Tag: food

Quantifying Hangry

So I nicked a sensor from a friend and monitored my blood sugar levels continuously for the last 2 weeks. This is the spring-loaded spike that stayed in me for the 2-week period, feeding data to a cell phone app. I ran some experiments, like eating Stevia packets on an empty stomach, and looked for patterns (graphs below). Here is what I learned

1) Liquid sugar is the worst. I have heard the same conclusion from everyone I know who has monitored themselves. High-end fresh-pressed juice and Chic-Fil-A’s frosted lemonade spiked my blood sugar like nothing else… super fast and super high relative to any food.

i wish more people did these kinds of experiments, we’d learn so much so quickly about our metabolisms. i did the same for 2 weeks as part of a viome study, but they were lame and only shared the data as pdf, not raw.

Ghost Kitchens

how ghost kitchens might evolve

For restaurants that have already established themselves in the physical world, ghost kitchens can be a way to adapt to shifting trends. Frjtz, a San Francisco restaurant beloved for its Belgian-style fries, closed its brick-and-mortar location in the Mission in 2019, after 20 years in business, and now operates—delivery only—via CloudKitchens. Delivery-only kitchens can also work as a sort of triage effort for restaurants that are doing well. Recently, the owners of DOSA, a 15-year-old upscale Indian restaurant with locations in Oakland and San Francisco, told Eater they planned to move to a virtual model: a central commissary kitchen will supply food to a network of 20 delivery-only kitchens, where it can be reheated and delivered. In recent years, Souvla, a rabidly popular chain of fast-casual Greek restaurants in San Francisco, saw 30% of its business come from delivery. The restaurant group recently converted its commissary kitchen in SoMa into a “delivery-only restaurant,” intended to accommodate large orders and catering.

2022-04-30:

Consolidating kitchens has yet another side benefit: aside from increasing the sample size of restaurants and thus lowering the variance, it has higher employee utilization and less food waste. Food and labor costs are both 33% of restaurant operating costs, and the average profit margin from restaurants is 3-5%; a 3-point improvement in either food waste or labor waste adds 1 point of net margin, and getting both of those makes a restaurant 40% more profitable. Low-margin businesses are tough, but if there’s a way to improve them it creates a lot of operating leverage.

Destroy agriculture

After 12 ka of feeding humankind, all farming except fruit and veg production is likely to be replaced by ferming, brewing microbes through precision fermentation. Dairy farming in the United States will be “all but bankrupt by 2030”. The American beef industry’s revenues will fall by 90% by 2035.

2022-06-02:

Formo is trying to do the same for cheese. They use genetically modified microorganisms to produce milk protein rather than alcohol. They then “brew” them in a bath of nutrients and plant-based feed, and after it has finished, they strain out the milk proteins.

By combining these proteins with water, plant-based fats and carbs, and a pinch of salt, they have created a completely lab-grown milk. This can be processed just like cow’s milk to make all sorts of cheeses. Formo says its process also uses orders of magnitude less land and produces far fewer CO2 emissions than dairy farming. What’s more, their cheese tastes like normal cheese and has near identical nutritional value.

Routine meals

Variety doesn’t really matter to me. I would be perfectly happy to eat the same Caesar salad or peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich every day. 1 survey estimated that 17% of British people had eaten the same lunch every day for 2 years; another indicated that 33% of Brits ate the same lunch daily. But it’s hard to say for sure how common this really is, since these surveys tend to have been conducted by food purveyors, who might be inclined to exaggerate the ruts that diners are stuck in.

Awkward Scone

At the airy and plant-filled, 16-seat cafe, See makes 3 kinds of breakfast burritos. 1 with chorizo, New Mexican red chile, white cheddar, scrambled eggs, and hash browns; another with all the same ingredients except for New Mexican green chile and bacon; and a third, vegan option with refried Navajo pinto beans, chipotle salsa, New Mexican green chile, and hash browns.

Best NYC Restaurants

As the population of New York continues to diversify, the city will only become a happier place when there’s a deeper bench of honest, uncompromising, and non-exorbitant places to eat. Take Llama San. It serves as proof that an excellent Peruvian-Japanese restaurant can book up just as far out as a classical fine dining temple. Or consider Haenyeo, a packed French-Korean spot that’s packed on any given night thanks to a Mexican-Korean rice cake fundido. And for those craving the meaty, milky cuisine of Italy’s Emilia-Romagna, Rezdora is happy to take your name for an 23:30 seating.