Comments for No measure of health

Comment on Mongrel cuisines by Alexis

Alexis — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:49:12 +0000

I have a fondness for food that has been so mongrelized it’s become its own thing: Southwestern and Tex-Mex for example, Greek diners, Puerto Rican food, or anything you can eat in New Orleans. Peruvian and Filippino cuisine have a lot of inherent fusion in them. I also have a few cookbooks written by immigrants trying to accommodate American grocery stores into their cuisine (these are usually published in the 1970s and 80s) – my favorites are a Persian cookbook from California and an Indian cookbook from Michigan. These are fascinating because they allow you to watch how a cuisine changes in order to adapt to a new location/food supply. My mother-in-law gave me “The Settlement” cookbook, which is an early 20th century (wildly popular) book written by a Jewish women’s organization, which also shows an incredible amount of adaptation, and an almost surreptitious mainstreaming of “traditional” Jewish recipes.

Have you ever had a New Jersey Tomato Pie (aka a Pizza Pie)? The sauce goes on top of the cheese. New Jersey, I suspect, is one big fusion cuisine state.

In terms of fusion cuisine deemed so delicious it’s been exported, I would suggest further examples are the beignet and the enchilada. I was going to try and think of a few more, but I’ll stick to those.

Comment on Mongrel cuisines by eldan

eldan — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 06:10:03 +0000

I wasn’t even thinking about the Columbian exchange, but I guess you do have a point. Any cuisine combining ingredients from the Old and New Worlds is inherently mongrel, which means that almost all of them are (imagine Szechwan without chillis, Thai or Malay without peanuts, Mexican without pork or any Northern European without potatoes….) I definitely had later mongrelism in mind, and in that sense I think of Italian-American as quite different from the Italian food from Italy that incorporates some ingredients that came back from the New World. Italian immigrants to the US definitely changed their food quite a lot, whether to fit local tastes or just because their culture started to evolve away from the mother country, and that’s what I’m thinking of as mongrelism. I will admit that it’s a pretty arbitrary distinction, though.

That’s a very good point about the native cuisine of places like the Bay Area. I wonder what an “authentic Seattle restaurant” in another part of the country would look like – the menu probably wouldn’t be that far removed from the Hawaiian place I mentioned in the original post.

Comment on Mongrel cuisines by Becky

Becky — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:04:12 +0000

This reminds me that when I was last in Italy, I was horrified to see a ham-and-pineapple pizza listed on the menu as an “American pizza”. I told everyone else at the table (all Italians; I was at a conference) that we would call that a “Hawaiian pizza”. Then I claimed that all pizza could be called American pizza, as tomatoes came from the New World. So on a related note, perhaps some large fraction of “Italian” food worldwide is actually the Italian-American interpretation?

At home we cook a lot of Indian and Southeast Asian food, to varying degrees of authenticity. I sometimes wonder what food S will grow up to think of as “his”. We cook very little food from either mine or E’s cultural heritages (as E particularly dislikes traditional Eastern European Jewish cuisine). Then again, if we stay in the Bay Area, growing up with lots of Asian cuisines is perhaps normal, even for those not of Asian descent.

Comment on Mongrel cuisines by eldan

eldan — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:24:40 +0000

I just saw this on Twitter:

@DougSanders: French monarchist refugees to Soho brought frites. Jewish refugees brought fried fish. The result, in 19th C, was "English" fish-n-chips.

Comment on The inequality cycle by eldan

eldan — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:42:52 +0000

You’ve got me thinking. One thing I do know a priori is that Japan urbanised very much later than Britain or France and then did so really quickly – I wonder if that upheaval has an impact on social mobility, in which case we should be able to find it by comparing time periods. And the chances are that at least Scotland compiles similar statistics for itself as the UK as a whole, so we could probably compare like with like for Scotland vs rest-of-UK, which would be worth a look.

I agree with you about meritocracy as a problematic concept, and I think James Flynn’s point about those with status using it to benefit their offspring is the [or at least, a major] causal factor behind this relationship. I seem to recall first encountering that idea through Gelman’s blog because you linked to it, so: thank you.

Comment on The inequality cycle by Erin McJ

Erin McJ — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:40:56 +0000

No firm answer, just a comment that these are only a handful of datapoints, at a fairly high level of analysis. It might be interesting to think whether there is another level at which the data could be analyzed, to see if the same general pattern still holds. Longitudinal data on countries might be one idea, to see what happens as one variable shifts over time. Or smaller geographic units, perhaps?

More generally, I think meritocracy is a problematic idea to start with. Andrew Gelman has said something I really like on the subject: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/12/lamentably-common-misunderstanding-of-meritocracy/

Comment on I was wrong: about “positive discrimination” by The inequality cycle » No measure of health

The inequality cycle » No measure of health — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:34:18 +0000

[...] a comment the other day I alluded to the impossibility of having a society that’s both a perfect meritocracy and highly unequal. I hadn’t actually realised how strong the relationship between these two aspects was, until [...]

Comment on I was wrong: about “positive discrimination” by eldan

eldan — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:15:11 +0000

That’s a really important point, which I think also addresses part of what Ross is saying about “clearer ideas about what a successful education is and what it’s for”. We have to fix equality in the quality of education, but what you’re talking about may be just as important: equality in what kind of life education prepares people for, and even encourages them to believe they could have.

Comment on I was wrong: about “positive discrimination” by eldan

eldan — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:06:30 +0000

I definitely agree that this is to a substantial degree about minimising inequality. That’s actually something else it took me a while to get, because I’d be quite satisfied with a theoretical world in which there was great inequality but perfect meritocracy – the trouble is I no longer believe that world could exist.

I’m not sure that international inequity is as big an issue in these terms as it is in general. At the end of the day deprivation relative to one’s own surroundings is much more important to well-being than deprivation relative to distant people: for example, almost a fifth of the U.S. population qualifies as part of the global 1%, but someone at the bottom of that bracket isn’t going to feel particularly wealthy.

Comment on I was wrong: about “positive discrimination” by Melinda (the aforementioned wife)

Melinda (the aforementioned wife) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 04:45:19 +0000

I like your meta-commentary! From personal experience, I can tell you that your point about improving education is spot-on. A lot of what I ultimately got out of school, I had to seek out for myself. The school system I was in wasn’t set up to make people successful at anything that involved discovery, creativity, solving new problems or thinking for themselves, and the very best teachers I had were people who seemed to have found clever ways around it.

That has been a huge problem for me- especially early in my career, I just didn’t understand how I was supposed to work, and it really compounded my nagging sense of incompetence and not-belonging.