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An Economist Gets Lunch : New Rules for Everyday Foodies
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AN ECONOMIST GETS LUNCH : New Rules for Everyday Foodies

Tyler Cowen
WELL USED, PAPERBACK
Tyler Cowen
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM13.00

A Quirky Look At Food Bargains And Dining Out Through An Economic Lens

Remarks Free Cover-Pages Wrapping
ISBN 9780452298842
Book Condition WELL USED
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc (Plume)
Publication Date 04 Jul 2013
Pages 294
Weight 0.30 kg
Dimension 20.5 × 14 × 2 cm
Availability: 2 in stock

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2 in stock

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Description

“AN ECONOMIST GETS LUNCH” is basically like Freakonomics for foodies – it takes a contrary approach to finding delicious, authentic, and cheap food. Provocative, incisive, and as enjoyable as a juicy, grass-fed burger, An Economist Gets Lunch will influence what you’ll choose to eat today and how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.
 
Tyler Cowen, one of the most influential economists of the last decade, wants you to know that just about everything you’ve heard about how to get good food is wrong. It focuses on distinguishing the behaviors of the everyday foodie from those of the food snob and the thoughtless consumer.
 
Cowen believes that great food doesn’t have to come from the most expensive restaurants. You can find great eats in cities all over the world, and he offers interesting ways to suss out those hidden gems. Just a few examples: When getting a taxi at an airport in a big city, pick an old cab driver– he’s likely to know the city well– and ask him where he himself likes to eat. Chances are, he’ll lead you someplace affordable and delicious.
 
Cowen does readers and mindful eaters a great service by explaining both the positive and negative effects of America’s food supply chain. He also provides guidelines to help the reader make every meal count, realize that good food is often cheap food, and to be innovative as consumers.


Drawing on a provocative range of examples from around the globe, Cowen reveals why airplane food is bad, but airport food is improving, why restaurants full of happy, attractive people usually serve mediocre meals, and why American food has improved as Americans drink more wine. At a time when obesity is on the rise and forty-four million Americans receive food stamps, An Economist Gets Lunch will revolutionize the way we eat today—and show us how we’re going to feed the world tomorrow.
 
Americans are on a crusade against agribusiness. They demand local, organic, humanely raised food that hasn’t been mass-produced or scientifically modified. While many shoppers willingly pay much more for such food, some can barely afford even the shipped-in, pesticide-laden, obesity-inducing processed food they’re eating now.
 
The food industry is capitalizing on trendy demands by creating green supermarkets and eateries that eagerly accept every dollar consumers want to spend. From a global, historical and economic perspective, the choice isn’t between good, costly food and bad, cheap food; it’s between consumer education and marketing hype.
 
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.
 
This gutsy philosophical book explains the damage American food trends are doing to the global economy. Because he is a foodie himself, with a doctorate in economics from Harvard, readers may take Cowen seriously when he throws good-natured jabs at locavores, food snobs and slow-food advocates. He believes politicians and marketing folks with hidden agendas are duping everyone, so if you’re doing more harm than good by buying local, organic food, you’re not entirely to blame
 
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.
 
But what many readers loved about this book was its tips for finding good places in any city, and its emphasis on the power that we have as consumers to choose and shop and cook for ourselves. Maybe you want to find a good Chinese (or Indian, or Mexican) restaurant in your town, or in a city you’re visiting soon. Or maybe you want to find some high quality, low cost ingredients to whip up a meal in your own kitchen. Either way, you CAN eat well without spending a fortune. That’s something many believed for years, and it was invigorating to read someone else’s tips for doing that very thing.
 
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KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
Food and economics meet in this entertainment by celebrity economist Cowen.
 
A celebrity economist? Yes, for Cowen is widely hailed for his smarter-than-freakonomics, libertarian-inclined economics blog Marginal Revolution on one hand and his D.C.-centric blog Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide on the other.
 
Here he blends the best of both those worlds. If you’ve heard of the free-rider problem in economics, where leeches benefit from the productivity of others, then here’s a twist: “the wealthy and the myopic are the friend and supporter of the non-drinking gourmand.”
 
In other words, the knowing customer may well choose to avoid drinking anything other than water, knowing both that the markup on alcohol and soda is astronomical and that those who buy such things effectively lower the tariff on the price of a meal, where the margins are slimmer.
 
In economic terms, this “price discrimination” favors the teetotaler, and with nary a hint of moralizing. Cowen stops short of formulas and equations, but there’s plenty of hard, old-fashioned economic thinking in these pages—e.g., the power of immigration to improve cuisine and the bewildering array of food choices we have today as one of the blessings of free-market capitalism.
 
Cowen is also prepared to go into the fray as a mild-mannered version of Anthony Bourdain. He writes that one shouldn’t Google “Best restaurants Washington” but instead “Washington best cauliflower dish” if one wants to escape the awfully ordinary, and he counsels that the best barbecue is to be found in small towns in joints that open and close early.
 
The narrative gets a touch repetitive at points, but if you’re a foodie with a calculator, this is your book.
 
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About the Author :
 
Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a prominent blogger at marginalrevolution.com, the world’s leading economics blog. He also writes regularly for The New York Times, and has written for Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly.

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