Tuesday, March 26, 2019

All the Things You Can’t Do -- Instead of All the Things You Can

Peter Drucker, in his seminal book The Effective Executive, makes an arresting point about focusing on what you can do rather than what you can't:

"Most executives I know in government, in the hospital, in a business, know all the things they cannot do. They are only too conscious of what the boss won't let them do, of what company policy won't let them do, of what the government won't let them do. As a result, they waste their time and their strengths complaining about the things they cannot do anything about.

Effective executives are of course also concerned with limitations. But it is amazing how many things they find that can be done and are worth while doing. While the others complain about their inability to do anything, the effective executives go ahead and do."

We see this same dynamic in many of the life domains we discuss here at Casual Kitchen--of how far too many people give away their power, complaining about things totally outside their circle of control, rather than taking specific action inside their circle of control.

Some examples:

1) Complaining about greedy food companies trying to make us all fat--instead of thinking about what specific actions you can take to help your family eat healthier.

2) Raging about the political environment, or holding generalized negative feelings about those idiots in that other party who are all total idiots. Usually this is a direct function of consuming too much media. Remember! The media's function is not to inform you, it's to capture your attention by inducing rage or fear.

2a) Related: Letting a certain orange-colored President derange you, letting him live rent-free in your head, letting him make you mad from thousands of miles away. Instead of impotently shaking your fist at him on Twitter, you could be directly and positively impacting the people right around you, right now.

3) Complaining that the investing game is rigged (because of "high frequency trading" or "rich insiders" or whatever reason), rather than taking action yourself by improving your own investing game and getting better at it. As with politics, the investing realm is cruel to those who overreact to the media. Also, an innocent question about your personal circle of control: What's the last personal finance book you read? What is the most recent concrete step you've taken to improve your family's financial footing?

4) One of the more pernicious traps of modernity: fooling ourselves into thinking we're taking action by reading and talking about things, rather than actually doing them. We get the illusion of taking action with none of the results. I wrote about one painful example of this on my writing blog, about an acquaintance who talked about a novel he would someday write. Unfortunately, his novel never existed in reality--it only existed in an idealized state in his imagination.

"The assertion that 'somebody else will not let me do anything' should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia. But even where the situation does set limitations--and everyone lives and works within rather stringent limitations--there are usually important, meaningful, pertinent things that can be done. The effective executive looks for them. If he starts out with the question: 'What can I do?' he is almost certain to find that he can actually do much more than he has time and resources for."

And he (or she!) can do much, much more than all the people sitting around complaining. Put together.


READ NEXT: Money Sundays: Is Looking For Tax-Efficient Investments Icky? Or Intelligent?

AND: The Official YMOYL Reading List






You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
at No comments:

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Major Media Food Writing Is Now Officially Dead. Here's the Guy Who Killed It.

Want to know what the labor market looks like for food writing? Have a good look at this job "opportunity" at Epicurious for an aspiring food writer:

So far, so good. But here's where it begins to get ... depressing:

...So, this is three jobs, then? Maybe four.
"Links to published work" ... for someone "who is at the beginning of her/his career"?

At this point, this poor un-self-aware gentleman and his "amazing job" began to receive severe blowback.
This tweet was particularly blunt:
And then... things got serious:

There's an old saying: "Never go inside a sausage factory, you might see how the sausage is made." Well, major food media is sausage--and now we've had a good long look at exactly how it's made: on the backs of people working "amazing jobs" like this.

This ought to shatter any serious reader's interest in Epicurious as a site, and perhaps also shatter any reader's interest in any of Conde Nast's publications.


Footnotes:
A list of Conde Nast publications:

Allure
Architectural Digest
Ars Technica
Backchannel
Bon Appétit
Brides
Condé Nast Traveler
Epicurious
Glamour
Golf Digest
GQ
Pitchfork
Self
Teen Vogue
The New Yorker
Vanity Fair
Vogue
W
Wired


You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
at No comments:

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Neomania


neomania [nee oh MAY nee uh] noun; An obsession with the new.

Neomania is disease of modernity. And in fact the most telling examples of neomania usually involve tech gadgets. Ask any iPhone owner, especially while he's lining up outside an Apple store excitedly waiting to be separated from a thousand dollars.

But neomania exists in the world of food too. It appears in ingredient bragging, a topic we've discussed previously here at Casual Kitchen. It seems so cool to be the first food blogger to share some exotic-sounding ingredient with your readers. For example, ten years ago, if you were one of the early bloggers to offer a recipe featuring "garlic scapes" you were too cool for school! You were in the know, ahead of everybody else.

What about neomania in restaurants? I know I unfairly pick on New Yorkers all the time here, but New York City is simply loaded with people obsessed with going to the latest restaurant. And since restaurants in New York City have an 80% fail rate within five years, neomaniac New Yorkers always have an unlimited supply of the "new" to chase.

Travel? Yep. If you're the first person in your circle to go somewhere, you get tremendous status heirarchy points. First among your friends to visit Medellin? Check. First to Iceland? Check. Bali? Laos? Tibet? Check. Another bonus: trendy locations go in and out of fashion over the years, so when a hip tourist location goes from new to old to new again, you can say you went there before it was cool--and be right twice!

What's consistently depressing about neomania is how within months of a thing being new, it's quickly no longer new, and we contemptuously roll our eyes at things we recently thought were amazing. You might be too cool for school if you were early to the garlic scapes trend, but heaven help you if you were late to it. Borrrr-ing!!

Think about various trendy concepts in the restaurant industry: sea foam, lobster ravioli, avocado toast, or, for the beverage neomaniacs among you, overpriced "mules" served up in a distinctive copper cup. And think about how, if we look back honestly at the trumpeting of these experiences when they were trendy, how we all now feel vaguely sheepish having participated in the neomania when it happened: how we wish we hadn't written that me-too recipe featuring garlic scapes, just like everyone else did at the same time. How we wish we hadn't paid $15 for that mule in the trendy copper mug in that trendy upscale bar. And how we'd rather forget all about that time we paid $42 for an entree of "scallops and sea foam" at some restaurant whose name we can barely remember... that isn't even in business any more.

Neomania in cooking
There's one instance where I find neomania to be particularly offensive: when I see a perfectly perfect recipe appallingly butchered by neomaniacs. One example that comes to mind is taking a flawless, timeless recipe like apple pie or apple crisp, and using some abstruse, expensive neomaniacal new apple variety that nobody's ever heard of [1] when anyone with half a soul knows that in-season, traditional Macintosh apples [2] are the only acceptable variety to use for apple pies and crisps.

Finally, if we extend our time horizon a bit, we can see how neomania has caused us to introduce needless, even harmful elements to our lives. Consider the now-infamous government food pyramid, or worse, things like olestra, a new (and supposedly healthier) oil. I'm not sure which is worse: a set of food recommendations that were exactly, exactly wrong, or a new oil that became infamous for causing anal leakage.

Neomania is a type of infirmity, an illness, because it causes us to shun already-familiar things that work well and chase "new" things that usually don't work at all.

The new is rarely better, but it's always designed to seem so. And it certainly tricks enough of us as we scramble from vacation spot to vacation spot, from ingredient brag to ingredient brag, from new restaurant to newer restaurant, from tech gadget to tech gadget, constantly straining for more, when what we already had worked better all along.


READ NEXT: Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
AND: A False Referent


[1] The new "Jazz" apple variety comes to mind, itself ironically a cross of two other neomaniacal apples: Royal Gala and Braeburn.

[2] Okay, maybe Cortlands in a pinch.




You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
at No comments:

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Should I Be Vegan or Vegetarian? How to Resolve the Question

"No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people."
--William Howard Taft

"It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

*******

Should we all be vegans? Or at least vegetarians? We're fed all kinds of reasons for it: to save the planet, for ethical reasons, because it's supposedly healthier, to help the Green New Deal, and so on.

One way I address the question of whether to be a vegetarian or vegan is by first understanding that I am part of a system that I do not fully understand. I certainly don't know all there is to know about the human body and how it responds to dietary inputs. In other words, I begin from a place of epistemic humility. I know lot less than I think I know.

Second, I'm not in the business of "laying down rules of conduct" for others. On the contrary, in the business of sharing how I think, how I try to play chess rather than checkers in the various domains discussed here at Casual Kitchen. But you should eat how you want to eat! I don't want to tell you what do to when you're fully capable of deciding for yourself.

Unfortunately, we also have an oversupply of health and diet experts who, in stark contrast, love to tell us how to eat, and they do so with a total lack of epistemic humility. A few blatant examples: It was only a decade or two ago that the medical establishment realized that dietary cholesterol does not equal blood serum cholesterol, which made laughably incorrect the overconfidently dispensed 1980s-era dietary advice that eggs were unhealthy. Worse, our government went so far as to recommend carbs as a preponderant element of our diets. And to top it all off, they still haven't admitted that the horrendous, totally upside down food pyramid was utterly wrong from the start.

One shudders to think how many other things our expert community currently believes to be right, but will later discover to be wrong.[1]

All of this is to say that even if I were to learn as much as I possibly could about veganism and vegetarianism, even if I were to learn all the latest, most rigorous science behind it, it's still enormously likely I'll arrive at errant conclusions, basing those conclusion on soon-to-be-debunked dietary "science." Even more embarrassing, because I "know" so much about all the latest "science" about it, I'll be more confident than ever that I'm right! [2]

Now, humans have been eating meat and animal products for millennia, and our ancestor species likely consumed meat for millions of years before that. So, one possible decision framework in deciding what to eat would be to let "what has worked well in the past" guide your decisions in the future. This is a heuristic, an imperfect one admittedly. But using it in the dietary realm will help you avoid recently-invented foods (Velveeta, hydrogenated oils) and stick instead to foods that have been around for, say, several centuries at a minimum.

Second, I can try to back up this initial tentative choice by carefully observing the results of people around me. Are the vegans and vegetarians that I know healthier and fitter than an equivalently healthy meat-eater? What of my vegan friends who decided to resume eating meat: why did they do this and what are their results? Readers can observe their circle of friends and acquaintances and copy the most effective behaviors.

Now let's go one step further. Let's say that despite this "what do humans historically eat" heuristic, I still want to consider veganism or vegetarianism because I'm persuaded by the various reasons given in this posts' first paragraph. So, knowing that meat and animal products are historically part of our diets, I could make an epistemically humble choice to experiment with the quantity of meat or animal products I eat, and keep that quantity low. This would be a partial-measure solution that would still provide the nutritional inputs that my species historically appears to need without overtinkering with a complex dietary system that I cannot fully understand.

Essentially, this is how we've thought through this issue. It's why we've embraced what we call partial vegetarianism here at Casual Kitchen, where we eat animal products like milk, cheese and eggs and some meat. And it's why we're unlikely ever to be vegans or vegetarians.


READ NEXT: The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
AND: You May Now Ignore All Scientific Studies





Footnotes:
[1] What's even more offensive to me is that nobody ever seems to apologize when a major medical, dietary or psychological claim is later debunked. "Oops, sorry about all those statins we put you on, our bad."

[2] A naive reader easily persuaded by cheap rhetoric might interject here, claiming I am "anti-science." Not in the least. What I am against is when experts use the patina of science to justify epistemically arrogant claims and to tell us what to do. And this goes double when what they tell us to do later turns out to be wrong! Further, calling something "science" does not make it so, which is why I use the (deliberately condescending) phrase "studies show science" to distinguish domains like psychology, nutrition/diet, healthcare, sociology, economics, etc., from genuine sciences like physics. Finally, readers can also use this expression as a reliable rule of thumb: Studies show science is not science.

******************

You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!
at No comments: