Graeme Wood’s review touches on both of Cowen’s picks, American pit barbeque and Pakistani food in the UK:
It is a style of food that, like a Wi-Fi signal, fast loses its potency away from its home base. “Eat barbecue in towns of less than 50,000 people,” he suggests; the brisket Valhalla known as Smitty’s Market in Lockhart, Texas, accordingly wins the unrestrained praise it deserves. For the best barbecue, look for restaurants that open in the morning and have real pits with stacks of burning wood, since nothing signals commitment better than a willingness to spend nine hours overnight cooking meat next to a pit of fire. These labor-intensive operations, Mr. Cowen writes, show “just how uneconomical true barbecue art can be”—which suggests that if you want to eat like an economist, you should find a chef who doesn’t cook like one.
And in the UK:
For authenticity, he awards points to Pakistani restaurants that feature pictures of Mecca, since they’re more likely to cater to Pakistani clientele. (“The more aggressively religious the décor, the better it will be for the food.”) Find restaurants where diners are “screaming at each other” or “pursuing blood feuds,” he says—indications that people feel comfortable there and return frequently with their familiars.
You can read about Cowen’s recent experiment shopping in a Chinese grocery for a month here. For some unknown reason, he didn’t mention Spotted Dick and Steak and Kidney pudding. On this whole subject, Orwell remains indispensable:
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. The Great War, for instance, could never have happened if tinned food had not been invented.
And the history of the past four hundred years in England would have been immensely different if it had not been for the introduction of root-crops and various other vegetables at the end of the Middle Ages, and a little later the introduction of non- alcoholic drinks (tea, coffee, cocoa) and also of distilled liquors to which the beer-drinking English were not accustomed. Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners. The Emperor Charles V is said to have erected a statue to the inventor of bloaters, but that is the only case I can think of at the moment.
Follow Tyler Cowen‘s work at Marginal Revolution and buy his new book, An Economist Gets Lunch. Earlier videos of Cowen here, here and here. Video archive here.
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