Seth’s blog

Tonight, at a panel discussion at UC Berkeley that was part of The New Yorker College Tour, I learned two things about Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia:

1. There are scales in the bathrooms (according to Lawrence Wright).

2. There is a gift shop that sells CIA golf balls and the like. By the register is a notice: “If you are a covert operative, don’t use your credit card” (according to Jeffrey Goldberg).

The big shock, however, was neither of these. It was, as Hilary Goldstine pointed out, that there were almost no undergraduates in the audience. Which speaks volumes about UC Berkeley. It was a great discussion. Jane Mayer was the third discussant and Orville Schell the moderator.

Jacob Grier, who works in a coffee shop, has written to say that coffee deserves to be on my list of connoisseur-type foods with health benefits (previous entries: tea, wine, and chocolate). For the health benefits of coffee, read this and this. Thanks, Jacob. In Berkeley, Peets (coffee) and Scharfenberger (chocolate) have created several products together. Let’s see: Peets and Scharfenberger, Teance and Charles Chocolates . . . the wine/chocolate category seems underpopulated. By eerie coincidence, today I watched an episode of Weeds (Season 1, Episode 3) in which the heroine goes to a cannabis club (dispensing medical marijuana) where she learns about fancy grades of marijuana she never knew existed.

Last night I went to the opening of the lovely Teance store on Fourth Street (Berkeley). Teance specializes in Asian teas, with some Indian teas as well. They used to be elsewhere in Berkeley, but their lease ran out. At the new location, they replace a gift shop, which makes sense: Fourth Street is foodifying. Teance fits well with the other upscale food stores in the area, such as the Pasta Shop.

But enough about small business. At the opening, someone from a local tea appreciation society gave a brief talk. Two things he said made me think. One was: “We drink tea for fun. The health benefits are just a bonus.” The other was a comparison of tea and wine. Tea is now where wine was thirty years ago. Since then there has been a vast increase in wine appreciation. “Thirty years ago if it was a special occasion you drank a bottle of Blue Nun. Now every kid on a skateboard knows the difference between merlot and cabernet sauvignon.”

Wine has health benefits, of course. A few weeks ago I went to a little tour/talk/demonstration at Charles Chocolates in Emeryville, where a few of the fine points of making chocolates (the candies, not the raw ingredient) were explained. Chocolate, too, has health benefits, as the makers of Cocoavia will be happy to explain. (Charles Chocolates has partnered with Teance to produce a line of tea-flavored chocolates, which were served at the opening.)

Three foods with intense connoisseurship action, three foods with substantial health benefits:

1. Wine

2. Tea

3. Chocolate

A coincidence? Or meaningful? Will cheese turn out to have health benefits? As a general rule, connoisseurship and health are unrelated: That hand-painted Italian flatware is no better for you than K-Mart’s finest (at least before the partnership with Martha Stewart, who called their customers “K-Martians”.)

I became interested in connoisseurship because of my interest in human evolution. Connoisseurship evolved, I believe, because it supported high-end craftsmanship. Skilled craftspeople were the main source of technological innovation. Connoisseurs happily pay more for high-end, carefully-made stuff. The tea spokesman was right: We drink it for fun.

A recent Slate article compared beef from different sources. “We sampled rib-eye steaks from the best suppliers I could find. The meat was judged on flavor, juiciness, and tenderness and then assigned an overall preference.”

The winner: grass-fed beef, which was also the least expensive ($22/pound). The highly-convincing tasting notes:

Never have I witnessed a piece of meat so move grown men (and women). Every taster but one instantly proclaimed the grass-fed steak the winner, commending it for its “beautiful,” “fabu,” and “extra juicy” flavor (that “bursts out on every bite.” The lone holdout, who preferred the Niman Ranch steak, agreed that this steak tasted the best, but found it a tad chewy.

The grass-fed beef was probably the highest in omega-3, by the way. What the writer found wrong with grass-fed beef was lack of consistency:

One grass-fed rancher I spoke to refused to send me any steak for this article because, he said, it sometimes tastes like salmon. Restaurants and supermarkets don’t like grass-fed beef because like all slow food, grass-fed beef producers can’t guarantee consistency-it won’t look and taste exactly the same every time you buy it.

From the standpoint of the Shangri-La Diet, of course, variable flavor is a plus — a big one. I expect a similar result with other foods — the more variable foods taste better. As any engineer knows, the less you have to worry about keeping a variable (such as flavor) constant, the more you can do to maximize it.

Thanks to Clyde Adams for the link.

In the most recent issue of American Journal of Epidemiology (15 November 2006) is an article about whether there is a connection between dietary fat and breast cancer. They found no connection. Part of the abstract:

Dietary fat in midlife has not been associated with breast cancer risk in most studies, but few have followed women beyond one decade. The authors examined the relation of dietary fat, assessed by repeated questionnaires, to incidence of postmenopausal breast cancer in a cohort of 80,375 US women (3,537 new cases) prospectively followed for 20 years between 1980 and 2000. The multivariable relative risk for an increment of 5% of energy from total dietary fat intake was 0.98 (95% confidence interval: 0.95, 1.00). Additionally, specific types of fat were not associated with an increased risk of breast cancer.

Reference: Dietary Fat and Risk of Postmenopausal Breast Cancer in a 20-year Follow-up. Esther H. J. Kim, Walter C. Willett, Graham A. Colditz, Susan E. Hankinson, Meir J. Stampfer, David J. Hunter, Bernard Rosner, and Michelle D. Holmes. Am. J. Epidemiol. 2006 164: 990-997.