The Tricky Economics Of All-You-Can-Eat Buffets
For a small fee, you’re granted unencumbered access to a wonderland of gluttony. Is it possible to out-eat the price you pay for a buffet? How do these places make money? We looked at the dollars and cents behind the meat and potatoes.
A Vision For Agriculture
Allowing cows out to harvest their own feed and spread their own manure is the most profitable means of producing meat and milk. But, somehow, agricultural science has encouraged farmers to mount a treadmill of increasing yields of milk or meat by increasing the amount of production per unit input.
What Fruits And Vegetables Looked Like Before Humans Intervened
The fruits and vegetables we know and love are a lot more complicated than you’d think. They didn’t always look like they do. In fact, it took decades of human intervention to transform them into the delicious, nutrient-rich morsels they are today.
OK Soda Marketing History: Not Good, Not Bad, Just OK
A quarter-century ago, a really big soda company attempted to subvert itself to reach Gen X. The problem? Coca-Cola’s OK Soda was a couple of decades too early. The story about The Coca Cola Company’s failed attempts to use irony, disenfranchisement, and disillusionment to sell us subpar soda.
How To Trick People Into Saving Money
Walmart has an incentive to become the place people think about when they think of their financial future. Inside Walmart’s curious, possibly ingenious effort to get customers to build up their savings accounts.
The Dictatorship Of Data
Big data is poised to transform society. Yet big data also exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think. Nothing underscores the consequences of data analysis gone awry more than the story of Robert McNamara.
Why A Struggling Rust Belt City Pinned Its Revival On A Self-chilling Beverage Can
Welcome to Youngstown, Ohio, home of Chill-Can, the self-chilling beverage container you’ve probably never heard of. Officials have gambled millions of dollars and demolished a neighborhood for the product. Not one job has been created yet.
How Our Definition Of Middle Class Has–And Hasn’t–Changed In 100 Years
Some of the cultural markers associated with the middle class–like education–have shifted. But its aspirations? Not so much.
Please Do Not Try To Survive On An All-Meat Diet
If your love of ribeye knows no bounds, perhaps you’d be interested in the carnivore diet. However, you need 13 vitamins in order to live, and though you can actually get most of them from eating a variety of meats, you’re going to miss out on some crucial ones if you totally forego flora.
Eating The Arab Roots Of Sicilian Cuisine
Seen from the sky, the island appears as a triangularish football being punted toward the Maghreb by Italy’s boot. It’s a pixelated reflection of Sicilian identity itself, which hovers midway between North African and European. For Sicilians, mal d’Africa is a kind of phantom continent syndrome, a sense of nostalgia for a lost homeland.
How An Obsession With Home Ownership Can Ruin The Economy
Many dream of owning their own home, and thanks to huge financial incentives in the rich world many have been able to so. But government policies to encourage home ownership were a huge mistake.
The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America
In one of the best decades the American economy has ever recorded, families were bled dry by landlords, hospital administrators, university bursars, and child-care centers. For millions, a roaring economy felt precarious or downright terrible.
Why Is There Still Poverty In America?
In America almost 40m people—one eighth of its population—live in poverty. Why does the richest big country in the world still have so many people living in profound need?
The Dark History Of How Coffee Took Over The World
Four hundred years ago, Coffea arabica, a tropical shrub bearing glossy green leaves and bright-red berries, was virtually unknown outside of the Arab world and the corner of Ethiopia where it had been discovered in the ninth century.
Air Co’s Vodka Is Made Out Of Carbon Dioxide Pulled From The Atmosphere
To bring the spirit in-line with its contemporaries, Air Co. has applied a process that converts air-based carbons into pure ethanol using a proprietary, solar-based electrical procedure. The result? An 80-proof vodka that looks, tastes, and feels like the traditional spirit, but with a reduced environmental impact due to its specialized “distillation” process.
How Eating Alone Is Radically Changing Our Diets
Eating alone has become a defining feature of modern life: the breakfasting commuter; the household members with conflicting schedules; the widower who receives few visitors.
Sperm, Skulls And Scandal… The Hidden History Of Coffee
Sperm, skulls and scandal… who knew coffee had such a dark history! Food historian Annie Gray reveals the hidden history of coffee.
The War On Coffee
Epicurean coffeehouses in the United States numbered in the hundreds in 1989, and in the tens of thousands by 2013. A lot of that is Starbucks, but not all. Roasters in Italy went from exporting twelve million kilograms of espresso in 1988 to more than a hundred and seventy million in 2015.
Will An All-Meat Diet Kill You Or Cure You?
In anecdotal testimonials, people say that eating an all-meat diet helped them drop 10, 20, 40, 80 pounds and cured them of depression, fatigue, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, joint pain, and insomnia. How is this possible? And what is going on in these people’s intestines and arteries?
Meet The Bag Man: 10 Rules For Paying College Football Players
How to buy college football players, in the words of men who deliver the money. These men are fans who believe they’re leveraging football success $500 or $50,000 at a time.
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong
Nearly half of 3- to 6- year old girls say they worry about being fat. For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public perception and ruining millions of lives. It’s time for a new paradigm.