my parents’ divorce, my mother would agonize each month about where to spend her meager funds: on gas and electric bills or groceries? She hunched over her checkbook, lips puckered with worry. We lived in a perpetual state of panic over having zero dollars. The fear had a metallic scent that lingered in my nose long after I climbed into bed. For a while we had food stamps in the drawer, but my mother was too ashamed to use them. That she could choose not to indicates a certain degree of financial stability, but a child doesn’t distinguish between being cash poor and being unable to pay the rent. And even with grandparents volunteering to purchase school clothes, I marinated like a pickle in that atmosphere of scarcity, walking a thin line between my hunger to consume and my management of that hunger, always thinking of the costs.

My mother didn’t like to cook, so I learned my way around the kitchen. As a kid who did not have enough healthy food to eat, I literally dreamed of shopping trips like the ones I took to buy food for the yacht, filling multiple carts with expensive items and paying for it all with my employers’ gold credit card.

I’d become a ship’s cook almost by accident. On a break from college in my early twenties, I was traveling in France and took a job as a deckhand on a 128-year-old Spanish brigantine that made trips back and forth across the English Channel. I endured a lot of teasing from the mostly British sailors—working-class Brits really know how to twist the knife—but my tears gave way to laughter as I developed a thick skin to go with my sea legs.

The food on board was standard English fare: hunks of roasted meat and potatoes served with reconstituted gravy granules. I thought constantly about improvements I could make. Though I had no formal training, I had little doubt I could produce nourishing and delicious meals—part bravado and part the result of a lifelong curiosity about food that had compelled me to experiment with recipes growing up. I volunteered to help in the galley, peeling potatoes or scrubbing pans. Before dinner one night I asked the cook if she would mind if I deglazed the roasting pans with sherry to bring flavor to the gravy. “Knock yourself out,” she said. I added salt to the stockpot of boiling potatoes. When the captain noticed a small improvement in the food, the cook said, “Don’t look at me, it’s her,” and the captain suggested I report for galley duty. The cook much preferred working on the decks anyway. Before long I was providing meals for a dozen or more people a day.

I became romantically entangled with a sailor aboard that ship, and we soon left to try to find work as a team: He would captain commercial sailing yachts, and I would be his cook and sidekick. The romance ultimately fizzled, but it served as a springboard into a previously unimaginable career. As the ships grew fancier and the guests more demanding, cooking interesting and creative meals day after day required an engagement akin to a spiritual practice. The repetitive motion of knife through vegetables soothed me. I wrote lists of ingredients for wine-braised chicken legs or chocolate crinkle cookies. When we moored in a harbor, I would talk my way into commercial kitchens, explaining I was a self-taught cook who worked aboard a yacht, and could I ask the chef about his favorite dishes? They always allowed me in for a few hours.

About four years into my maritime career, I took six months off to attend a French-themed culinary school, hoping the expected salary increase would be enough to recoup the money I’d spent on tuition. Everyone in the marine industry said that charter yachts rented by the super-wealthy were where the crews made the biggest money.

I’d been aboard The Rental Cow for three months by the time Mr. and Mrs. J. arrived. It wasn’t the most beautiful in the fleet of charters available on the Mediterranean that summer. Though at first glance she looked like the other boats, with her high bow and sleek lines, a second look revealed cracks in the paint and chips in the varnish. Our economy-minded boss outfitted the decks with Pottery Barn furnishings, while the more state-of-the-art yachts we moored beside displayed Balinese wicker. Some of the biggest vessels had Ming dynasty rugs and helicopter pads and charged upwards of $500,000 a week. Our main draw was our relative affordability. Depending on which week of summer it was, we charged between $25,000 and $35,000 a day. The rental contract recommended guests leave a minimum 8 percent gratuity for the crew. Some left far more, and the crew celebrated wildly. Others stiffed us.

Our captain, Brian, was a mild-mannered, mostly ineffectual leader. Lance, our first mate, picked up the slack with his endless enthusiasm and charm. He understood the importance of the food to our guests’ experience and checked in with me frequently to see if I needed anything. Lance’s wife, a therapist, served a dual role as both deckhand and empathetic listener for other crew members. The other deckhand was an Italian with prior experience as a restaurateur, and after finishing his other duties, he donned dress whites and served meals or even stepped into the galley to help with my endless prep.

I’d come to think of being a chef on a yacht as a kind of psycho-spiritual quest, like Homer’s Odyssey, only instead of tumultuous seas and six-headed monsters, our challenges were wealthy clients who arrived by private jet with Louis Vuitton purses on their arms. True to form, I strove to please them all. People with money intimidated me, so when guests were arrogant or snobby, I pictured them as patients in a hospital and myself as the doctor assigned to their care. This imaginative leap inoculated me against the class differences and boosted my confidence that I could diagnose their needs. [...]

One afternoon Lena, our second stewardess, spied Mrs. J. at the back of the main saloon, making small dots on the window with a tube of lipstick. Lena went around the yacht studying the mirrors and windows and finding similar marks. Apparently Mrs. J. was testing the proficiency of the housekeeping staff as well.

“She’s smart,” Lena said, in her French accent. “Some of the marks are hard to find.” To make one, she said, Mrs. J. must have climbed up on the counter in the master cabin.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I replied.

“They’re all the same,” Lena said, placing her hands on her small hips. “Trying to get their money’s worth.”

by Mishele Maron, The Sun |  Read more:
Image: © Dominique Philippe Bonnet

Sake: It’s All in the Rice

The nuanced world of Japanese sake and how to pair it with food.

If your experience with sake is limited to the warm cup at your local sushi spot, you’re missing the larger world of sake, which is as nuanced and layered as wine.

The traditional Japanese drink is brewed (not distilled) from rice, yeast, water and koji, a mold that converts the rice starch into sugar. Premium sakes might add some distilled alcohol. Sometimes other ingredients are added for flavor, but purists stick to the essentials.

“It’s quite incredible to think of the variation in flavor sake provides, given these constraints,” says Yoko Kumano, who with Kayoko Akabori owns the shop Umami Mart in Oakland, California. The pair has written a new book, “Everyday Sake.”

She also likes to remind people that sake is a food-pairing beverage.

“It is meant to be enjoyed with food — and not just sushi,” Kumano says. Umami Mart’s monthly sake club has tried pairings with cheese, pizza, French cuisine and more.

Every batch of sake — which in Japan is called nihonshu — is overseen by a toji, or master brewer, whose skill shapes the final flavor.

Here are some quick sake facts so you can sound savvy about it at a restaurant or wine store.

It begins with rice

The first step in making sake is rice polishing, or seimaibuai. Each grain’s outer layers are milled away to reveal its starchy center. The more polished the rice, the lighter and more refined the sake; the less polished, the earthier the flavor. Sake also varies based on whether distilled alcohol is added and how it’s filtered, stored and served.

The two main families of sake are Junmai and Honjozo. Within those, you have grades like Ginjo and Daiginjo, reflecting how much the rice has been polished.

Grade names are on the label, though not necessarily the polishing ratio.

Junmai
Means “pure rice,” with no distilled alcohol added. These sakes range from light to full-bodied, and often have more umami and structure than other sakes. Think earthy, rice-forward flavors that pair beautifully with grilled meats or heartier dishes. Junmai is often served warmed or at room temperature, highlighting its comforting depth of flavor.

Honjozo
Contains a touch of distilled alcohol, which lightens the texture and enhances aroma without significantly changing the alcohol content. Smooth and versatile, it pairs with everything from tempura to sushi to teriyaki.

Ginjo
More delicate, made with rice polished down to 60% of its original size and fermented at lower temperatures. A bit of distilled alcohol may be added to enhance aroma. The flavor is often floral and fruity. Ginjo is best served chilled, and pairs well with lighter dishes like sashimi, sushi, salads and delicate seafood.

Daiginjo
The most extensively milled sakes, with at least 50% of the outer rice layers removed. The result is aromatic, delicate and often considered the highest-quality sake. Expect a higher price tag.

Nigori
Coarsely filtered, leaving some rice sediment (kasu) behind, giving it a milky appearance and slightly sweet, creamy texture. Its sweetness pairs especially well with spicy dishes.

Sparkling Sake
In recent years, sparkling sakes — some naturally carbonated, some artificially — have become popular as a festive touch to many occasions.

Nama
Kumano says Nama (unpasteurized sake) has been growing more popular, and appeals to people who like fresh, young beverages like Beaujolais Nouveau or fruity wheat beer. Make sure it’s refrigerated both at the store and at home.

Creative additions
Hirohisa Hayashi, chef-owner and sake sommelier at Hirohisa restaurant in New York City, makes different versions of plum sake each year. He steeps Washington State-grown plums in low-alcohol sake, sometimes with shiso (a minty herb) and, this year, Okinawan brown sugar.

Serving and storage tips

Ultimately, whether sake is served warmed, chilled or at room temperature is subjective. “In general, classic dry junmai sake is often said to become softer and more approachable when (slightly) warmed. On the other hand, if you warm a fragrant daiginjo, its delicate aromas and refined character can be lost,” says Hayashi.

Sake is best consumed within a year of bottling. Store it in a cool, dark place. Once opened, refrigerate and enjoy within a week. Unpasteurized sake (nama) must be refrigerated and consumed within a few days.

Finally, take a cue from Japan: Pouring for others and refilling their glasses before they’re empty is an act of hospitality and attentiveness. And don’t forget to clink glasses and say “Kanpai” (“Cheers”) before you sip.

by Katie Workman, AP |  Read more:

Image: Katie Workman

[ed. For more details, see also: Sake 101: A Beginners' Guide (Sake Hub):]

***

Koji
While the rest of the ingredients of sake are straight-forward, koji tends to trip up sake beginners. Koji, also known by its scientific name aspergillus oryzae, is a special mold. Koji helps break the rice starches into sugars to prepare for fermentation.

As important as both water and rice are for brewing sake, the sake production process can't get off the ground without koji.

The quality of koji also affects the sake's flavor profile immensely. That's why sake brewers take koji production (seigiku) itself so seriously.

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago

[ed. Mental Awareness Day. Pretty dope.] 

The Way We Treat Pigs is a Sin

I consider myself a pretty good and decent guy, overall. I don’t commit crimes. I’m nice to the people I meet. I help out my friends. I take good care of my pet rabbit, and I donate lots of money to other people who take care of abandoned and sick rabbits. My politics might not always be correct or wise, but I want things like the end of poverty, the end of war, and so on.

And yet just down the highway from me, there are facilities for the mass torture of animals. In the United States, there are 73 million pigs in “concentrated animal feeding operations”, more commonly known as factory farms:

There are many horrors experienced by chickens and other animals on factory farms, but the way pigs are forced to live is probably the worst. For most of their lives, female pigs (sows) are kept in tiny cages — either “gestation crates” when they’re pregnant, or “farrowing crates” when they’re nursing. A sow will spend most of her life in one of these cages.

In a gestation crate or a farrowing crate, sows don’t have enough room to turn around — all they can do is either stand or lie down in a pile of their own feces. Imagine living your entire life in an airline seat, where you couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom or take your seatbelt off. That’s how these pigs live.

Pigs are social creatures — they exhibit “emotional contagion”, meaning that when one pig is scared or happy, other pigs start to feel the same, and they give comfort and support to other pigs who are in distress. Research suggests that they’re at least as smart as dogs, and probably smarter. But a pig in one of these crates will never get any social interaction in her entire adult life — she can’t even turn around to look at her babies.

This is torture. The pigs who are confined this way bite the bars of their cages, desperate for a freedom that will never come. They have their tails chopped off as babies (generally without anesthetic), so that they can’t chew each other’s tails in anguish. But no relief ever comes — they live out their entire lives and die in these tiny torture-cages.

I have no other word for this except “sin”. This is a sin. If there is a God, and if that God is in any way good and moral, then that God is looking down with disgust on the way my society treats pigs. I go about my daily life — hanging out with my friends, petting my rabbit, going out to eat at nice restaurants — never thinking about the horrible suffering that has engulfed the entire lives of those tens of millions of pigs. [...]

On top of the obvious and demonstrated inability of individual action to solve this problem, it’s insufficient even from a moral stance. Suppose that our society farmed human beings for food. Would simply refusing to eat human flesh be enough to absolve me of culpability? I don’t think so. I would still have a responsibility to try to abolish the evil system.

In fact, “abolish the evil system” is exactly what voters in California and some other states are trying to do. In 2018, by an almost 2-to-1 margin, California voters enacted a law called Proposition 12 that heavily restricted the sale of meat from pigs, hens, and calves that weren’t raised with a minimum amount of space. Crucially, the partial prohibition extended to meat from animals raised inhumanely in other states. This followed on the heels of a similar law in Massachusetts two years earlier.

Courts have upheld the law, but Republicans in Congress are trying to undo it from the federal level. In 2025 they proposed the Save Our Bacon Act, which would ban states from enacting animal welfare laws like the ones voters approved in California and Massachusetts. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, but this year it got incorporated into the Farm Bill, which has passed the House and is now being considered in the Senate:

Companies and industry groups have also worked with members of Congress for over a decade to introduce federal legislation to nullify laws like those in California and Massachusetts. The latest iteration is called the Save Our Bacon Act, originally proposed last year…This effort, which for years went nowhere as standalone legislation in Congress, now has a decent chance at becoming law as part of the new Farm Bill…

In late April, the House of Representatives passed its version of the Farm Bill, which included the language from the Save Our Bacon Act…It’s “really a Save Our Crate Act,” Brent Hershey, a hog farmer who opposes it, told me. “A vote for the farm bill,” he said, “is a vote to cage an animal that can’t walk or turn around.”

Lewis Bollard has a good post explaining what’s at stake. In fact, the current Farm Bill wouldn’t just reverse the recent anti-crate laws in California and Massachusetts — it would roll back much of the progress that has been made in farm animal welfare over the decade, as well as preventing any future welfare laws along similar lines:

The [Save Our Bacon] Act would stop any state or locality from regulating the sale of meat based on how it’s produced in another state. This would likely invalidate state and local bans on foie gras, crated veal, and more…It would also halt future legislative progress. Congress hasn’t passed a farm animal welfare law in decades. State laws are where reforms actually happen. The SOB Act would gut them by mandating they contain a giant loophole for out-of-state imports.

Why should Congress prevent the voters of California and Massachusetts from taking a stand against the evils of factory farming? First and foremost, it’s a case of a concentrated interest group — the pig farming lobby — making headway against a diffuse interest (voters with a conscience). In fact, if you believe the polls, a majority of the country — even a majority of those who regularly eat pork — would probably support measures like the ones in California and Massachusetts: [...]

In fact, I suspect that the American public is still in a mood to support animal welfare laws like this. The Save Our Bacon Act failed on its own, and its supporters had to end up sneakily burying it within the much bigger Farm Bill; to me, this suggests that even the SOB Act’s proponents knew how bad it would make them look if people started paying attention.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Humane Society via Wikimedia Commons; Our World in Data; YouTube

[ed. Is anyone surprised this continues? Everything Congress does (or doesn't do) is purely transactional. The Congress/lobbyist/fundraising/election process/system is a contagion on our society (... and pigs). See also: Leadershit.]

An Ode to Miller Lite

One of the many humiliations that arrive in your 30s is the grudging recognition that a parent was right about something. For some people, their parents were right about a financial decision they recommended, or a romantic relationship they disapproved of. My dad was right about a 96-calorie American lager produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

“It’s hard to get in trouble drinking Miller Lite,” was my father’s advice, dispensed repeatedly throughout my young adulthood—usually after he’d spied me carefully tipping an over-hopped beer out of a florid can and into a stupidly shaped glass. For years, I wrote off his wisdom as the curmudgeonly philosophy of a man too stubborn to join the Craft Beer Revolution. Why would anyone still drink mass-produced piss water when you could stock your fridge with $21 four-packs made with love and genius by regional artisans? It was like watching a black-and-white boob tube in the age of 4K flatscreens.

In my 20s, I turned enjoying craft beer—and booze in general—into a minor hobby. I stood in long lines to buy limited releases from various “gypsy brewers.” I nursed recurring obsessions with Monastrell wines from Jumilla. I hunted down vintage bourbon; National Distillers–era Old Grand-Dad was a particular fixation.

In retrospect, I can see that this was something of a defense mechanism. After growing up working-class, I went to college and then graduate school at fancy private institutions, which put me in constant contact with people who had family money, or were simply from hipper places than I am. You may have a trust fund and come from a stock of people who “summer,” I reasoned, but I’ll be damned if you know more about food or alcohol than I do. I viewed drinking decent tipple as part of what it meant to be civilized. To some extent, I still believe that. But now I also believe that most of the time, it’s Miller Time.

The conversion happened slowly. It began with a search for a beer that I could drink while watching Monday Night Football, but that also wouldn’t leave me feeling grimy when I woke up to teach my 8 a.m. class. As I entered my third decade of life, I’d found that microbrews, with their high alcohol content, made me feel a bit suboptimal the next day, even when I consumed only one or two. Before long, my Miller Mondays made me realize that this 4.2 percent ABV “macro-lager” had many applications I had not previously considered: It was a treat for mowing the lawn. It prevented me from getting too drunk at weddings. It could be reliably consumed during a hot-afternoon cookout without requiring me to take a nap. This small pleasure was even cheap! At my local bottle shop, a sixer of tall boys rings out at $7.49.

The problem with craft beer is how easily it can make you, as my dad says, “get in trouble.” One double IPA is not enough, but two is one-half too many. Two sours is one-half too few, but three is instant heartburn. Boozy imperial stouts are best consumed in eight-ounce increments, but they tend to come in 22-ounce bombers. The math doesn’t math. Miller Lite, by contrast, is an honest beer. If you find yourself Miller Lite drunk, most likely the issue is not that you shouldn’t have had that last beer; you shouldn’t have had those last four.

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

by Tyler Austin Harper, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Pinterest via
[ed. 100%. Lite is the archetypal go anywhere beer. Always remembered for bringing the concept of "light" (as in "less calories"), into the public consciousness. Interestingly, where I live, you can only find it in 16oz 12 packs; regular 12oz cans only come in cases (no 6 packs). Not sure of the message there...]

via:

The Case of Missing American Mushrooms

Why the U.S. is missing a million pounds of mushrooms a week.

I am a grocery-list-captured male shopper. If something is not on the grocery list, it most likely does not go into the shopping cart. There is one item, though, for which I make an exception. Whether it is on the list or not, I always get a pack of mushrooms because I love them. I love mushrooms in my soup, in my burgers, on my toast, or just sauteed with garlic1.

Given the short shelf life of mushrooms and their fragility, I had always assumed that most of the mushrooms I buy must be coming from some nearby place in California.

I recently learned that Canada’s mushroom production has been growing over the last 20 years, and much of it is exported to the United States, while production in the United States has declined. Differences in policy toward migrant workers between the United States and Canada, and differences in investments in new technology may explain the divergence in mushroom production between the two countries.

But before we get into the details, it is important to understand where and how mushrooms are grown, harvested, and shipped.

US mushroom production

You would be surprised to learn that almost 69% of the US mushroom production occurs in the borough of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. It is a small town of about 6000 people, but mushroom-growing facilities around town produce almost 451 million pounds of mushrooms annually (2024). 451 million pounds of mushrooms would occupy about 45 American football fields or 35 soccer fields. The dollar value of mushroom production in the US is roughly $ 1 billion per year.

China is the undisputed leader in mushroom production. China accounts for 93% of the world’s global mushroom production.

The history of mushroom farming in Kennett Square dates back to 1885, when a grower obtained mushroom spores from Europe and began growing mushrooms. This concentration of mushroom farming in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, is due to historical immigration patterns, primarily of Italians in the 1950s or 1960s, easy availability of horse manure for the mushroom substrate, an easy access to the Philadelphia and New York markets.

Growers use an old system called “Pennsylvania doubles” to grow mushrooms. Specialized, two-story cinderblock buildings with wooden shelves and intensive manual picking characterize the system. The system is designed with the assumption of cheap labor.

The growing houses provide a strictly controlled environment for growing white button, cremini, and portobello mushrooms on stacked beds, producing approximately 400 to 500 million pounds of mushrooms annually. Growers can manage the temperature, humidity, and airflow to create optimal conditions for mushroom mycelium to grow and fruit.

The houses are equipped with vertical wooden or aluminum shelves, which maximize growing space. The shelves house pasteurized compost (often made from hay, straw, poultry litter, and cocoa shells) used to grow mushrooms year-round.

As you can see in the video below, the conditions inside the mushroom-growing facilities are hot, humid, and stinky! The process of harvesting mushrooms is fairly manual, unless the grower has invested in a robotic harvesting system from companies like 4AG Robotics. Most US production facilities lack an automation design.

Mushroom shelf life dictates the supply chain

Mushrooms are a type of fungus. If you have the right spawn available and can control the environment economically, you can grow mushrooms year-round. Mushrooms have a short shelf life. Mushrooms are 92% water. A mushroom starts losing water as soon as it is harvested. Anyone who has seen a fresh mushroom that has begun to dehydrate knows how unappetizing it can look.

The dominant mushroom variety grown in both the U.S. and Canada is called the Agaricus. Your most common mushroom variety in your grocery store, the white and brown button mushrooms, cremini, baby bellas, and portobello, all belong to the Agaricus family. The Agaricus family accounts for more than 90% of mushroom production and sales in North America. Shiitake (my favorite or oyster mushrooms) do not belong to the Agaricus family.

Canada and the United States grow mushrooms year-round in climate-controlled, indoor warehouses. Readers of this newsletter are aware of my massive skepticism about the economic viability of vertical farming, but mushrooms provide a counterexample in which vertical farming actually works. The main difference is that mushrooms are fungi and do not need sunlight for photosynthesis.

Due to supply chain constraints and the limited shelf life of mushrooms post-harvest, most fresh mushroom consumption occurs within a few days of production. For example, mushroom production from Pennsylvania mostly stays within a few days of transit.

Most mushroom production facilities in Canada are located in British Columbia and Ontario, close to the US border, and deliver their products to the northern United States within 36-48 hours of harvest. Production geography relative to population is the structural constraint that neither shelf-life extension nor improved cold chains can fully overcome.

The shelf life of mushrooms is the hard constraint. Fresh button mushrooms have a 7-10 day usable shelf life under an optimal cold chain, beginning at harvest. Mushrooms are a high-respiration-rate product. They consume oxygen, produce CO2, and generate moisture. Every degree of temperature above the ideal range of 34-38 degrees F doubles the respiration rate and halves the effective shelf life. Continuity in temperature from the moment of harvest to when the customer picks it up is a critical supply chain variable.

Mushrooms are fragile and bruise under their own weight. Vibration and pressure can cause bruising in transit. Each bruise initiates a localized decay, which accelerates from the point. It limits the number of handoffs or transfer events, since each event is a risk. Mushrooms can lose quality if they dehydrate or become too heavy, and they require an ideal relative humidity of 90-95%.

The same MAP technology used for packaged salads is also used for mushrooms and can extend their shelf life, though it cannot do much for the product’s fragility or the minimum handling requirements.

So, why is US production dropping while production in Canada is rising, even though 99.6% of Canada’s exports go to the US? A big part of the answer to this question lies in how the United States and Canada provide support to migrant workers who come over to pick mushrooms.

by Rhishi Pethe, SFTW | Read more:
Images:Rhishi Pethe; YouTube: Alan Rockefeller, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Do the Top Sushi Restaurants Leave Us So Bored, and So Broke?

Hiss, hiss, hiss. Up and down the marble counter, the sushi chefs are brandishing their weapons. The first time it’s a thrill, the blue gush of the hand torch, the whoosh like an F-16 fighter jet taking flight. The fifth time it’s a tic. Piece after piece of fish goes under the flame, until the flavor is more smoke than sea, until everything tastes the same.

In a 1963 column about new Japanese restaurants in Manhattan, the New York Times food editor Craig Claiborne wrote that sushi “may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates.” Then came the California roll, popularized by Ichiro Mashita in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the flocking of Hollywood stars and studio heads to sushi bars like Osho, conveniently located next to the 20th Century Fox lot.

By 1987, Charlie Sheen, playing a whippersnapper stockbroker in the movie “Wall Street,” was churning out rice balls eight at a time from a home nigiri-making machine in his penthouse.

That nigiri-maker might have been an omen for what was to come: the co-opting of sushi by finance bros, favoring optimization and spectacle over craft, in an eerie Benihana-fication of the American sushi-ya.

I am not arguing for sushi as some serene, transcendent ritual. Sushi as we know it started out as working-class food sold in the streets of 19th-century Edo (today Tokyo). Some of the best sushi I’ve had was in strip malls in Los Angeles, at unadorned counters where the chef set down piece after piece with sometimes little more than a grunt, and we were out in half an hour. (Shout-out to Sushi Ike, for those who know.)

Now the hand torches flare and, at the most expensive restaurants, there’s a banker’s roll of supplements to pad out your meal and push the already astonishing prices even higher — up to $1,200 per person, pre-tax and pre-liquor, for the “chef’s reserve” omakase at Masa on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

At Sushi Nakazawa in the West Village, you might have your choice of A5 Wagyu, truffles (a Japanese food writer I consulted expressed concern that the scent would be “distracting”), a tweezering of gold leaf over caviar and a pairing of Krug Champagne and kinki (thornyhead), a rare and opulently fatty fish sometimes called the Wagyu of the sea.

More insidiously, an odd note of appeasement has crept in. A recent omakase meal at a Lower Manhattan counter was almost all crowd-pleasers. First, three kinds of salmon — a fish not even used for sushi until the 1980s, when Norway, eager to offload an oversupply, lobbied to create a new market in Japan (which may in turn have expanded the audience for sushi in the United States, with the lure of a more familiar and straightforwardly buttery fish). Then delicate sweet snappers, luscious jacks and tuna close to liquefying in its own fat.

With each bite I had the nagging sense I was being spoon-fed, like a finicky child who couldn’t possibly know what’s really good or keep an open mind. There was nothing funky or chewy that might demand a pause to wonder: What am I eating?

In the past decade and a half, omakase, in which the guest cedes power and the chef decides what you eat, has become the dominant form of sushi in major American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas. This stems in part from the popularity of the 2011 documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” a paean to the monastic virtuosity of the sushi master Jiro Ono, plying his craft in a basement nook off a subway station in Tokyo.

In classic omakase, a chef has leeway to improvise in the moment, modulate, maybe even figure out what kind of person you are. These days in New York, the experience is more often one-size-fits-all: a fixed series of courses — essentially, a tasting menu — ranging from a dozen to 20 or more, with accommodations only for allergies or a particularly querulous diner, and often not even then. At the highest-end spots, everyone sits down at the same time and is fed in the same order, as if at the most elegant of mess halls.

There was a time when omakase was something you asked for, a way of saying, I’m curious and open, willing to try anything. You voluntarily set aside the menu and gave yourself up to fate. It was part of a code you learned, along with picking up pieces by hand and not dipping them into soy sauce unless instructed to do so, and then only the very tip of the fish, never the rice.

In my early years of eating sushi, I didn’t expect to love an omakase meal from beginning to end. Inevitably there were pieces I found slightly less delightful: giant clam, profoundly rubbery, or the oilier fishes that smacked of murky parts of the sea. Nevertheless I ate them, hoping I would learn something — about fish, sushi as a craft, the corners of the chef’s mind. [...]

Every omakase has an arc — as a year has seasons, marking our passage through time — and this is certainly not the only way to eat sushi. I’ve had fine meals ferried by conveyor belt in Tokyo, and nights I would’ve been content with a fistful of negitoro rolls.

But when you ask for omakase, you relinquish choice and your own desires. You put your trust in the stranger across the counter, and say, tell me a story.

Sometimes the story is personal. Naomichi Yasuda, the founding chef of Sushi Yasuda, near Grand Central Terminal (who has since returned to Japan), once told me that he was trained to be an “eel man,” and then served me only eel, sea and freshwater, in every treatment and form, including the flash-fried spine.

At the now-shuttered Jewel Bako in the East Village, I was handed a shot glass full of squirming baby eels, boneless, to be drunk straight; the likewise shuttered Kura, a few blocks over, presented a saucer of shiokara, fermented squid viscera, while the chef laughed and laughed. [...]

No such surprises await at most of today’s sushi-yas. Instead, you are assured that you will get what you pay for: pliant and unchallenging fish, occasional pyrotechnics and status-symbol frills on demand. Which is to say, what you think you want, or the world wants you to want. Nod to the chef; fiddle with your phone. Whatever comes will probably be delicious. It will also be boring.

by Ligaya Mishan, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ellen Silverman for The New York Times

[ed. Any place blow-torching sushi should be avoided.]

My Journey to the Microwave Alternate Timeline

As we all know, the march of technological progress is best summarized by this meme from Linkedin:

Inventors constantly come up with exciting new inventions, each of them with the potential to change everything forever. But only a fraction of these ever establish themselves as a persistent part of civilization, and the rest vanish from collective consciousness. Before shutting down forever, though, the alternate branches of the tech tree leave some faint traces behind: over-optimistic sci-fi stories, outdated educational cartoons, and, sometimes, some obscure accessories that briefly made it to mass production before being quietly discontinued.

The classical example of an abandoned timeline is the Glorious Atomic Future, as described in the 1957 Disney cartoon Our Friend the Atom. A scientist with a suspiciously German accent explains all the wonderful things nuclear power will bring to our lives:

Sadly, the glorious atomic future somewhat failed to materialize, and, by the early 1960s, the project to rip a second Panama canal by detonating a necklace of nuclear bombs was canceled, because we are ruled by bureaucrats who hate fun and efficiency.

While the Our-Friend-the-Atom timeline remains out of reach from most hobbyists, not all alternate timelines are permanently closed to exploration. There are other timelines that you can explore from the comfort of your home, just by buying a few second-hand items off eBay.

I recently spent a few months in one of these abandoned timelines: the one where the microwave oven replaced the stove.

First, I had to get myself a copy of the world’s saddest book.

Microwave Cooking, for One

Marie T. Smith’s Microwave Cooking for One is an old forgotten book of microwave recipes from the 1980s. In the mid-2010s, it garnered the momentary attention of the Internet as “the world’s saddest cookbook”:

To the modern eye, it seems obvious that microwave cooking can only be about reheating ready-made frozen food. It’s about staring blankly at the buzzing white box, waiting for the four dreadful beeps that give you permission to eat. It’s about consuming lukewarm processed slop on a rickety formica table, with only the crackling of a flickering neon light piercing through the silence.

But this is completely misinterpreting Microwave Cooking for One’s vision. First – the book was published in 1985.

When MCfO was published, microwave cooking was still a new entrant to the world of household electronics. Market researchers were speculating about how the food and packaging industries would adapt their products to the new era and how deep the transformation would go. Many saw the microwave revolution as a material necessity: women were massively entering the workforce, and soon nobody would have much time to spend behind a stove. In 1985, the microwave future looked inevitable.

Second – Marie T. Smith is a microwave maximalist. She spent ten years putting every comestible object in the microwave to see what happens. Look at the items on the book cover – some are obviously impossible to prepare with a microwave, right? Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Marie T. Smith figured out a way to prepare absolutely everything. If you are a disciple of her philosophy, you shouldn’t even own a stove. Smith herself hasn’t owned one since the early 1970s. As she explains in the cookbook’s introduction, Smith believed the microwave would ultimately replace stove-top cooking, the same way stove-top cooking had replaced campfire-top cooking.

So, my goal is twofold: first, I want to know if there’s any merit to all of these forgotten microwaving techniques. Something that can make plasma out of grapes, set your house on fire and bring frozen hamsters back to life cannot be fundamentally bad. But also, I want to get a glimpse of what the world looks like in the uchronia where Marie T. Smith won and Big Teflon lost. Why did we drift apart from this timeline?

by Malmsbury, Telescopic Turnip |  Read more:

Images: Microwave Cooking For One/YouTube/uncredited

Chip Buddy

When I first told my colleagues about the chip butty, nobody believed me. British chips…sandwiched between two slices of buttered, untoasted white bread? Hey, don’t knock it until you try it. The chip butty is a working-class staple sold at chippies—fish and chip shops— across the United Kingdom, and the delightful, comforting snack I sought out as a university student in Scotland many years ago. There was a lot of rain and not a lot of shine, and I, like many other students, drowned my sorrows in fried food. As journalist Tony Naylor wrote in The Guardian, “Hard liquor and soft drugs aside, the chip butty is the most reliable way we human beings have to mentally shut out this harsh world and, momentarily, transport ourselves to a happier, more innocent place.”

by Genevieve Yam, Serious Eats | Read more:
Images:Amanda Suarez, Serious Eats/Eric Nathan/Alamy
[ed. Yep, it's a real thing.]

'Get Them All'

Why are WA farmers blindsided by an ICE crackdown?

It looks like farmers are starting to have some buyer’s remorse.

“ICE raids rattle Washington farmers who backed Trump’s immigration promises,” read one headline.

“A Republican farmer relies on immigrant work. He sees his party erasing it,” read another.

Randy Kraght is one such farmer. He runs a berry farm in Ferndale, in far northwest Washington, close to the Canadian border. Recently he emerged on a radio show in Bellingham, called “The Farming Show,” to tell how immigration agents had nabbed two of his longtime workers and sent them to the Tacoma detention facility.

“They’re my two main guys, unfortunately,” he said on KGMI on March 28. “Really good guys. Squeaky clean. Don’t drink. Not even a traffic ticket, none of that stuff.

“That’s why I didn’t worry too much about it, this whole crackdown thing,” he added. “All of a sudden you come to find out you’re wrong.”

Kraght said he had believed rhetoric from the Trump administration that it was targeting criminals, not workers. He said as a right-winger himself who backed Donald Trump — in 2020 he also gave $500 to the Loren Culp for governor campaign — that he’s “ended up really disappointed.”

What should those of us who are not farmers make of stories like this?

The crowd on social media was not sympathetic.

“You voted for this,” said one. “Haul your butt out there and work the fields yourself.”

“You just thought Trump would hurt other people,” said another.

“What did you think ‘mass deportation’ meant?” asked a third.

That last one was my reaction as well. At the GOP convention in 2024 the delegates waved “Mass Deportation Now!” signs. Trump pledged “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Rally crowds chanted “send them home, send them home.”

It couldn’t have been clearer, could it?

Trump also talked of deporting up to 20 million people, which is thought to be more than 100% of all the people in the country illegally. It’s true Trump has also emphasized removing “the worst of the worst.” But he has canceled past directives that ordered ICE to focus its enforcement on criminals.

“He wanted mass deportation, rather than targeted deportation,” summed up the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

The director of a local farming advocacy group told me he thinks it’s unfair to say farmers should have known better.

“I don’t think farmers are simply cherry-picking what they want to hear,” said Ben Tindall, executive director of Save Family Farming in Whatcom County. “They have been told repeatedly that the workers on their farms who have been with them for years are not the targets.

“While Trump may have promoted one narrative at times during his campaign, what farmers and Americans more broadly have been told over and over and over again this past year and a half is something very different.”

A Tri-City Herald editorial decrying recent arrests on farms in Central Washington made a similar case.

“On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said that immigration enforcement would primarily target undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes,” the paper wrote. “In practice, ICE has cast a wide net, capturing anyone who lacks the right papers and even some who have them.”

That’s not what I heard. On the campaign trail, Trump said immigrants in the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country.” He put that in writing. He wasn’t talking just about people with criminal records. Being in the country illegally isn’t a crime by itself anyway; it’s a civil violation, like a traffic ticket.

A year before the 2024 election, in November 2023, the media outlined what Trump planned to do. “Sweeping raids, giant camps and mass deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 immigration plans,” The New York Times reported.

Did people not hear this — are we all in information silos? Did they not expect it to happen?

Or did they rationalize it, as the commenter up above said, as something that would only happen to others. You’d think farmers who employ undocumented immigrants would be less prone to this empathy deficit, if for no other reason than immigration is central to their business interests.

Or maybe this is one of those instances where some people take Trump literally, while others process the gist.

Recently the Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference and discussed this exact issue.

“I see there’s a lot of language out there that President Trump’s backing off on mass deportation,” Homan said. “No, he’s not … The Biden administration, he told ICE you can’t arrest an illegal alien unless he’s convicted of a serious offense. President Trump says, ‘Get all. Get them all.’ And that’s what we’re doing.”

There’s not much wiggle room in “get them all.”

Immigration arrests in Washington state are up 73% through the first 14 months of Trump’s term. Less than half had any criminal record or charge. Some were following green card or asylum rules and got detained anyway. A national analysis this past week found that arrests of people without criminal records is up eightfold.

It seems completely predictable that any mass deportation scheme will increasingly snatch up the “squeaky clean,” as farmer Kraght described his workers.

The second-guessing of this farmer, and others who suddenly are speaking out, is human nature.

Some empathy is called for as well.

Farming is in a tough spot right now, with tariffs and energy prices soaring. Tindall of Save Family Farming said adding immigration raids on top of all that, without any effort at reform of the system with permits or legal pathways, is threatening the farm system and potentially the food supply. As well as the due process rights of migrant workers and their families — something “farm owners have become deeply concerned about.”

Farm country is Trump country. It can’t be comfortable for this group, or this farmer, to cross that red line. Farmer Kraght didn’t have to tell his story or acknowledge being wrong. Or to suggest some of his workers were undocumented, a reality farmers sometimes gloss over.

Political change comes in many ways, from small gatherings in living rooms to mass street protests. This is one of the ways, when one by one, the scales begin to fall from people’s eyes.

by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Matt Rourke / The Associated Press

[ed. At least annual farm subsidies will help some. But workers will lose an entire season's pay.]

Hawaii’s Small Farmers Begin Recovery After Catastrophic Flooding

Eddie Oroyan’s farm was thriving when the storms hit. He and his wife had started LewaTerra Farm last year on a gorgeous stretch of land on the north shore of Oahu. They were delivering vegetables to customers in the community, selling at farmer’s markets and to local restaurants.

Then, on the week of 10 March, a first kona low storm hit the island, bringing copious amounts of water, flooding their land and wiping out crops. Nearly all their papayas were gone. And the tomatoes didn’t survive. But the couple quickly began cleaning, replanting and tying down crops, confident that they would get back on their feet shortly.

“It was looking really positive. We were like, OK, we’re going to make it out of this,” Oroyan said.

But days later the Hawaiian Islands were hit with yet another storm – this one even more perilous. It inundated neighborhoods, leading to more than 200 rescues, washing houses off their foundations and leaving wide swaths of the land underwater.

Oroyan and his wife evacuated in chest-deep water. They returned to find an almost complete loss.

“The crops were completely covered and had already been underwater earlier that week. The disease was already setting in,” he said.

One week on, Hawaii is only just beginning to grapple with the aftermath of both storms, which saw as much as 50in of rain and caused some of the state’s worst flooding since 2004. The damage is immense – with officials estimating costs at $1bn, and farmers have been hit hard, particularly on Oahu. More than 300 farms have reported about $17.5m in damage as of this week, said Brian Miyamoto, the executive director of the Hawai‘i Farm Bureau.

“This is so widespread that the need is astronomical,” he said.

And with significant debris, damaged roads, and thick mud indoors and outside, cleanup will take time. [...]

Blake Briddell and Brit Yim, who for the last eight years have run an eight-acre farm on land that used to serve as a sugarcane plantation on the north shore, went through their nursery and storage sheds, elevating everything off the ground to protect their breadfruit, mango and citrus trees.

The storm came sooner than expected. The first front brought incessant rain, dropping about 20in in McKinnon’s area, which typically sees an average of 30in for the year. The water levels on Briddell’s farm were steadily rising, and the couple soon had to evacuate.

The heavy rains didn’t stay for long, but caused significant damage, including flooding fields and saturating the ground, and harvested crops were lost to power outages and damaged equipment.

Much of the land that Oroyan and his wife, Jessica Eirado Enes, tend had been left coated in a thick layer of mud thanks to the dense clay soil. Millions of years of erosion from the mountains produced that mineral-rich clay soil, which is good for planting, but that doesn’t soak up water well, Oroyan said, and swallows shoes and tractors.

The couple spent days cleaning up their land, trying to get things back in order and leaving soaked equipment out to dry. They got to work replanting crops that had tipped over, including eggplant and okra.

So did McKinnon and Briddell. Another kona storm was forecast, but was expected to be less severe than the previous ones. “It’s silly looking back, but we were talking about how it might be nice to get a little bit of rain to wash the mud off of everything. Like a little bit of rain would be welcome,” Briddell said.

Briddell woke up at 1.30am on the morning of 20 March to the see water surrounded his farm’s small living space, an alarming development given that it is located on the most elevated area of the property. The water was already shin-deep, meaning the road was too flooded for the couple to drive out, he said.

“We knew we were stuck at that point and it was just a matter of ‘OK, everything that we can get back up elevated, let’s do it’” Briddell said. “The water at that stage was raising about a foot every 20 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it. You could literally see the water line climbing.”

Meanwhile, as the storm made landfall, Oroyan had been harvesting beets and lettuce in the rain, trying to get them out of the ground before it became too muddy to do so. As he prepared to go to bed, he saw that water was already overwhelming a nearby culvert and coming to the edge of a drainage ditch on the property.

He and his wife began to prepare once more. They gathered their things and moved valuable heavy equipment, a solar generator and a washing machine.

“Within 20 minutes of me saying we should start prepping it was at the foot of the living space,” Oroyan said. Twenty minutes later it was up to their knees, and they drove their vehicles to higher ground with water submerging the hoods of their cars. They made it to a neighbors after walking through chest-deep water.

Briddell and Yim put on wetsuits, and placed their dry clothes in a cooler. The couple knew their cats would not leave, and that they couldn’t swim out with them, so they left wet food on the rafters of their home where they knew they’d be safe. They swam a quarter of a mile to their kayak and met with a friend who offered them a vehicle to drive out in.

“The drive was scarier than the swim. The water ripping down the roads. You’re driving with the tailpipe pipes submerged for miles where you can’t let off the gas,” Briddell said.

by Dani Anguiano, The Guardian | Read more:
Images: Eddie Oroyan of LewaTerra Farm

[ed. Climate change. We lost the fight before ever getting started. Because it was a hoax. Because we needed to protect our corporations and our economy, 401Ks, consumptive standards of living. Because it was too complex and too far in the future. Because it was just too hard. See also: They’re Rich but Not Famous—and They’re Suddenly Everywhere.]

A Theory about Dishes

“Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

In 2016, an article by Matthew Fray titled, “She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by The Sink” went viral. It begins by addressing the ridiculousness of the title.

It seems so unreasonable when you put it that way: My wife left me because sometimes I leave dishes by the sink.

It makes her seem ridiculous; and makes me seem like a victim of unfair expectations.

The author then goes on to talk about why his wife cared about the dishes he left and how it reflected her broader concerns about not feeling respected and wanting her partner to share the mental load of managing a house. Toward the end, he summarizes the real problem his wife and other women in her situation have.

The wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband because he leaves used drinking glasses by the sink.

She wants to divorce him because she feels like he doesn’t respect or appreciate her, which suggests he doesn’t love her, and she can’t count on him to be her lifelong partner.

In the end, it was not about the dishes but about a broader pattern of behavior that left the wife feeling unsupported in their marriage. The dishes are a symbol, an artistic flourish to represent one piece of the frustration many couples, especially straight ones, have when it comes to dividing household labor. But what if this is not the whole story? What if dishes have a unique ability to create resentment and domestic misery?

There was a group of friends I knew who decided to all live together after high school. When their lease was up, they did not renew and there were some bitter feelings. At least one person claims that the reason their setup did not work out was because of conflict over the dishes. Maybe the dishes were a symptom of a bigger problem related to communication or willingness of everyone to share in household labor. But what if we take this reason seriously? What if that household did fall apart because of the dishes?

Conflict over dishes is so common that I am willing to bet every person reading this has argued about dishes at some point in their life whether that be with their parents, their own children, their partners or their roommates. There are always dishes to wash and most people find washing them to be unpleasant. Over time after hearing about other people’s conflicts and dealing with my own, I have come to think much more seriously about dishwashing than any sane person should. I have read empirical research on the division of dishwashing labor and its effects on relationships (most of which, oddly enough, focus on sexual satisfaction). I have read multiple takes by Christians who argue that dishwashing is part of God’s punishment for Eve eating the apple. Then I explored the many articles whose title is a play on “everyone wants a community/village/commune but no one wants to do the dishes.”

My radical conclusion after reading the dishwashing literature is that who does the dishes is not a petty concern and the fact that people see it as petty is the main reason it can prove to be such a destructive force in households whether those houses consists of married couples, roommates, or income sharing commune dwellers.

Evidence for the Surprising Importance of Dishwashing

Out of the few scientific studies on the division of dishwashing labor, the most relevant is Carlson, Miller and Sassler’s (2018) study that compared how the division of labor of different household tasks affects relationship satisfaction (including its effects on sex). Out of all the tasks they included (preparing/cooking meals, house cleaning, shopping, laundry, home maintenance, and paying bills), the “most consequential to relationship quality” was washing the dishes. When women were doing much more of the dishwashing, there was lower relationships satisfaction, more reports of relationship troubles, higher likelihood of having talked about separating, and a higher likelihood of physical arguments. Dishwashing was unique in its ability to cause discord and unhappiness.

Unfortunately, most research on division of household labor does not separate out dishwashing from other tasks so the rest of my evidence is anecdotal. After Mathew Fray wrote the above mentioned article about his wife leaving him over the dishes, he became a relationship coach and wrote a book about how men can save their marriages. His article about dishes resonated so much that he spun it into an entire career. [...]

My Guesses as to Why Dishwashing is so Important

Compared to other household tasks, dishwashing is more constant and has less potential to be fulfilling. There are other tasks that are gross, such as cleaning the toilet or gutters, but those aren’t daily tasks. Other tasks that are daily, such as cooking, are ones that many people enjoy and even do as a hobby. No one washes dishes as a hobby. The closest task in terms of regularity and unpleasantness might be laundry. In households where one person does everyone’s laundry then it does become a daily task of often unnoticed drudgery. But in most households laundry is not a daily issue in the way dishes are.

My main theory is that the perception of dishwashing as a petty concern is the problem. Most of the comments under Mathew Fray’s article are in the vein of “in a healthy marriage people do not care so much about dishes.” The whole reason the article went viral is the ridiculousness of the idea that dishes could be so important. When an issue is considered petty then the onus is on the resentful person to let it go rather than force a solution that everyone is satisfied with but it’s hard to let go when the dishwasher is reminded of their resentment everyday, multiple times a day. Washing the dishes does not take long but those short bursts of annoyances adds up.

by Mia Milne, Solar Thoughts |  Read more:

Image: “Washing dishes” (1914) photograph by Harry Whittier Frees

Vertical Farming

via:
[ed. Impressive.]

***

"While most vertical farms are limited to lettuces, Plenty spent the past decade designing a patent-pending, modular growing system flexible enough to support a wide variety of crops – including strawberries. Growing on vertical towers enables uniform delivery of nutrients, superior airflow and more intense lighting, delivering increased yield with consistent quality.

Every element of the Plenty Richmond Farm–including temperature, light and humidity–is precisely controlled through proprietary software to create the perfect environment for the strawberry plants to thrive. The farm uses AI to analyze more than 10 million data points each day across its 12 grow rooms, adapting each grow room’s environment to the evolving needs of the plants – creating the perfect environment for Driscoll’s proprietary plants to thrive and optimizing the strawberries’ flavor, texture and size. Even pollination has been engineered by Plenty, using a patent-pending method that evenly distributes controlled airflow across the strawberry flowers for more efficient and effective pollination than using bees, supporting more uniform strawberry size and shape."  ~ Greater Richmond Partnership

via:

Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast

When the President of the United States travels outside the country, he brings his own car with him. Moments after Air Force One landed at the Hanoi airport last May, President Barack Obama ducked into an eighteen-foot, armor-plated limousine—a bomb shelter masquerading as a Cadillac—that was equipped with a secure link to the Pentagon and with emergency supplies of blood, and was known as the Beast. Hanoi’s broad avenues are crowded with honking cars, storefront venders, street peddlers, and some five million scooters and motorbikes, which rush in and out of the intersections like floodwaters. It was Obama’s first trip to Vietnam, but he encountered this pageant mostly through a five-inch pane of bulletproof glass. He might as well have watched it on TV.

Obama was scheduled to meet with President Trần Đại Quang, and with the new head of Vietnam’s national assembly. On his second night in Hanoi, however, he kept an unusual appointment: dinner with Anthony Bourdain, the peripatetic chef turned writer who hosts the Emmy-winning travel show “Parts Unknown,” on CNN. Over the past fifteen years, Bourdain has hosted increasingly sophisticated iterations of the same program. Initially, it was called “A Cook’s Tour,” and aired on the Food Network. After shifting to the Travel Channel, it was renamed “Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations,” and it ran for nine seasons before moving to CNN, in 2013. All told, Bourdain has travelled to nearly a hundred countries and has filmed two hundred and forty-eight episodes, each a distinct exploration of the food and culture of a place. The secret ingredient of the show is the when-in-Rome avidity with which Bourdain partakes of indigenous custom and cuisine, whether he is pounding vodka before plunging into a frozen river outside St. Petersburg or spearing a fatted swine as the guest of honor at a jungle longhouse in Borneo. Like a great white shark, Bourdain tends to be photographed with his jaws wide open, on the verge of sinking his teeth into some tremulous delicacy. In Bourdain’s recollection, his original pitch for the series was, roughly, “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.” The formula has proved improbably successful.

People often ask Bourdain’s producers if they can tag along on an escapade. On a recent visit to Madagascar, he was accompanied by the film director Darren Aronofsky. (A fan of the show, Aronofsky proposed to Bourdain that they go somewhere together. “I kind of jokingly said Madagascar, just because it’s the farthest possible place,” he told me. “And Tony said, ‘How’s November?’ ”) A ride-along with Bourdain promises the sidekick an experience that, in this era of homogenized tourism, is all too rare: communion with a foreign culture so unmitigated that it feels practically intravenous. Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine. Often, he insinuates himself into a private home where the meal is even better. He is a lively dining companion: a lusty eater and a quicksilver conversationalist. “He’s got that incredibly beautiful style when he talks that ranges from erudite to brilliantly slangy,” his friend Nigella Lawson observed. Bourdain is a font of unvarnished opinion, but he also listens intently, and the word he uses perhaps more than any other is “interesting,” which he pronounces with four syllables and only one “t”: in-ner-ess-ting.

Before becoming famous, Bourdain spent more than two decades as a professional cook. In 2000, while working as the executive chef at Les Halles, a boisterous brasserie on Park Avenue South, he published a ribald memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.” It became a best-seller, heralding a new national fascination with the grubby secrets and “Upstairs Downstairs” drama of the hospitality industry. Bourdain, having established himself as a brash truth-teller, got into public spats with more famous figures; he once laid into Alice Waters for her pious hatred of junk food, saying that she reminded him of the Khmer Rouge. People who do not watch Bourdain’s show still tend to think of him as a savagely honest loudmouthed New York chef. But over the years he has transformed himself into a well-heeled nomad who wanders the planet meeting fascinating people and eating delicious food. He freely admits that his career is, for many people, a fantasy profession. A few years ago, in the voice-over to a sun-dappled episode in Sardinia, he asked, “What do you do after your dreams come true?” Bourdain would be easy to hate, in other words, if he weren’t so easy to like. “For a long time, Tony thought he was going to have nothing,” his publisher, Dan Halpern, told me. “He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”

The White House had suggested the meeting in Vietnam. Of all the countries Bourdain has explored, it is perhaps his favorite; he has been there half a dozen times. He fell for Hanoi long before he actually travelled there, when he read Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” and the city has retained a thick atmosphere of colonial decay—dingy villas, lugubrious banyan trees, monsoon clouds, and afternoon cocktails—that Bourdain savors without apology. Several years ago, he seriously considered moving there.

Bourdain believes that the age of the fifteen-course tasting menu “is over.” He is an evangelist for street food, and Hanoi excels at open-air cooking. It can seem as if half the population were sitting around sidewalk cookfires, hunched over steaming bowls of phở. As a White House advance team planned the logistics for Obama’s visit, an advance team from Zero Point Zero, the company that produces the show, scoured the city for the perfect place to eat. They selected Bún chả Hương Liên, a narrow establishment across from a karaoke joint on a busy street in the Old Quarter. The restaurant’s specialty is bún chả: springy white noodles, smoky sausage, and charred pork belly served in a sweet and pungent broth.

At the appointed hour, Obama exited the Beast and walked into the restaurant behind a pair of Secret Service agents, who cleared a path for him, like linemen blocking for a running back. In a rear dining room on the second floor, Bourdain was waiting at a stainless-steel table, surrounded by other diners, who had been coached to ignore the cameras and Obama, and to focus on their bún chả. Like many restaurants in Vietnam, the facility was casual in the extreme: diners and servers alike swept discarded refuse onto the floor, and the tiles had acquired a grimy sheen that squeaked beneath your feet. Obama was wearing a white button-down, open at the collar, and he greeted Bourdain, took a seat on a plastic stool, and happily accepted a bottle of Vietnamese beer.

“How often do you get to sneak out for a beer?” Bourdain asked.

“I don’t get to sneak out, period,” Obama replied. He occasionally took the First Lady to a restaurant, he said, but “part of enjoying a restaurant is sitting with other patrons and enjoying the atmosphere, and too often we end up getting shunted into one of those private rooms.”

As a young waitress in a gray polo shirt set down bowls of broth, a plate of greens, and a platter of shuddering noodles, Bourdain fished chopsticks from a plastic container on the table. Obama, surveying the constituent parts of the meal, evinced trepidation. He said, “All right, you’re gonna have to—”

“I’ll walk you through it,” Bourdain assured him, advising him to grab a clump of noodles with chopsticks and dunk them into the broth.

“I’m just gonna do what you do,” Obama said.

“Dip and stir,” Bourdain counselled. “And get ready for the awesomeness.”

Eying a large sausage that was floating in the broth, Obama asked, “Is it generally appropriate to just pop one of these whole suckers in your mouth, or do you think you should be a little more—”

“Slurping is totally acceptable in this part of the world,” Bourdain declared.

Obama took a bite and let out a low murmur. “That’s good stuff” he said, and the two of them—lanky, conspicuously cool guys in late middle age—slurped away as three cameras, which Bourdain had once likened to “drunken hummingbirds,” hovered around them. Noting the unaffected rusticity of the scene, Obama was reminded of a memorable meal that he had eaten as a child, in the mountains outside Jakarta. “You’d have these roadside restaurants overlooking the tea fields,” he recalled. “There’d be a river running through the restaurant itself, and there’d be these fish, these carp, that would be running through. You’d pick the fish. They’d grab it for you and fry it up, and the skin would be real crispy. They just served it with a bed of rice.” Obama was singing Bourdain’s song: earthy, fresh, free of pretense. “It was the simplest meal possible, and nothing tasted so good.”

But the world is getting smaller, Obama said. “The surprises, the serendipity of travel, where you see something and it’s off the beaten track, there aren’t that many places like that left.” He added, wistfully, “I don’t know if that place will still be there when my daughters are ready to travel. But I hope it is.” The next day, Bourdain posted a photograph of the meeting online. “Total cost of Bun cha dinner with the President: $6.00,” he tweeted. “I picked up the check.” [...]

As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.” [...]

In 1998, he answered an ad in the Times and got the executive-chef job at Les Halles. It was an ideal fit for Bourdain: an unpretentious brasserie with its own butcher, who worked next to the bar, behind a counter stacked with steak, veal, and sausages. “Kitchen Confidential,” which was excerpted in this magazine, was inspired by “Down and Out in Paris and London,” in which George Orwell describes chefs as “the most workmanlike class, and the least servile.” Karen Rinaldi, the editor who acquired the book, for Bloomsbury, told me that she underestimated the impact it would have. “It was a flyer,” she said—the profane musings of a guy who broiled steaks for a living. “But a lot of the books that end up shifting the culture are flyers.”

“Kitchen Confidential” was filled with admonitions: Bourdain assailed Sunday brunch (“a dumping ground for the odd bits left over from Friday and Saturday”) and advised against ordering fish on Mondays, because it is typically “four to five days old.” The book was marketed as a dispatch from the scullery, the type of tell-all that might be more interesting to the naïve restaurant-goer than to the battle-seasoned cook. (“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms,” Bourdain warned. “They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinal or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like.”) But, for Bourdain, the most important audience was his peers. The final line of the acknowledgments page was “Cooks rule,” and he hoped, desperately, that other professionals would see the book in the spirit he had intended, and pass gravy-stained copies around the kitchen.

Bourdain did not quit his job at Les Halles when the book became a success. “I was careful to modulate my hopes, because I lived in a business where everybody was a writer or an actor,” he recalls. For decades, he’d seen colleagues come into work crowing about their latest callback, only to see their grand designs amount to nothing. “So at no point was it ‘So long, suckers.’ ” His confederates at Les Halles were amused, if mystified, by his blossoming career as a writer, and the owners were accommodating about the book tour. When Bourdain started travelling to promote the book, something curious happened. He’d amble into a restaurant alone and order a drink at the bar. Out of nowhere, a plate of amuse-bouches would appear, compliments of the house. It marked an affirmation for Bourdain: chefs were reading the book, and they liked it. But it also signified a profound inversion. He had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: William Mebane
[ed. I was reading another article in the New Yorker and got sidetracked. Great read. Still miss not having him in this world. And Obama in the presidency.]