Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Bleeping cart

Reading the paper this morning, I learn that Microsoft and MediaCart of Plano, Texas have jointly developed an electronic console for a shopping cart. It’s supposed to offer customers their shopping list as well as a scanner to be able checkout without having to wait in line (or talk to anyone). Sounds pretty cool, until you go further: An embedded RFID tag will allow ShopRite to track their customers shopping patterns (and you were hoping nobody was watching when you doubled back for the forgotten tomato sauce). They state that this will enable them to “make the shopping experience better for the consumer.”

I’m already wary of having to not only create an electronic shopping list (I have tried this, but it’s hard to do when you’ve got your head in the freezer to see what that white lump is), but they completely lose me with the “targeted marketing.” They’re going to display a coupon for Oreos when I enter the cookie aisle, and they’re trying to figure out why I may or may not buy the product. I can think of a thousand reasons why I may not take them up on the offer, and the RFID tag isn’t going to tell them. Perhaps I buy them in bulk at the warehouse store. Perhaps I’m on a tight budget so I buy Hydrox instead. Maybe I’m allergic to wheat, and so opt for Newman’s wheat-free knockoff. Or maybe I still have a mound of Christmas cookies at home and don’t need to add any cookies to the pile. It could be that my mother-in-law live with me and bakes cookies every Tuesday afternoon, so I don’t need store-bought cookies. Maybe I just don’t like Oreos.

As an aside, I can’t help but wonder how this is supposed to enhance the experience of the harried mother. Imagine putting a control panel on the handle where a baby or toddler can push buttons at will: it’s like a remote you can’t take away from the kid, with the screen behind them, so they are constantly turning around and trying to squirm out of their seat. Moms already have to drive our cart down the center of the aisle to avoid the grab and toss: Imagine letting the kidlet scan your cottage cheese three times—and pay for it. For our family, who actively tries to avoid screen time, it’s a nightmarish scenario, and only serves to drive me away from stores who have it. The distracted mom’s seemingly random pattern tracked by the RFID (including three passes back to the dairy case and one to the bathroom) might be good for a few laughs, and might even skew the results past usefulness.

Now, instead of developing more and more complicated systems to track my behavior and extrapolate my intentions, I’m thinking of a decidedly low-tech solution (beginning with that luddite favorite, the back-of-the-envelope shopping list). Let the grocer take the time to know me, inefficiently chatting at the checkout counter. He’ll begin to get a full picture of me as a human being, not the tendencies of a demographic. Anyone who has spent any time selling their wares on a personal scale and chatting with their custom will develop an instinct that can run circles around their MediaCart console. Imagine a world where people connect with each other, instead of staring at their computer screens to figure each other out.

Monday, January 14, 2008

Melted butter

Popcorn is a staple in every college dorm. My 18th birthday present, few weeks before I went off to college, was an air popper with built-in butter melting dish, along with a jar of Orville Redenbacher kernels and a salt shaker. It was a fun ritual, plugging in this souped-up hair dryer and gathering around in our fuzzy slippers (I lived in an all-girl dorm my freshman year, at my father's insistence). We soon discovered it was easier to place a little bowl on top to melt the butter than use the poorly-designed and impossible to clean butter melter thingy. It was really fun to take the lid off and try to catch flying popcorn.

I imagine a similar scenario playing out in today's dorms, replaced by bags of microwave popcorn purchased from a mega-warehouse, with maybe even a small microwave oven for the well-heeled preppies. But there's less challenge in breaking open a wrapper and pressing the popcorn button and then trying to catch the door before you smell the burnt smell.

And now the headlines read of the horrors of the buttery flavor, diacetyl, an additive that not only doesn’t taste like real butter (think of the yellow goop in your movie snack bucket), but clogs the lungs of people exposed to it in large quantities, like popcorn factory workers, professional chefs and short-order cooks, as well as people who each huge amounts of microwave popcorn. It’s everywhere it seems—in cooking oils, butter-flavored cooking sprays and margarines.

Well, you say, at least I’m not affected, for I eat real butter. And that's what I was assuming until I kept reading. It appears that even buying real butter doesn’t shield us from diacetyl. As illogical as it sounds, most major brands of real butter contain butter flavor, including some organic brands. It’s in the list of ingredients, hidden in the ubiquitous “natural flavors” mystery ingredient.

So what’s a girl to do? At least one San Francisco restaurateur has gone so far as to start making his own butter, and the New York Times actually published his butter recipe. Registration is required to access the article, but I’m going to assume you know how to make butter. Little One can tell you how it’s done, taking turns shaking a mason jar full of cream while the bread is baking. Some adults may go more upscale, using an electric mixer. I’m even lazier, reading labels to find an organic brand whose only ingredient is cream (I buy unsalted butter, preferring to control the amount of butter in my cooking and baking).

But it looks like we've done it to ourselves again: we have taken a traditional food, made on a small scale in a traditional way, and turned it into a mass-produced food commodity. When we began to manufacture milk products, we lost the ability to skim off the cream (and have real buttermilk for biscuits and pancakes in the process); we had to buy our butter in paper-wrapped cubes. We have homogenized our milk, homogenizing in the process our society, making sure that every stick of butter tastes the same, by adding a chemical that poorly mimics nature.

So where does that leave us? In practical terms, I can still buy butter, if I’m careful, and I may even be able to find microwave popcorn that is both free of genetic modifications and diacetyl. But it would be cheaper to place a brown paper bag of bulk organic popcorn in the microwave (check out the great video and discussion at instructables). It turns out it’s considerably cheaper, and it’s much more fun, especially if you have fuzzy slippers and some friends to share it with.

Sunday, January 13, 2008

Pound with friends

It was a pretty typical Saturday, with running Number One around to cello doings, and Little One helping his papa call the Vaterland and do a (very) little housework. We had an invitation from a co-worker to come to a mochi-tsuki, so we headed over after orchestra, arriving at the Evil Empire just in time to see Darling Husband swinging the mallet. A hand-written poster outlined the process for those who weren’t familiar with it: Mochi-tsuki is a new year’s activity, where sweet rice is steamed and pounded "with friends" using mammoth wooden mallets (kine). The action centers around the massive granite mortar (usu): big burly young men, a trio of delicate women, little kids with papas shadowing, everyone takes part. It’s enormously entertaining, with the mochi master yelling instructions and spectators chanting as the pounders take turns, “ichi, ni, san, shi!” (“one, two, three, four!”). To change things up, the master will call on one person (invariably a broad-shouldered man) and they alternate in quick succession: the mallet smashes down with a satisfying splat, the master reaches in and moistens or turns the sticky mass with his hands while the mallet is on the upstroke, pulling them out just before it descends. Miraculously, no fingers are crushed, and the sticky white lump is eventually handed over to the women-folk, who form the mochi balls, much like we form dinner rolls, and distribute them to eager hands.

Historically, rice was a valuable commodity, and so it was that the community came together to pound the rice balls to insure a prosperous new year. It’s clearly too much of an undertaking for a single person. After a turn swinging the mallet, you need to catch your breath: if you had to pound it alone, it would get cold, and mochi is best eaten warm. So here they were, families wearing polar fleece and jeans, with card keys dangling from their lanyards, pounding and chanting and laughing, while little children ran around, dads snapped pictures and older kids helped out here and there. Number One had a go with the mallet, and said it would be fun even without the end product, but I disagree: the communal energy that went into the mochi made plain rice delicious.


***

Back on the home front, Darling Husband scored the better part of a rather large cedar tree from some friends. This time it was cut into rounds (buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about the time he scored a whole tree), but it still needed to be split. We all took turns helping as we could, swinging the ax, pounding the wedges, carting and stacking wood. An oddly familiar gesture, perhaps firewood-tsuki? Yes it was fun, but as I stacked it, I was reminded of the adage that wood heats twice: once when you burn it, and once when you chop it. With friends.