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Food snobbery is killing entrepreneurship and innovation, says economist, preeminent social commentator, and maverick dining guide blogger Tyler Cowen. Americans are becoming angry that our agricultural practices have led to global warming-but while food snobs are right that local food tastes better, they're wrong that it is better for the environment, and they are wrong that cheap food is bad food. The food world needs to know that you don't have to spend more to eat healthy, green, exciting meals. At last, some good news from an economist!
Tyler Cowen discusses everything from slow food to fast food, from agriculture to gourmet culture, from modernist cuisine to how to pick the best street vendor. He shows why airplane food is bad but airport food is good; why restaurants full of happy, attractive people serve mediocre meals; and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. And most important of all, he shows how to get good, cheap eats just about anywhere.
Just as The Great Stagnation was Cowen's response to all the fashionable thinking about the economic crisis, An Economist Gets Lunch is his response to all the fashionable thinking about food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, it will influence what you'll choose to eat today and how we're going to feed the world tomorrow.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 17, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780449011201
- File size: 299568 KB
- Duration: 10:24:05
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Here's a good audiobook to listen to while preparing dinner. It's part contrarian (GMOs are good for the ecology, meat should be taxed according to its environmental impact) and part travelogue (listeners take taxi rides to remote foreign locales for inexpensive ethnic cuisine). In essence, the book veers between the Food Channel and FREAKONOMICS. (Author Cowen is an economist and food blogger.) Narrator Stephen Hoye's authoritative tone makes Cowen's more provocative ideas palatable and provides vocal cohesion to what might otherwise seem like a series of essays. This big-picture econo-centric audiobook explains why you should avoid trendy restaurants packed with pretty girls, the link between Prohibition and bad dining, and how Dr. Spock dumbed down American eating habits. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from February 6, 2012
Enlightened consumerism, not ideology, is the surest path to tasty and responsible dining, argues this yummy gastronomic treatise. Economist and restaurant critic Cowen (The Great Stagnation) takes readers along as he eats, shops, and cooks in a diversity of spicy settings, including a Nicaraguan tamale stand, the greens aisle at the Great Wall supermarket chain, backwoods barbeque pits, and his own kitchen, where he wrestles with Mexican cuisine. He focuses on how the interplay between creative suppliers and demanding customers produces good, cheap food, an approach that yields offbeat insights into, for example, why the menu item that sounds the least appetizing usually tastes great and why you should never eat in a place filled with beautiful people having a great time (that restaurant’s specialty, he reasons, is the scene, not the food). Cowen also offers a telling contrarian critique of high-minded food orthodoxies that extols agribusiness, debunks the environmental benefits of locavorism, and toasts genetically modified organisms. Cowen writes like your favorite wised-up food maven, folding encyclopedic knowledge and piquant food porn—“the pork was a little chewy but flavorful, and the achiote sauce gave it a tanginess”—into a breezy, conversational style; the result is mouth-watering food for thought.
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