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It is a truth universally acknowledged [at least outside the US] that American chocolate sucks. This observation serves as synechdoche for the general sense that Americans are philistines who are only interested in McDonalds and Budweiser. In the particular case of chocolate, however, the story is rather more interesting. The dominant chocolate in the US is Hersheys and for historical reasons Hersheys has a very distinct flavor:

Hershey process milk chocolate, invented by Milton S. Hershey, founder of The Hershey Company, can be produced more economically since it is less sensitive to the freshness of the milk. Although the process is still a trade secret, experts speculate that the milk is partially lipolyzed, producing butyric acid, which stabilizes the milk from further fermentation. This compound gives the product a particular sour, "tangy" taste, to which the American public has become accustomed, to the point that other manufacturers now simply add butyric acid to their milk chocolates.

As with beer (another oft-maligned American product which I'll get to in a minute), it's not like Americans don't know how to make chocolate that's good by non-US standards (exhibits A-G: Scharffen Berger [now owned by Hersheys, btw.], Guittard, Devries, Askinosie, Amano, Patric, Tcho), it's just a case of path dependence. Americans are used to a particular flavor, and as the passage above suggests, actively reject chocolate without that. Interestingly, I just got back from the UK, where I picked up a few bars of the legendary Cadbury Dairy Milk only to find it not at all as I remembered. Terence Spies suggests that this may be a problem in product handling but the above Wikipedia article suggests that they may have actually screwed with the formula, which, if true, is baffling.

I spent a lot of my time in the UK drinking and came away with a single observation: British beer is astonishingly bad, overly sweet, flat, thin, and almost utterly without hop flavor. I was mostly drinking local beers but I also tried Guinness and Bass, both of which I've had in the US, and while the Guinness was all right, the Bass seemed to differ from the US version in the same way as all the others. I attribute part of the difference here to the temperature (British beers are served far warmer) and lower level of carbonation due to cask conditioning, with the resulting lower level of carbonic acid. But the primary difference seems to be far less hops, both in terms of bittering and aroma; conversely my British companion informed me that they find American beers way too hoppy. (For the record, when I was in Germany and the Czech Republic, I found their beers perfectly fine). I don't have a complete theory for this, but I'm guessing it's another path dependence issue, in this case due to prohibition gutting the American alcohol market and leaving only a small number of breweries focusing on Czech pilsner style beers. This created a population bottleneck, and when the beer market in the US re-expanded with the American craft brew movement in the 1980s and 1990s it drifted in a totally different direction from that found in its ancestral population, one focusing on much higher levels of bitterness and hoppiness.

I don't intend to offer a defense of McDonalds, however.

 

Acknowledgement: This post produced with assistance from Terence Spies of Cacaolab, who originally told me about the Hershey process.

Apparently Coke is introducing a new 7.5 oz Coke "mini-can" and William Saletan thinks it's a bad idea or dishonest, or something:

These messages sound a lot like what tobacco companies said when they introduced light cigarettes. According to a 2001 U.S. government report, internal documents obtained from tobacco companies

reveal the industry's efforts to produce cigarettes that could be marketed as acceptable to health-conscious consumers. Ultimately, these low-tar/low-nicotine cigarettes were part of the industry's plan to maintain and expand its consumer base. ... [T]obacco companies set out to develop cigarette designs that markedly lowered the tar and nicotine yield results as measured by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) testing method. Yet, these cigarettes can be manipulated by the smoker to increase the intake of tar and nicotine. The use of these "decreased risk" cigarettes [has] not significantly decreased the disease risk. In fact, the use of these cigarettes may be partly responsible for the increase in lung cancer for longterm smokers who have switched to the low-tar/low-nicotine brands. Finally, switching to these cigarettes may provide smokers with a false sense of reduced risk, when the actual amount of tar and nicotine consumed may be the same as, or more than, the previously used higher yield brand.

Coca-Cola's promotional video for its mini cans delivers a similar pitch. It features Jan Tilley, a "registered dietitian" and consultant to beverage companies. "The new 90-calorie mini-can is a great way for people to enjoy the taste of Coca-Cola that they love, while still managing their calorie intake," says Tilley, smiling all the way:

The size of the packaging really reinforces moderation. ... Part of maintaining a healthy lifestyle is not feeling deprived. ... The new 90-calorie mini-can is a great way for people who like Coca-Cola to enjoy the taste with built-in portion control. A treat or a favorite food or beverage is a wonderful way to ensure that you're going to be able to practice a healthy lifestyle for life.

...

So you'll drink Coke mini for the same reason you already drink Coke: to sate your addiction. And if you don't get enough "sparkle" from the smaller can, no problem. The mini containers "will be sold in eight-packs," says the company. Just open a second 7.5-ounce can, and you'll get 20 percent more sparkle than you used to get from a 12-ounce hit.

You'll also get 20 percent more calories. According to the company's nutrition information page, an 8-ounce serving of Coca-Cola classic has 97 calories. That's roughly 145 calories in each 12-ounce can. At 90 calories per shot, the 7.5-ounce Coke mini can keeps pace with the original calorie rate, and the second mini can brings you to a sparkling 180 calories. But you'll feel better about yourself, because now you're practicing "portion control" and "a healthy lifestyle." Just like you felt better about smoking light cigarettes.

Saletan, of course, doesn't offer any actual argument, just snark, but the underlying argument you're supposed to infer presumably goes goes something like this:

1. Cigarettes are bad for you.
2. The tobacco companies introduced light cigarettes and suggested they were healthier.
3. Tobacco companies are really not very nice.
4. Coke isn't good for you.
5. Coke is introducing a smaller portion size and suggesting that it's healthier.
6. Coke is really bad just like the tobacco companies.

Of course, this form of argument is clearly bogus ("you know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler" [note: apparently this is a myth.]), and there are some pretty clear dissimilarities between Coke and cigarettes. First, Coke really isn't anywhere near as bad for you as cigarettes. Then there's the small problem being that light cigarettes were basically a huge scam, for two reasons: (1) the tar/nicotine measurements taken by the test machines didn't accurately reflect what happens when people smoked them (2) there was reason to worry that people would compensate by smoking more cigarettes or inhaling more deeply.

The first of these issues doesn't exist with mini Cokes: they're just Coke in smaller containers, so you're left with the compensation issue. Saletan implies that people will just drink a second coke (15 oz total) and thus be left worse off than before, but that's not at all obvious: there's extensive data suggesting that how much people consume is strongly influenced by the size of the portions in front of them and it's not all crazy to think that if you had a bunch of smaller Coke cans you would drink less Coke overall. It's true that because Coke contains caffeine, that's a potential confounding factor to the portion control effects we see with ordinary food, but most people really aren't that addicted to caffeine (and respond to it in quite small doses) so it's not at all clear that people would over-compensate. It's easy to do the math here: if you replace every 12 oz coke with a 7.5 oz coke you're getting 62.5% of the usual dose. If only half the time you drink a second mini can you come out very slightly ahead (11.25 oz). Obviously, it's an empirical question what people's real behavior is, but it seems plausible to me that they would do so infrequently enough for it to be a net win. I know that personally I tend to drink a whole bottle of whatever beverage I have, so when I buy 20 oz cokes it seems like I drink more coke than if I buy 12 oz cokes; sometimes I'll have an extra 12 ozer, but I don't think enough to compensate for all the times that I drank 20 oz just because it was in front of me.

In any case, the tobacco comparison seems at best premature: the tobacco companies knew that light cigarettes weren't any healthier; as far as I know, Coke doesn't know any such thing, and it may not even be true.

On my way to lunch Wednesday, I stopped by Barefoot Coffee to pick up some beans. As I'm checking out, the cashier asked me if I'd like a free coffee or espresso (this is pretty standard with bulk bean purchases). I'd already had way too much caffeine that day, but I'm not one to turn down a free espresso so I said sure and slid down the counter to wait. The place was pretty packed and the baristas were backed up, so I sat there for about 10 minutes getting increasingly antsy but unwilling to just walk away (Daniel Kahneman, call your office).

Eventually my espresso came up, but at that point Brian had been waiting for me in the car for about 15 minutes and I figured he was starting to get antsy, so I asked for my drink in a paper cup, only to be told "We don't do that. It kills it." Now first, I strongly suspect this of being mostly BS: the objection seems to be that you lose the crema, but that mostly stays stuck to the side of the ceramic cup anyway. Even if it were true, I'm the customer, and if I want to ruin my own espresso that seems to be my right. Had I had the presence of mind, I would have told them to pour it in one of the 12 oz paper cups they had for drip coffee, but instead I grumbled something about having to go and they told me I could leave the cup on the table outside (what a huge concession!).

In future, I'll just be ordering from Blue Bottle which is cheaper [if you have it shipped] and arguably better. Also, their Web site won't lecture me on how I should drink my coffee.

Probably the first question you get asked about a long backpacking trip is "what do you eat?" This is definitely a central concern, since you obviously need to eat and food often makes up between 1/4 and 1/2 of the mass you're carrying. First, some constraints:

• The nominal human caloric requirement is something like 2000 Cal/day, but more if you're exercising. Different people require radically different amounts of food depending on their metabolism, how fast they're going, how much weight they're carrying, etc. Backpackers probably aim for more like 3000 Cal/day, but you need to learn how much you personally need.
• You want your food to be as light as possible. Carbohydrates and protein provide 4 Cal/gram and fat provides 9 Cal/gram. Water in the food costs as does fiber and other non-energetic components.
• You probably need around 1g protein per gram of body mass per day.
• In areas where there are bears (the Sierras definitely have bears) you need to store all your food so bears can't get at it. In some areas you can hang your food from trees, but it's better to use a bear canister, which is basically a big plastic bin. I use the Bearvault, shown below. For JMT, bear canisters are basically required. This creates a new constraint: food must also be compact in order to fit into the canister. Note that the canister itself weighs on the order of 2.5 lbs, so that's a substantial cost in and of itself. On the other hand, it's not like you're not going to bring food at all!

Within those constraints, you can more or less do whatever you want and there is a lot of variation. Lots of people use the traditional freeze-dried backpacker meals, especially for dinner. From one another hiker, I heard the legend of a Pacific Crest Trail (Mexico to Canada) thru-hiker who eats couscous and textured vegetable protein cooked in a plastic bag on the top of his pack by the heat of the sun during the day.

Another important factor here is palatability. You could of course load up your pack with dog chow (approximately 4 Cal/g) and eat that for every meal, but you'd probably get tired of that pretty quickly. There are plenty of trail stories of people who just packed the equivalent of dog chow (e.g., trail mix) and then tired of it 3-4 days out and were reduced to begging passersby for something different. Confounding the palatability issue, a lot of people lose appetite after long days of effort as well as at high altitude, and what you want to eat in those circumstances may vary. A lot of people also report losing their appetite initially and then regaining it with force after 4-5 days, which complicates resupply (more on this in a bit). Finally, you have to decide if you want to cook. Most people do, but the stove does weigh something, and then you need a pot to boil water in, plus the fuel, and so you're talking somewhere on the order of 250-600g, which isn't insignificant. My experience on recent trips in the sierras has been that I wasn't hungry for freeze-dried dinners after a long day and I don't much care if things are hot, so I just decided to take cold food this time.

As a practical matter, you can't take enough food for 11 days, so nearly everyone does one or more food resupply drops. I did mine at the Muir Trail Ranch.

My initial plan was as follows:

Meal	Food	Quantity	Calories
Breakfast	Granola	60g	294
Lunch	Triscuits	56g	265
	Almonds	56g	376
Snacks	Granola	60g	294
	Clif bars	3	783
Dinner	Triscuits	74g	395
	Peanut Butter	64g	400
	Jerky	56g	146
	Chocolate chips/m&ms	30g	152
	Fun size snickers	2	??

I packed all this stuff (except the clif bars and the peanut butter) into individual ziploc bags inside one quart-sized ziploc bag per day. The idea here is that you just pull out today's bag and you're good for the rest of the day. I also brought an extra day's food bag for backup.

This plan disintegrated really fast. Let's start with the triscuits. My general thought was that they were flavorful, salty, and crunchy, etc. so this would work out, but unfortunately while this is fine at home in front of the tube, on the trail, it's more like you're eating sand and you just have to shove it down. I only managed to choke down the full dinner portion of triscuits once or twice. Now for the jerky: I generally like TJ's beef jerky (teriyaki flavor) but I decided to mix it up a little bit and buy different flavors and somehow whenever I pulled out a dinner bag I got some disgusting flavor. The only ones that I concluded I could tolerate were the teriyaki and some spicy/peppery flavor. Also, jerky requires a huge amount of chewing, and this isn't really consistent with the objective of just getting calories in, especially when you're not really hungry in the first place.

Finally, there's the peanut butter; from a palatibility perspective it was fine, but from a dispensing perspective, a disaster. I packed it in these squeeze tubes, but they're pretty useless. I put chunky peanut butter in one and then when I went to squeeze it out, I got a small bit out and then it just clogged. When I squeezed harder, the plastic clip popped off the end and getting back on didn't really work out—I think it was broken somehow. The clip on the other tube actually broke before I left, so basically a bust. At the resupply point, I threw away the tubes and just packed the peanut butter into a ziploc bag, but this didn't really work any better, since you can't get it out with a spoon without making a huge mess. [And remember you don't want to get covered with PB since then bears think you smell like food.] Like I said, a bust.

So, the bottom line here is that I brought way too much food and had to do a bunch of re-sorting out at the resupply point. What I eventually settled on was something more like this:

Meal	Food	Quantity	Calories
Breakfast	Clif bar	1	240
	Almonds	56g	376
Snacks	Granola	60g	294
	Clif bars	2	783
Dinner	Triscuits	56g	265
	Peanut Butter	64g	400
	Jerky	56g	146
	Chocolate chips/m&ms	30g	152
	Fun size snickers	2	??

Note that we've lost about 650 Cal here, so that's a pretty significant change, and even then I was really having to shove food down and often only ate like half my jerky or something. I wasn't wearing a power meter or anything, but at this point it's clear I was at a significant caloric deficit; at the end of the trip I had lost about 10 lbs even though I had a fair amount of food left in my pack and wasn't really ever feeling hungry.

Three other points that deserve making:

• I deliberately deemphasized (yes, 3/day is deemphasized) energy bars even though I eat a lot of them during training. The theory here was that for the long term I should actually eat, you know, food. This was a mistake. I had energy bars left at the end but they were the thing I liked the best—probably because they're sweet—and I would have been better subbing them for some of the more food-type food.
• I brought about 6-8 energy gels on the theory that I might need the occasional fast burst of energy to get over some pass (and this helped with Forester Pass and Mount Whitney), but I only ate a total of 2 gels. This isn't a big deal, but they're the only food I brought that contains a lot of water, so there is a weight penalty here.
• One of the better moves I made was to bring a few packets of Propel powder. At altitude and in the heat you need to consume a lot of water, but it also gets boring because it's tasteless [this is part of why Gatorade was invented]. Propel is just flavoring, so it's super-light, and mixing up a bottle of flavored water occasionally can make it much easier to rehydrate.

All in all, though, my food seems to have worked out pretty well. Given that I didn't want to eat at all, it was always going to be an exercise in forced caloric input, and since I managed to get enough calories in without vomiting I guess you could call it success.

I have a simple orange juice purchasing strategy: I go to Safeway and buy whichever of the major brands (Tropicana, Minute Maid, Florida's Natural) is on sale. No doubt people with better taste than me can distinguish these, but I don't much care. Anyway, I was in Safeway the other day and nearly missed the (on sale) Tropicana because they had changed the packaging and I initially mistook it for a generic brand.

Helpful comparison photo here

Turns out I wasn't the only person who wasn't impressed:

Tropicana's previous design, with orange and straw, will soon be brought back. The PepsiCo Americas Beverages division of PepsiCo is bowing to public demand and scrapping the changes made to a flagship product, Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. Redesigned packaging that was introduced in early January is being discontinued, executives plan to announce on Monday, and the previous version will be brought back in the next month.

...

The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look.

Some of those commenting described the new packaging as "ugly" or "stupid," and resembling "a generic bargain brand" or a "store brand." "Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?" the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. "Because I do, and the new cartons stink."

The juice tasted fine, though.

Ken Hirsch rightly nails me on the topic of Uncle Ben's:

All you really need to know here is that Uncle Ben's is owned by Mars, the company that makes M&Ms.

That actually doesn't tell you anything about the taste or nutrition of Uncle Ben's. You usually don't make such careless statements.

Your "converted" link goes to the "instant rice" wikipedia page, but the "parboiled rice" page is more appropriate. Converted rice has more nutrients than white rice. And, although converted rice is what made Uncle Ben's famous, they sell other kinds, too.

Fair enough. I was mostly trying to be clever, but I agree that it's not much of an argument. I generally find Uncle Bens "Original" to be tasteless and insipid, whereas a good basmati or jasmine is, as you know, a joy to eat. I've never had the other versions, except for I think the minute, which is ghastly. You're totally right about the wikipedia link. That's where it took me when I entered "converted" rice and I didn't check any further. I didn't even know about the nutrient thing. My bad!

I just looked in our kitchen and we have two kinds of basmati (one from India and one from Lundberg in California), three kinds of brown rice, and a 12-pound sack of Uncle Ben's Original, which my wife bought a couple of months ago when she was worried that the food distribution system might collapse at any moment.

I fully endorse this use of Uncle Ben's Original. I too would eat it after the apocalypse, probably after the canned tuna and freeze dried camping meals ran out but before emergency rations, MREs, and my neighbors.

Joe Hall is a man of good taste but his recommendations for making rice omit some important information:

• Buy good rice. Depending on taste, you can go with either jasmine rice or basmati rice. Do not get Uncle Ben's, which has been "converted" so it cooks faster. All you really need to know here is that Uncle Ben's is owned by Mars, the company that makes M&Ms.
• Buy a rice cooker. You can make perfectly good rice in a pot, but it requires a bit of attention to take it off the stove when it's done. Rice cookers automatically shut off when the rice is finished [technical note: the way this works for cheap rice cookers is simple and elegant, and makes use of the fact that a boiling liquid stays at the boiling point. There's a thermostat which automatically shuts off the heat when the temperature goes above 100C, indicating the water has boiled away]. A good rice cooker will then go into a warming mode. You don't need something expensive here. I think I paid $25 for mine.
• You can make a variety of cheap and easy dishes by mixing them into the rice while it cooks. For instance, coconut rice by substituting some of the coconut milk for water, lentils or beans and rice by mixing in the add-in with the rice and adjusting the water accordingly. Lentils, rice, and a little spices (you can basically just throw them into the rice cooker; no doubt there's a more high-end prep, but this works fine) makes a fairly complete meal with about 5 minutes of prep time.
• If you live in an area with minimal rice choices, look for an ethnic (Chinese, Indian...) food store, which will often have cheap, high quality rice in big bags.

That is all.

It's definitely starting to look like the melamine-contaminated infant Chinese infant formula incident was not an accident, but rather deliberate. Science has the story:

Researchers say the adulteration was nothing short of a wholesale re-engineering of milk. Weeks ago, investigators established that workers at Sanlu and at a number of milk-collection depots were diluting milk with water; they added melamine to dupe a test for determining crude protein content. "Adulteration used to be simple. What they did was very high-tech," says Chen. Researchers have since learned that the emulsifier used to suspend melamine--a compound that resists going into solution--also boosted apparent milk-fat content.

Sanlu baby formula contained a whopping 2563 mg/kg of melamine, adding 1% of apparent crude protein content to the formula, says Jerry Brunetti, managing director of Agri-Dynamics in Easton, Pennsylvania. Milk, he notes, is only 3.0% to 3.4% protein. Chen says a dean of a school of food science told him that it would take a university team 3 months to develop this kind of concoction.

Investigators have concluded that as-yet-unidentified individuals cooked up a protocol for a premix, a solution designed to fortify foods with vitamins or other nutrients. In this case, it was deadly. Several milk-collecting companies were using the same premix, Chen says: "So someone with technical skill had to be training them."

As I said earlier, it's pretty hard to reliably prevent intentional substitution, with any practical inspection regime. There's an arms race between the inspectors and the cheaters and since the cheaters apparent; indeed, the melamine looks like the first stage in that arms race, since it's intended to defeat a quality control check on the protein content. The cheaters presumably know what tests are being performed, and if you don't care about whether your product kills people, you probably have a lot of flexibity in what kind of countermeasures/masking agents, etc. you can use.

I'm a man of simple tastes in coffee, but if I were one of those people who liked their drinks a little more frou-frou, I'd need to stay away from Murky Coffee in Arlington, VA. Here's Jeff Simmermon's tale of being denied an iced espresso:

I just ordered my usual summertime pick-me-up: a triple shot of espresso dumped over ice. And the guy at the counter looked me in the eye with a straight face and said "I'm sorry, we can't serve iced espresso here. It's against our policy."

The whole world turned brown and chunky for a second. Flecks of corn floated past my pupils, and it took me a second to blink it all away.

"Okay," I said, "I'll have a triple espresso and a cup of ice, please."

He rolled his eyes and rang it up, took my money, gave me change. I stood there and waited. Then the barista called me over to the bar. I reached for it, and he leaned over and locked his eyes with mine, saying "Hey man. What you're about to do ... that's really, really Not Okay."

I could hear the capital letters in his voice, could see the gravity of the situation in his eyes.

He continued: "This is our store policy, to preserve the integrity of the coffee. It's about the quality of the drink, and diluting the espresso is really not cool with us. So I mean, you're going to do what you're going to do, and I can't stop you, but"

I interrupted. "You're goddamned right you can't stop me," I said. "I happen to have a personal policy that prohibits me from indulging stupid bullshit like this -- and another personal policy of doing what I want with the products I pay for." Then I looked him right in his big wide eyes and poured the espresso onto the ice.

Check out the comments on the blog post for a lot of comments, both by supporters and opponents of Simmermon, including a message from the owner of Murky Coffee threatening to "punch you [Simmermon] in your dick." Outstanding!

Jelly Belly has just brought out their BeanBoozled product:

BeanBoozled jelly beans come in 20 flavors, 10 weird and wild flavors matched up with 10 look-alike tasty flavors. Is the black jelly bean Licorice, or is it Skunk Spray? Perhaps the blue bean is Toothpaste flavor, or maybe it's delicious Berry Blue. Think you can tell them apart? We dare you!

You might not know when you will be bamboozled by a weird flavor. A key on the back of each box gives clues to the surprises found inside, but the beans look so similar, every bite will be a surprising dare.

I actually already have this problem with Jelly Belly bulk packs. Mrs. Guesswork buys these ginormous tubs of mixed jelly beans at Costco and I already find a pretty substantial fraction of the beans (cafe latte, cappuccino, a&w cream soda, licorice, ...) revolting, and they look a lot like other flavors that I like, so I have to be on my guard anyway.

On a related topic, why when you go to Costco do they insist on selling you mixed packs of cliff bars, power bars, etc. Are there really people who like vanilla crisp power bars, or is this just some scheme to get you to throw away 1/3 of the bars so you buy more that much sooner?"