Tyler Cowen Discusses "An Economist Gets Lunch"

Hello everyone. I'm Tyler. Thank you all for coming to the event. I was asked if I would be speaking about the Eurozone tonight. I can predict that food will become cheaper. In some of those countries. But that's all I have to say about the Eurozone for the time being. I'd like to talk just a little bit about my book, "An Economist Gets Lunch." And this is really a book inspired by having lived here in Northern Virginia and also near Maryland and Washington, D.C. In a broad sense, it's a book about this area. I'm very much an optimist about food. When I look at the food world, What I see is a kind of bundling of food and complaining. People love to complain about food. So you look at most books on food, like "Fast Food Nation," or you look at Morgan Spurlock, there's no end of things that people complain about with food. So it might be genetically modified organisms, if you're reading Mark Bittman. It might be that too many people are eating too much food. It might be fast food. Or people might be complaining that we actually transport in food from other places, believe it or not. So these are the people I call the food snobs. And the purpose of "An Economist Gets Lunch" is to put forward a different vision, a more optimistic vision, a more capitalistic vision, I would say, but most of all, a vision rooted in food as being a popular art, a commercial art, something competitive, a vision that individual consumers are often the source of good innovation, uh, not just government, and, uh, really trying to unbundle, uh, food and complaining. I think food is something we should celebrate, and commercial food is arguably mankind's single most important invention. If you think, even at the very beginning of the 20th century, Most Americans basically lived on farms. Today, what is it, you know, 2% of the labor force works on farms. Because of food productivity, we have basically everything else that we have in modern life. So this is to be celebrated. Genetically modified organisms, there's very strong evidence they're just flat out a good thing. There's not serious evidence that they've caused significant problems— health, environmental, or otherwise. If anything, they've improved the environment. Uh, the data seem to indicate that the so-called obesity epidemic has peaked. And besides, the people least likely to be obese typically are foodies and the well-educated. So the way to attack, uh, that problem, I would say, is by educating people about food, not trying to control their behavior. There's a lot of evidence that transporting food does not take up much energy. I do think there's a serious case for, in some way, using your private food life to improve the environment. But what the data indicate, by far the most effective thing to do is simply eat less meat. You don't have to become a vegetarian, just eat a bit less meat. That will have more positive impact than any other food decision you can make. Also, if you care about climate change, just eat less meat. Cows burp and fart. The energy consumed by, like, bringing in grapes from Chile on a boat, it's very small. It can be more environmentally efficient than having a local farmer get in his pickup truck. There's some things when you fly them in, it's inefficient, but overall, distance is not the enemy of a sound environment. Distance is international trade. It lowers costs. For the most part, it lowers the burden on the environment. Now, part of the book also is about how to find good food. It's a how-to guide. It's not mainly a policy book. And I think there are some fairly simple principles. You need to learn a bit how to apply them. But they guarantee, I think, that even if you're not an actual food expert, if you apply the principles, uh, you can eat much better meals. Furthermore, I do not think that on average, more expensive food is better food. It can be, sometimes it is, and there is a lot of very bad cheap food in the form of fast food, but note, even fast food's gotten a lot better in the last 5 years. Improvements in fast food are the biggest food sector trend right now, and that will continue. But anyway, just a few of the ways I think about food. Our first issue is, you know, how do you get to it? You really should be looking for places that are hard to get to. If it's too easy to get to, something is wrong. Let's say you're walking down the main aisle of a mall, or you're walking down Fifth Avenue in New York, or Broadway. That food is easy to get to. It's usually like good enough. It may not be terrible. It's got to serve a lot of people. But they're paying a high rent, they've got to do high turnover. It's not really that specialized. What you want are things that are weird or esoteric or small number of dishes or for a small number of customers. And those are places that are hard to get to. So if you find when you go out to eat you keep on getting lost, this means you're on the right track. The question I'm emailed the most often, I despair when I get it, people ask me, "I'm looking for somewhere really good to eat right by a metro stop." This is now more possible than it used to be, but basically being right near a metro stop is a bad sign. It's changing actually in Clarendon. There are some better places, but still, best places, the best bargains are hard to get to. Here's another way to think about food. We're in the United States. It's a big country. We're great at long-distance, large-scale logistics, right? We're the country of Walmart. A lot of foodies think that's bad news, but I say use it to your advantage. We're also a nation of immigrants. We're a nation of talent. So if you're looking for a dish that is based on, like, the perfect raw ingredient— like, you go to Italy, they serve you a plate. There's a tomato, there's some olive oil. Like, that's it. It's awesome. It's wonderful, but you're in the wrong country for that. If you can get that here, if it's going to be good, it probably costs a lot of money. Fancy chef, flown it in, whatever. The American genius in food is combining ingredients in creative ways, often done by immigrants. That's what this country is. Those are our strengths in every other area. Like, think about Google. Google's a great company. It's like immigrants combining mathematical ideas in new ways. We're good at that. We're good at that when it comes to food. So go to a Bolivian restaurant. Don't order the plain steak. That'll be like, okay. Order the steak with the green chilies, the onions, the tomatoes, the green sauce on top, the rice, potato. Mix it all together.— and then it's great. Very simple rule: do not order dishes which rely on ingredients' quality, order dishes which rely on human creativity. Key question, maybe the most important question— I don't even like to talk anymore like, "What are the good restaurants?" when I can avoid it. It's really a question like, "How do you get the good dishes?" Most ethnic restaurants have some really good dishes, And most dishes in ethnic restaurants, including my favorites, maybe two-thirds of them are just average or mediocre. So there's just an art to ordering. Now, if you know what are the best dishes, or you could check my food guide, you know, great. But what if you don't know? So much of eating out well is simply learning how to communicate with other human beings. You're in an ethnic restaurant. To be perfectly blunt, especially if you look American, American in the sense of what they think of as American. They don't trust you. You come in, they think you're a fool. They think you're a fool because on average, you are a fool. So what you need to do is establish a bond of trust. You need to tell them, "Bring me your best dishes," and to say it in a way where you are credible. You need to trust them, and you need to get them to trust you. It's like a two-way sales job. And when you view it in those terms, you're establishing your credibility, showing them that you trust them. They will bring you the best dishes, and your meal will be many times better. And that's a more important point than any knowledge of food you might learn by reading books or talking to food critics. How can you establish trust with your waiter or owner or chef and get them to stop thinking of you as a fool. Now, if you're Chinese, you walk into a Sichuan restaurant, you know, it might be pretty easy, especially if you speak Chinese. But again, if you look like I do, you always have to reestablish credibility. And just learn how to do that. That's like number one food tip. It works. Here's another tip I give. Especially for more expensive places, places in Washington, places in hip neighborhoods. I would say the restaurant cycle has been speeded up. So it used to be a place would open, it would build for years, it would be good for years. There was word of mouth. It all happened somewhat slowly. Now there's the food bloggers. Imagine those people. There's the internet. There's Yelp. There's Twitter. So a new place opens up. It's geared to make a big splash right away. Everything is about publicity. Typically, these places, the first 6 months, they're really pretty good. Sometimes they're great, excellent, original, unique, whatever. The chef owns 7 restaurants and he's there, or she's there, for the first 6 months. So you've got to— you go to a new restaurant, you like it, you say, "Wow, this is good." You've got to ask yourself, "Are these people part of the cycle?" 80% chance is that they are. So if you really like it, I would say go a lot those first 6 months. Then once the place is established, it's a social scene, it starts attracting beautiful women, well-off men, whatever, you've just got to cut bait and stop going. Kiss it goodbye. Don't look back. You've got to be somewhat brutal and disloyal because it probably isn't good anymore. It's still probably like not bad, but it's somewhat expensive. It's not the way you remember it. You keep on going back. You're hoping. You tell people. You bring them. You're like, "Gee, it was better last time." It's like, no. Be brutal. 6 months. Speed up your enjoyment. Cut it loose. Move on to the next one. It's not the case for ethnic restaurants. If they're good, they stay good for years. Trendy places, the quality cycle is totally accelerated. How to use the internet? Places like Yelp, they're great, other sources. But don't look at the average of stars.

No.

That's the average. Who wants the average assessment? If you went for the average assessment, where would you eat every meal? I think it would be McDonald's, right? McDonald's Big Mac. Here's what you do on Yelp. You look at the positive reviews. Are they long, detailed, and convincing? If they are, it's a good place. And forget all the people who gave it 1 star because, like, the food was too spicy, or 1 star because I wanted Mexican food and they didn't serve margaritas, or 2 stars because they'd never had mole before. Like, forget them. Just look at the quality of the good reviews. How good are they? That will do the trick. You know, those are just some of my basic tips for finding good food. They're all based in economic logic. So I view, like, the food writing I do, the economics writing I do, they're more or less the same thing, even though they inhabit, from the point of view of the world, two totally separate universes. But the logic of food is the logic of economics, and vice versa. Let me say just a little bit about some of my favorite places in particular around here. I take it most of you live not too far from here. And I'll even mention a place or two near metro stops. But if you're like wondering, like, where should I eat now? Like, you know, this Cowen guy, can he get totally specific? Best meal I've had lately is in a new Bangladeshi restaurant. It's called Gharir Kabar. These are all on my food blog, by the way, tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com. But that's 5151 Lee Avenue. I went there once like 3 months ago, 4 months ago. I walked in the door, they look at me like I'm insane. Like, "You want food?" It was like the Monty Python cheese shop skit. There was no menu. The chef was back in Bangladesh, some kind of family problem. Like with great persuasion on my part, it wasn't a question like, "What's your best dish?" It's like, "Are you willing to cook me anything?" Finally, they cooked a biryani, best biryani I've ever had in the US. But that was all they could do. I went back this last weekend. We went in a group of 4, did the old song and dance. We trust you, you must trust us. Please bring us your best things. We had like an 8-course meal, $30 a head. Every course was incredible. We loved it. I'm dying to go back. Every course was original. There's not that much Bangladeshi food around here. It wasn't just, you know, repeating Indian dishes. Great place. That's my number one pick right now. Another place, like really right around here and really right by a metro stop, but they have a hidden menu. It's called Hunan Delight. You get out of Boston Metro, it's right across the street, like right across, like 20-second walk. It looks terrible. It does everything wrong. It has every mark of a bad American Chinese restaurant. And it is a bad American Chinese restaurant. But if you go in and ask for the secret menu, the Manchurian menu, and then even on the Manchurian menu there are secret dishes not on the Manchurian menu. That is a great meal. And you need to go in a group, get a bunch of things. Just ask them, like, "What should I get here?" Let them take care of you. It's a great place. Chinese food buffet, all that's mediocre. Don't let it scare you off. If you can't get the secret menu somehow, just, like, walk out and leave. It's interesting, this escalation of the secret menus. Another favorite place of mine, it's called Bangkok Golden. It's a Thai restaurant at Seven Corners. Like, the Thai food on a scale of 1 to 10, maybe it's 5.5. I mean, it's not bad. I think it's good, maybe above average. But their best food is Laotian, tremendous Laotian restaurant and really cheap. So if you go there— well, at first it was a secret menu and you had to know to ask. 90% of the people got the Thai food. So people who knew got Laotian. Over time, more people knew Laotian food. The word spread. Now there's a double secret menu. There's a secret menu in Laotian, which is not really a secret anymore. And there's an extra double secret menu written only in Laotian. You need to ask for that menu. They don't want to bring it to you. Maybe there are Laotians in the audience, but there probably aren't too many. So they look at most of us and they think, "You don't read Laotian." You must insist. Menu in Laotian. And then they bring it to you and just say to them, "I want these." Make them bring you those dishes. And they will laugh and they'll think you're silly. You must hold your ground. That's one of the best places. The, like, Middle East secret menu is still great. Thai food, okay. Middling secret menu, great. Super double secret menu, very great. I recommend there. In DC, more expensive, but Little Ciro's, one of the best places in North America. It's fixed price, they don't take reservations, you have to wait in line, but it's absolutely tremendous. It's better than any other expensive restaurant in town. It's just one of the best places to eat right now in this whole side of the world. So go now before— I don't know what they'll do with it, but it can't last forever. You get many courses for what is kind of a fancy restaurant, not a lot of money. Around here, what's new? There's a new place just blocks from here. It's called Rus'Uz. What kind of appealing name is that? Rus'Uz food. But it's R-U-S dash U-Z, which is still like wacky. But you hear a wacky name and you think name is ugly. Maybe the food is good. So, Russ-ooze is Russian food and Uzbekistan food. So, apply the logic of economics. Which is the appeal to, like, the masses? Well, in relative terms in this country, it's like the Russians who are the masses, right? It's the Uzbekis who are harder to find. So, of course, that means the Uzbeki dishes are better. Just get the Uzbeki dishes. You'll see these Russian dishes on the menu. The familiar stuff, you know, the dumplings, the borscht, whatever. It's okay. I mean, it's fine, but don't go there for that. Hold your ground. Get the Uzbeki stuff like the noodles, the lamb, whatever, the pasta. It's excellent. Only Uzbekistan restaurant around here, right by a metro, a few blocks from where we speak. If you're into gas stations, and I bet, you know, most of us are if you drive a car, but in Maryland, R&R Taqueria. Best Mexican food around by a long mile. It is served out of a gas station. It's 12 miles up Route 95. It's worth the trip. That's great. It's like our one real Mexican place. There's a Vietnamese cluster in Needham Center. Most of you probably know that. Just go there, like, make some kind of mistake. Go to the little places in the corridors. Those little places, like, they don't have names. They don't really have menus. There are like glass and 3 tables. Go to those, throw yourself on their mercy. Like, they'll have 5 dishes and 3 of them you won't like, but their best dish is really good. Find out what's their best dish, get that. There's an Ethiopian cluster in West Alexandria on South George Mason Drive, not too far from here. All those places are great. My favorites are EO Sports Bar, again a great name. When I heard that name, I thought this place must be great. When Americans want to eat Ethiopian food, what kind of name are they looking for? Like Red Sea, Queen of Sheba. You know, fine, those are not bad restaurants. But when it's EO Sports Bar, you know it's really for Ethiopians. Like names you can't pronounce, names in tonal languages, names which indicate you'd never want to go there for ethnic food. Basically, that's a green light. Every Sunday on Route 50, a bit west of here, there's a few Bolivian food trucks. I'm a huge fan of food trucks. D.C. is trying to basically regulate them out of existence. I hope you all lend your support to the cause to keep those food trucks going. Virginia doesn't have as many food trucks. I guess Arlington does, but Fairfax, we're like not up to food trucks. I guess we're too unzoned in a way. There's so much convenient food and lower density. We don't have food trucks, but on Route 50 they do. There's a great Bolivian place in Arlington, La Ciborita. Wonderful late-night hangout, lots of fun. My favorite Chinese place is in Maryland, Sichuan Jin River, Mala Tang, right around here. It's right, it's right behind GMU. Great Sichuan food. You can walk there. Elephant Jumps for Thai is in Merrifield. And really a lot of good places. We live in a golden age of Northern Virginia, Maryland dining. 10 years ago Maryland was better. Now Virginia's pulled away with the lead. It's not even close. Sorry if I'm offending anyone here, but it's true. We have now better for almost everything. Not Caribbean, not always Indian, but most everything else. There's a new one, New Orleans Place, like Cajun Place. You know, I saw the people here, One More Page. It's a great bookstore. I just discovered it lately. I was astonished how good it is, and I hadn't known about it. It's off of Route 29, which is like food mecca. Route 29's everything great about Virginia. It's a total dump. Every site on Route 29 is ugly. When Route 29 becomes nice, it is time to leave this area. Because we will be boring. So like Clarendon has sort of priced out Vietnamese, priced out some of the lower-income Latinos, but Clarendon is still diverse, still interesting, still has great food, great. But Route 29, it's like the bastion of diversity. And just like track that road. Every year Route 29, parts get better, parts get worse, but when you see it being gentrified, run the other way.. But there's this place, they have New Orleans dishes and, you know, the red— the crawfish which they boil. And right next to that is One More Page. That makes for a great combined trip. So go there if you have the chance. And you can eat decent New Orleans food. But it's a great bookstore. Anyway, I'm about out of time. We have time for some questions. But those are just my basic points about, you know, food, capitalism, markets. We live in a great world. It has some problems. The biggest problem actually is how are we going to grow more food for poor people and get the price down? That's a real problem, not for like the people in this room, but for the world as a whole, for Africa, for South Asia, for other poorer parts. We need to get agricultural productivity up. We don't need nearly as much people complaining about, you know, individuals in the U.S. somehow doing this or doing that. In a way which is maybe found to be unaesthetic. The real food problem is growing more, getting it cheaper. But if you live around here, you know, food's great, and those are just some of my core tips on how to find it. Anyway, thank you all for coming. Questions? Someone will come around with the mic. Yes. There's two of you next to each other, and if you go in order, we can economize on the mic.

Thank you.

The location you're talking about for the crawfish is called Chasin' Tails? Correct.

At, uh, on 29th?

But my question is, uh, what's your position on farm subsidies? My position on farm subsidies is very simple. There should not be any. We should abolish every dollar of them tomorrow. They do harm. Not phase them out, just get rid of them. They're counterproductive. They make food cost more. You know, there's a boom in commodity prices. If there was ever a time when farmers didn't need them, it's now. It costs taxpayers money, takes funds away from higher priorities. No good reason to do it. Behind you there was a question. Yes. Your tip was to establish trust with these ethnic restaurants.

What are some of the ways that you establish trust?

Depends, you know, where exactly you are, but basically for me, all of them mistrust me. When I go back, they know me, then it's easy. But to name something from their country. Go a little prepared. I don't mean the capital city, but if you go to a Bolivian place, say something about Cochabamba. Or just show some knowledge of something. You go to a Sichuan place, say, "I want the food the way you cook it in Chengdu." And if you can master the tones— I can't, you know— so much the better. Just try small things. They'll mostly work. If you see other patrons there eating the good stuff, you can point and say, "Serve me like "you serve them," or "Serve me like you would cook for yourself," one thing I'll note is that if you're really persistent, it's actually the case that 85% of the Chinese restaurants in America are great, even though it seems like only a few are good. But if you demand to personally speak to the chef, and you convince him you want like a real Mapo tofu, which doesn't really require good ingredients, and say, "Cook it for me like you cook it for you," "Cook it for me the way the staff eats it." Even like these horrible American-Chinese gloopy, sweet, salty, sugary, awful, cringe-inducing places. If you can whack sense into them, for you, for that one dish, they'll be like at least a B+ Chinese restaurant doing Mapo tofu. And almost any Thai place you can talk into a better meal. Then there's other cuisines, like you look at something like Bolivian. The genius of Bolivian cuisine is they haven't yet figured out how to sell out to a mass market. Same with a lot of Vietnamese. Like 20 years ago, people thought, "Oh, Vietnamese food is becoming popular. It's coming into Georgetown," whatever. Fortunately, that didn't happen. So there's like a sellout version of American Chinese food. We're developing a sellout version of Thai food, which is too sweet and a lot of gloopy, like Pad Thai. And some restaurants, Thai restaurants, you need to talk them out of that. But a lot of cuisines, they're so advanced, they haven't even figured out yet how to sell out. And you do that, you go to those places, then it's easy. You don't really have to talk them out of anything. Just order.

Yes.

So regarding these theories like that beautiful people in a restaurant are negatively correlated with the quality. Seems like there's not much empirical evidence on that. Do you think it's possible to get empirical evidence on that given how subjective things are? And should that be done?

The study would cost a lot of money, but I will volunteer for it. Here's the way to think about it. Beautiful women in a restaurant, they actually are correlated with quality of the food overall because it means you have higher income diners on average. But in terms of like the price-quality gradient, how much quality do you get for what you pay, beautiful women in a restaurant are typically trendy places where the food is like pretty good but it's really expensive. And not really extraordinary. And those places are usually best before the beautiful women or men started to come. You know, can I prove that statistically? No. Do I know it's true?

Yes.

But you've got to think about the trade-off in terms of price-quality gradient. So if you're a billionaire and you just want, like, pretty good food for $70, by all means, look for the beautiful women. And there'll be other advantages too. But you can do that for $70, and I can go my Bolivian route for $12. And actually, I'll probably prefer my meal to yours. Sure. Yeah, does your approach change at all when you go abroad? Do you have any tips for that when you're in another country, for example? My book covers a lot of other different countries. And these things vary by country. I mean, of course, there are some countries where you cannot avoid restaurants with beautiful women, right? And what do you do then? So it depends where you are, but the notion that you should go to places which are hard to get to, that's true virtually everywhere. Knowing how to ask is true virtually everywhere. If you're somewhere where you're totally stumped, what you want to do is look to ask a male between the ages of 30 and 50 years old who has a job which requires him to work with a lot of transportation. This would include cab drivers, but also firemen, textbook salesmen, all kinds of jobs. Sort of middle-aged men, not too young, not too old. They go around a lot. Find one of them and ask them. Don't ask concierge. It's all corrupt. Or they don't know. But find like a 38-year-old male who gets around a lot and ask that person where to eat. In most countries, that's your best bet. You know, if Yelp can help you out, fine, if you interpret the reviews correctly. So it depends where you are. You know, if you're in somewhere like Italy, I would just say, you know, look for trattorias. It's hard to go wrong. Worst food in Italy, it's in Rome, Florence, and Venice. Which can be pretty dismal. Everywhere else is awesome. You hardly even have to try. Food stalls are usually great. I love Singapore, love India to eat. I love roadside food in Mexico. Uh, it's a lot of good stuff out there. I'd say most countries are actually easier than the US. US is like big and complicated and things are far apart. It's harder to find really good food here than in most countries on this planet. Yes, up front.

I've read a couple articles about GMOs being responsible for the bee kill-off. Are you familiar with that, or do you have any information on it?

There's no evidence that it's actually true. The bee kill-off is somewhat mysterious. You know, the evidence on GMOs is they have increased yields. They've made it possible in some cases that, uh, crops don't have to be doused with as much stuff. They've lowered the price of food. Uh, the bee kill-off is a mystery, but there's not a serious research paper I'm aware of that ties it to GMOs. You find a lot of false claims about GMOs in the literature. It's an area where there's a great deal of pseudoscience. But if you read something like the National Academy of Sciences report on GMOs, It just says flat out, GMOs have had some benefits, they haven't created environmental problems. That's the state of science as we know it. Yes, also up front.

Do you have any advice as to how to eat at a food truck and how to get good food from a food truck? I feel like you spend 2 more dollars than at a restaurant to pretend like you're in Portland and I haven't had a really good— about the food truck experience?

You know, I live in Fairfax, which is even further west than Arlington. So what food trucks are most useful for is in urban areas where you have large numbers of employees, government-run cafeterias, and impossible restrictions on zoning. Now, what city might that be? That's D.C. I don't really track food trucks in D.C. Most of my meals I eat in Virginia or Maryland. I think food in the suburbs is a lot better. So actually, I'm much more of an expert on restaurants than I am on food trucks. But I think the way to find the best food trucks is to use the internet. Use Twitter, use Yelp, see what people say about food trucks, and try. But I actually, myself, I don't need to eat at them very much because I'm ensconced out there in Fairfax, lower density. I have to drive east to Arlington, really, to even see a food truck. So I'm living in a somewhat different world. So, uh, on that, try the internet would be my main advice. And look for lines, of course. Uh, yes?

I was just wondering what your experience is about asking a concierge at a hotel for recommendations. I've experienced some where it seems like they kind of get paid off and they're just going to a place or recommending places that aren't necessarily that great, but maybe a restaurant that, you know, might be trendy. I was just wondering if that's something you ever do, or do you just recommend going out on your own?

Go out on your own. Never ever trust the concierge. First, they might be corrupt, as you mentioned. But also, you know, it's like the people in the restaurant. He doesn't or she doesn't trust you. And there's actually a fair degree of contempt. Because their job is for other people to give them a hard time with questions that are often— I don't want to call them stupid, but frustrating, or the people are never happy, or they want the impossible. So they're going to send you somewhere It's like maybe okay, but the tourist experience. So never ever do that. If there's a way you can get the concierge to actually trust you with extended dialogue, a lot of them do know a lot. And if you're sure you've reached that zone, then it can be great. But you've got to put in like time. You can't just say, "Hey, trust me. Tell me where to go." So avoid them. What do you need them for? No, get out on the street, look for someone to ask if you're really desperate, if you don't have a smartphone on you, whatever.

Yes. I gather from your blog that you like food very, very hot and putting your hands in putting yourself in the hands of a restaurant or the chef and so forth, of an ethnic restaurant can really yield some very hot food. How do you avoid that if you can't take it?

Well, I'm not actually that big an enthusiast of heat, although maybe I am, you know, by some of your standards. So if I go to a Thai restaurant, for me Thai food is the spiciest. Like you go to Thailand, they serve you some soup, it's like, uh-oh. You don't say anything. It's like putting a lit match to your tongue. And there's been plenty of food in Thailand that I just really can't eat, and I never asked for it spicy. And obviously, I don't look like I'm Thai. So if I go to a Thai restaurant here, and if they have 4 categories and the 4 is Thai spicy, I want level 3, which is pretty hot. So you could just say, like for Thai food, spicy, but not Thai spicy. And they'll get that. Like they all know the phrase Thai spicy. And then what about other cuisines? From my point of view, none of them are really that hot. Like some things in Laotian are a bit like Thai. They can be hot. I don't know. Do we have spicy food around here? Maybe in saying I don't see it, I'm betraying that I eat really spicy food, but I don't think I do. So you got to beware. It's often efficient to get your food spicier than you want it. Because if you tell them, "Not too spicy," maybe what you mean is like downgrade from a 9 to a 7. But what they hear is downgrade from a 5 to a 2. And they lose respect for you, they lose trust, and even maybe a bit of contempt reenters the equation. And even if you want 4, like, it may be worth eating 6. To get the meal you desire. So you've got to calibrate. If a place knows you, great. But Thai food is where that's really an issue. And like really hot Thai food, I mean, I don't like it either. It's too spicy for me. Oh, yes, way in the back.

Hi. So my wife and I, we like German food and beer. And recently, a friend of my wife's who lives in Munich invited us to come there for Oktoberfest this year. We were wondering, how do you eat well in a city when there's a tremendous number of outsiders who have kind of temporarily descended on the city, especially if you are one of the outsiders?

That's tough. Of course, this will sound odd, but you want to avoid the beer gardens when you go to Munich for Oktoberfest. They're not bad. You'll get like decent Wiener Schnitzel there and the like. But Germany is a great food country. It's very underrated. It has a lot of great French food, good ethnic foods of many different kinds, although not too much good Chinese food. German food has excellent vegetables, very good meats. And if you get like, you know, a Michelin guide, avoid the starred places. Just go to like a Michelin two-forker. Somewhere a little out of the way. You'll get a superb German meal, and the other Oktoberfest tourists probably are not going there. And you'll eat very well in Munich or, you know, almost anywhere else in Germany. I would say look for quality of vegetables in Germany. They'll be correlated with other good things. Get a little bit off the beaten track. Use the Michelin Guide, but not for the, like, fancy super expensive places. Just like those moderate two-forkers. Or get like Time Out Munich. Go to the newer places. They'll be very, very good. So, you know, the beer garden, you can go there later. The Wiener Schnitzel in the Munich beer garden, it's actually still not that bad. As mass food goes, you could do a lot worse. Yes, in the front. What has happened to all of the smoking out there? What has happened to New Orleans cooking after Katrina? There's a lot of good food in New Orleans still. I think where and how you find it is changing. There's a lot of like new bistros springing up outside of the French Quarter that are really quite good and not necessarily that famous. The old standby places, I think, are on average getting worse. I think it's still a vital scene. You just need to mix up how you used to find things. Again, look for places out of the way. Avoid the French Quarter. Garden District has a lot of wonderful food. If you have a car or can rent a car, it's like a 2-hour drive to what's maybe America's very best food of all, and that's Southwest Louisiana. Go to these little dump towns where they like scrawl on the blackboard. Look for places where they spell the name of what they're serving wrong. Sometimes it's just served out of a guy's house. Things like sausage. They'll just have one or two dishes. It's mind-blowingly good. It's like some of the best food in the whole US, even the whole world. It's super cheap. If you can get there, way better than New Orleans. It'll blow your mind. It's where a lot of the New Orleans stuff comes from.

Yes.

So if you look at how food has been made in the past 100 years, that's changed drastically. But what we're eating hasn't changed drastically. When you look at moving forward, I don't know if you've heard of Soylent. A man in California says that he's managed to like take the minerals that you need and make a powder and then you mix it with water and you can just eat all of your food that way. Do you see that in the future? Do you see almost unrecognizable food 50 years from now?

It's not in the future for me. Here's one of the things in the food world. I'm less crazy about this than a lot of other people, like molecular gastronomy. I think a lot of it doesn't taste that good. I know it's heresy to say it. A lot of it tastes good. But like not as good as Sichuan Jin River Dan Dan noodles, you know, up there in Rockville for $8. So, I think comfort food, the tried and true classic ethnic dishes, just like fat, is pretty good and it's not going to be beaten anytime soon. I think not within our lives. So the Soylent stuff, it's like a publicity stunt. I blogged that, I chuckled. A lot of people commented, but no one wrote me, "Where can I get it?" And you know, from a purely marketing point of view, I wouldn't have called it "soylent" either. So no, I think food will stay food. In a lot of ways, food has become more like food than it was 10 years ago. And the real innovation now is to have really good fast food done in a chained way, There's like now a new fast food chain version of kava, like the kava in Clarendon. And the fast food chain version, cheaper, quicker, it's now in Merrifield. I went there last week. It's pretty good. Stuff like that's going to get a lot better. And that, you know, like Chipotle, it's pretty earthy food. And that's what I think is making the comeback. I don't think our future is molecular gastronomy where you eat like some purple thing that you're told is derived from essence of flower. And it like makes a little sound and there's a puff of smoke and you have no idea what just happened to you. So that's my prediction. Earthy food is robust. Where are the mics? That gentleman? I think he's pretty close to you.

My wife and I spent 6 years in France 'cause we came back in 2007. But I've noticed a big difference in just the food culture. I mean, people really care about where the food comes from, what cows the meat came from or where the food was grown. I mean, and they just care a lot more than Americans do. I mean, they ask those questions. Of course, France, they're crazy about the terroir and there's some hypocrisy I mean, there are big combines in France as well as little farms, and they pay a heavy price to subsidize their little farms. But when I got back to the States, there was a noticeable difference. I mean, you can't get a decent strawberry, even at Whole Foods it's hard to get a decent strawberry or tomato, you know. And I'm puzzled by the evolution of food culture. It seems like it's hard to imagine America becoming as obsessed as the French by where something comes from or where your cow meat came from and talking about that in the store. I just don't see that kind of change. The food has gotten a lot better, I mean, a lot more interesting. But I was just curious what your observations were about that.

You know, I agree. I don't think we're ever gonna do the French model, other than like eating a lot of French fries. It doesn't fit us culturally. We have too much big agribusiness. It's too big a country. And so on. But if you go to a lot of other wonderful food countries, you know, you go to Singapore, you go to most of Asia, no one there talks about terroir, whether in French language or their own languages. They're obsessed with quality of what you eat, but they're not like, "Oh, what province did it come from? How did they massage the cow?" It's just like, "How good is this?" "this grandmother runs a food stall, she's awesome, here's their best dish." So, as food here continues to get better, I think we'll move much more in an Asian direction. The content of food, but I don't just mean the content, I mean how we think about food. Asian food is mostly served quite quickly, with exceptions, like there's the long Chinese banquet and all that. But there's tremendous quick food in just about every Asian country. And I think we will go that route rather than the French slow food, sit down, they like, you know, brought you the artichoke right from the field. Value of time is too high here.

When are we going to get a decent, you know, selection of strawberries here?

I mean, I just— Not soon, right? Netherlands does a wicked strawberry. So does France. We're far away from that. It's a shame. Like, I won't really eat a lot of stuff here because it just isn't any good. It doesn't taste like anything. What would it cost for us now to get better strawberries? I think we could get, like, French or Dutch quality strawberries at 2 to 3 times the current price. So you have to ask, how wealthy will we get before we, as some collective whole, say here in Arlington, are willing to pay that? It's not next year, but it's not 100 years from now. It'll happen, but it's a ways away. Ah, yes, that gentleman.

Hello, Ty—

um, Professor. Um, about, um, GMOs, uh, if— how should societies, if they believe that there may be a risk, they don't know, um, from the long-term consumption of genetic, of GMOs, but they don't know. How should societies properly assess that unknown risk, you know, given that the only way to truly understand the risk is maybe if you take the plunge and actually, you know, consume it over the long term? If a country believes that, or a society believes that, how do they properly assess that risk in deciding whether or not GMOs are right for them? Also, if you'll indulge me, I'm Chinese. My beautiful wife is Indian. If you had to give up one of those cuisines for the rest of your life, which one would it be?

Let me take those in reverse order. All cuisine is regional cuisine. So there is no Chinese food. There is no Indian food. I would give them both up. And have all the foods of the regions and be just as rich as before. But on GMOs and risk, most of the food we eat is in some way genetically modified. Like corn is not something which exists in nature. It was bred by basically Nahua farmers in central Mexico thousands of years ago, and they took a weed and they turned it into corn. So there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of genetic experimentation with food going back a long way. And the main effect is that it increases yields. The main environmental effects can be it may push out other crops. Presumably the food is more valuable. A few hundred million people have eaten GMOs in the U.S. now for over 20 years. There's just not evidence of any health problems. If you think about what GMOs do, it's just not that different. There's nothing in theory to lead us to believe it should be harmful to people. I mean, the simple point that like rice is rice is still basically true. You know, the real future of GMO rice is to fortify rice with vitamins like vitamin A and lower the rate of blindness, mostly in Asia. And this is starting to get underway. We'll see how far it goes. So I think the risks are on the side of not using GMOs. Uh, the natural state of man is to starve or to die at 30 or 40 and be in a Malthusian world. That's kind of the risk. So when you weigh that risk against the GMO risk, rather than thinking like GMO risk against a perfectly safe world, then I think you see the problem somewhat differently. Anyway, I think we're about out of time, but thank you all for your questions. I'll be here for book signing and the like, and I appreciate your coming, and thanks also to the Library.