The NYT's Dana Bowen reports that health inspectors have launched a campaign to shut down a popular new cooking technique that doesn't fit into existing regulatory guidelines. The campaign comes in response not to an outbreak of food poisoning--no problems have been reported--but to a New York Times Magazine story on the popularity of sous vide cooking.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has quelled the sous vide revolution, for the moment. In the past few weeks inspectors have told some chefs to throw out shrink-wrapped food, forbidden them to use the equipment used to make it and told them to stop cooking and storing food sous vide until they have a government-approved plan for it.
In some cases, inspectors are handing out fines, which start at $300 per offense. The department's actions seem to represent the first time a city agency has singled out the technique, and how chefs use it.
The city health code, which governs the way chefs cook, does not specifically address the way a restaurant should vacuum-pack food. While no health problem has ever been tied to sous vide in restaurant kitchens in New York, officials say they are concerned that food could breed botulism and listeria if it is vacuum-wrapped improperly. [Emphasis added.]
Side note: The one good thing about Times Select is that it gives NYT subscribers free access to the Times archives, including articles like the magazine piece linked above.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 10, 2006 • Comments
Given recent distractions, I'm a little late on this, but if you haven't read Jonathan Rauch's latest column, on translating classical-liberal works into Arabic, by all means do so now. With the help of a brave Iraqi translator, Cato's Tom Palmer is spearheading this inspirational effort. Here's the connclusion of Jonathan's piece:
The Internet, in contrast, makes possible worldwide, instant distribution, at a nearly negligible cost. MisbahAlHurriyya.org relies heavily on volunteers and donated Web services; its budget, says Palmer, is in the five figures. Thanks to e-mail, conferring and passing manuscripts between Washington, Baghdad, and Amman -- a logistical nightmare in the days of mail and fax -- is a cinch. The site, entirely in Arabic, advertises on the popular Arabic Web sites Albawaba.com and Aljazeera.net. The whole enterprise was impossible a decade ago.
Firmly establishing liberal ideas took centuries in the West, and may yet take decades in the Arab world. Authoritarian and sectarian and tribalist notions are easier to explain than liberal ones, and it is inherently harder to build trust in mercurial markets and flowing democratic coalitions than in charismatic leaders, visionary clerics, and esteemed elders. The liberal world's intellectual underpinnings are as difficult to grasp as its cultural reach is difficult to escape. Thus the disjunction within which Baathism, Islamism, and Arab tribalism have festered.
Yet few who are genuinely intellectually curious can read J.S. Mill or Adam Smith and come away entirely unchanged. The suffocating Arab duopoly of state-controlled media and Islamist pulpits is cracking -- only a little bit so far, but keep watching. In the Arab world, the Enlightenment is going online.
While we're on the subject, let me once again plug Liberty Fund's Library of Economics and Liberty, which offers searchable, full-text editions of classic works in English. The online versions mirror Liberty Fund's authoritative printed texts.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 10, 2006 • Comments
Here are Sally and I on Saturday morning before the kidney transplant. My operation went extremely smoothly. Hers took longer than expected, because a little bit of the kidney was spasming, making it hard for the surgeons to attach the blood vessels. Worse, a couple hours after surgery she started hemorrhaging and had to go back into surgery--an unusual and dangerous complication. Fortunately, she came through OK and is gradually recovering.
I am now out of the hospital and doing fine, recuperating at a friend's nice DC crash pad. I'm a bit weak and not as mobile as usual, but I'm off pain medication and more normal than not. Here I am:
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 07, 2006 • Comments
Wright Amendment supporters have turned from push polling to push-direct mailing. Alan K. Henderson has the details.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 03, 2006 • Comments
Unless people like Leon Kass get their way, someday patients with failing kidneys will be able to get made-to-order replacements that are exact genetic matches, either through therapeutic cloning or some now-unknown future technology. Now, however, if your kidneys stop working, you have three options: die, go on dialysis (regularly described as "living hell" by dialysis patients and their loved ones), or find a donor kidney. And donor kidneys are in short supply, made shorter by legal restrictions and social taboos.
Last fall, my friend Sally Satel wrote about the issue in general and her own search for a kidney donor. Between the time she wrote the article and the time it appeared in the NYT, I heard about her situation and volunteered as a donor. Our tissues turned out to be unusually compatible for nonrelatives and, when her Internet donor dropped out, I moved from backup to actual donor. We have our surgeries tomorrow morning.
As surgeries go, the procedure is safe and straightforward--far more so than people think. A donor can live a completely normal life with one kidney. The recipientis not so lucky, since a foreign organ requires a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs. But that's a lot better than the alternative.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 03, 2006 • Comments
I'm delighted to announce that on March 15, I'll be joining The Atlantic as a contributing editor, writing a monthly column on "Commerce & Culture" and the occasional feature. My first piece will appear this summer.
In other writing news, if you're traveling Southwest Airlines this month, check out my article on pens in Spirit, the Southwest magazine. I hope to post the piece on this site eventually, but it's currently unavailable online.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 03, 2006 • Comments
| You Are Los Angeles |
 Young and fun, you always know where the best parties are. And while you tend to keep things carefree and casual... You certainly can glam it up when you need to. |
What American City Are You?
(Via Dan Drezner.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 28, 2006 • Comments
With its insights into the ways people act inconsistently or against what they say they want, behavioral economics can provide useful ideas for incrementally improving management, and self-management. Richard Thaler, for instance, has turned his research into the successful and practical Save More Tomorrow program to encourage employees to put their future raises (or portions of them) toward retirement savings.
Some economists, however, have rushed to apply behavioral economics not to private dilemmas but to public policy, arguing that inconsistent preferences need to be corrected with paternalist government policy. In a smart, careful new Cato Institute study economist Glen Whitman argues that the paternalist notion of "internalities" has serious flaws--flaws analogous to those identified in traditional "externality" theory by Ronald Coase in his breakthrough 1960 paper, "The Problem of Social Cost" (PDF file here). Unlike many people who throw around Coase's name, Whitman gets that paper right and applies it well.
UPDATE: More on behavioral economics at Marginal Revolution. It's a mistake to view the field as primarily about public policy. It isn't. But people who are primarily interested in government policy (pro or con) naturally apply any new social science discoveries to that interest.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 28, 2006 • Comments
Elaborating on an earlier blog posting, my latest Forbes column is on the tough-minded messages of Project Runway. And a couple of pages earlier, Amanda Ernst profiles PR finalist Chloe Dao.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 27, 2006 • Comments
Both my email and some of Dan Drezner's comments suggest that it's better to go with your gut on the ports issue, never mind the facts. Dan and I are supposedly "overly rational." One reader email recommends Malcolm Gladwell's Blink
as a cure for my excessive rationality.
All I can say is my gut reaction was, "This is stupid." And, now that the research is in, I'd say that gut reaction was right--as Glenn Reynolds, among others, has come to agree (the blogosphere at its best). When you've seen enough ill-founded hysteria over foreign ownership, you develop an instinct.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on February 22, 2006 • Comments