FOOD 49 Dealing with Failure

November 1, 2007

Dealing with personal failure is one of the great struggles of growing up. When we are young, the possibilities seem without limit, but as the years pass, we face every manner of barrier that causes us to be all too aware that we face a world with many constraints, many of them due to the limits of the temporal world but also, we must admit, many of them due to our own inadequacies.

I’m thinking in particular of my great failure to become a heavy drinker—I mean a serious, quaff-it-down-every-night, devil-may-care kind of drinker. I think back to when I was a young man, and how I split the world between two types of people: those who seriously drink, managing their lives well and enjoying every minute; and the other type who have a “glass of wine at dinner” but nothing else.

How I heaped disdain on the latter type—those puritans who poured up a tiny glass for purely functional purposes only, such as to “relax after a hard day’s work,” or to “cleanse the palate during dinner.” How they collected bottles and talked so sweetly about vintages and labels and smelled their wine long and hard. How pathetic!

At dinner parties, some well-dressed man would refuse a cocktail—you might as well not come at all—and then lovingly take little sips of grape extract with the meal. When the host or hostess offers to pour another glass, the gesture arrives: the hand over the glass! It’s as if to say: I refuse to live robustly as part of this gang. I’m too weak, too precious, to handle more.

So many of our influences in life are of a negative kind, people we observe and swear: I will never be like that. But I’m here to confess that I am indeed like that. It is not something I ever wanted. I wanted to be that other man who drank two double scotches before dinner, two or three glasses of wine during dinner, a brandy after dinner, and finally some peculiar liqueur with dessert.

If I drank like that now, I would be in intensive care and miss work for weeks.

I’m not entirely sure when the softening and compromises set in. Instead of two highballs before dinner, I would secretly and inauspiciously have one. Then during dinner, I started to drink more slowly and then use water to quench dinner thirst—a very bad sign. Then the whole brandy thing was cut, as was the fancy liqueur bit. Once I gave up the before-dinner liquor, it was straight into the abyss.

In the course of all of this, there were people who said that the problem was that I was relenting and thereby becoming less tolerant of alcohol. I was digging my own grave, so to speak. So I tried to prevent this by deliberately drinking more than I wanted in hopes of increasing my tolerance. Maybe I had to go through several weeks of not feeling well in the morning before I could restore my old level. Sadly, this didn’t work at all.

Eventually I gave in to reality and my own defeat. I became what I had once rightly loathed.

My second major failure in life deals with my lifetime ambition to be a heavy smoker until I died. Here I had many positive influences. These influences were from all classes of people. I’ve seen men in their eighties who were still pack-a-day smokers. Because they smoked so late in life, they still looked cool. They were good conversationalists because smoking gave them time to think before they spoke. I recall a banker who smoked and looked like a 1930s movie star well into his dotage. Then there was a coal miner who rolled his own cigarettes until his nineties. Every puff seemed to reveal a personal biography of courage and strength in hard times, and a marvelous and manly fighting spirit. He just had a way about him that was fabulous, and that cigarette seemed to sum it all up. Such style!

Like most smokers, I had a promising start when I was young, though of course it was a struggle at first. When you first start, you can’t smoke more than five a day without gagging. But gradually, you can increase that to 10 and finally, to the real goal, a pack a day. This I achieved in less than six months. I vowed to keep this up until the last day.

You can only imagine my thrill when I bumped it up further to two packs a day, and finally three. Now, I admit that my bragging rights are limited since I tended to light up incessantly and most of these cigarettes burned up in the ash tray. Even so, I was well on my way toward achieving my dream.

At some point, however, problems began to set in. There were rules, of course, about smoking in the office, and these rules tightened over time. Then the airline restrictions came along. Then restrictions in restaurants. But as much as I hated the state for curbing my ambitions, there was a more fundamental problem developing: my lungs just couldn’t take it anymore.

Of course I was in denial, but as the bouts of coughing and sickness increased, I finally had to face the fact that there was a problem. No, I didn’t stop altogether. First I smoked a pipe. Now here was a new image that worked just fine! But all that apparatus—the cleaners, the bag of tobacco, the special lighter, the dirty fingers, and bulky pipe itself—became an annoyance. So next came: the cigar! But this introduced other problems. The expense was prohibitive and, frankly, people hated the smell.

Eventually, and much to my dread, I had to face the fact that I would have to quit it altogether. It was a humbling moment but an unavoidable one.

I share all of this in the hope of helping others who have faced similar defeats, and letting them know that they are not alone. We all stumble.

Perhaps too there are lessons here in avoiding defeat itself. Perhaps there is a way to work up to becoming a lifetime heavy drinker and smoker by taking it all at a slower pace.

Perhaps one should set a schedule, and only hope to achieve the height at the age of 60, or something like that.

And a key question will always haunt me: perhaps I should have started smoking and drinking earlier, before I was fully grown. Perhaps then my bodily system might have become more accustomed to the habit and not reacted so negatively by the time I turned 30. Then I might have kept it up until a blessed old age.

Always remember that there is no better time for smoking and drinking than when you are young, when your system can handle it. As you grow older, you never know the ways in which the body will fight back against your dreams to smoke and drink heavily forever.

In any case, there is no sense in giving up hope. There is still the great lift that comes from observing others who have not similarly failed but rather stayed attached to their ideals. Nor will I give up hope in myself. To paraphrase someone, I’m no failure because I’m not yet dead.

50

Fortune Cookie Economics

August 28, 2006

Have you noticed how the texts of the “fortunes” in fortune cookies seem to be improving? In contrast to the old days when the fortune was a mere throw-away, these days, the language is clearer. The thoughts are more profound. Some of them are real keepers.

Is this a consequence of China’s having become more capitalistic?

While I can’t comment on the “lucky numbers” printed on them—who knows?—the last four fortunes I received in my cookies just astounded me with their erudition (even without adding any words at the end of them). Indeed they seemed to sum up the essence of core postulates of Austrian Economics!

Let’s see, and keep in mind that these are real.

Now, here we have a popular summary of the subjective theory of value. Value is not embedded in the material properties of any good or service. Neither does a thing acquire value merely because labor was employed to create it. Value is not dictated by the production process or social conditioning. An economic good is valued because an individual mind values it. It is a product of the human mind.

As Menger says:

Value is therefore nothing inherent in goods, no property of them, but merely the importance that we first attribute to the satisfaction of our needs, that is, to our lives and well-being, and in consequence carry over to economic goods as the exclusive causes of the satisfaction of our needs.

Next we come to a further condition that affects economic valuation:

Admittedly, this fortune is not quite as scientific but it makes a good point. Prices are the result of the interaction of subjective valuation and objective conditions of the relative availability of a good. They represent a historical record of trades that have already taken place. They do not and cannot dictate the future.

And yet even given a good with a certain price on the market, the desirability of a good cannot be imposed on others. It must be adopted and accepted by buyers, who assess prices based on individual usefulness.

Or as Mises says,

It is ultimately always the subjective value judgments of individuals that determine the formation of prices…. The concept of a “just” or “fair” price is devoid of any scientific meaning; it is a disguise for wishes, a striving for a state of affairs different from reality. Market prices are entirely determined by the value judgments of men as they really act.

So let us accept the fortune cookie’s implied claim that past data cannot somehow dictate our actions and therefore the future. The market is always looking forward. Our actions to buy or sell or invest or save are always a speculation, a judgment call. Nowhere is this more clear than in the institution of entrepreneurship, about which the next fortune speaks:

Given the forward-looking nature of the market process, and the human desire for economic development, there must be individuals who can imagine a future that is yet to be experienced, invest real resources in seeing their judgment come to pass in the production process, and thereby enjoy the rewards to come from profitability. This person is the entrepreneur-capitalist: the dreamer who imagines a possible future and then commits real resources to making that future happen.

The market process does not stop with one entrepreneurial success. Profits call forth emulators, people attracted to a certain idea or sector because a good or service is yielding high profits. For example, if a software entrepreneur comes up with an excellent anti-spyware program and becomes rich, others will take notice and enter the market and provide competition.

The method of success becomes part of the social store of knowledge that others are free to acquire and employ for their own use. As more producers enter the market, the result will be lower prices (if nothing else changes) and reduced profits for each producer.

In short, the successful entrepreneur will attract many people who strive to be just like him. His sucess in making his dreams become reality provides a model for others who do the same. Following the text of the fortune, we can call these people “friends.”

The fortune is already ahead of us here, because it also speaks the reality of losses. Let us never forget that capitalism is not only about profits, which win friends. As Rothbard says, entrepreneurs also face the prospect of losses, sometimes big losses. When this happens, people flee our adversity. We lose our friends. We are humbled, and learn from our errors. We then look to others who are making profits and follow their ways, and the process continues without end, to the continual improvement of our standard of living.

If China’s path to economic development continues on an upward path, can we expect ever-increasing economic sophistication from fortune cookies? I heartily await other fortunes that discuss capital theory, interest rates, the business cycle, and perhaps even price controls. If some entrepreneur wants to take the risk and create them, and I find them in my next set of cookies, I promise to scan them and make them famous. In your prosperity, your friends will know you.

51

Pound for Pound

September 28, 2005

There’s a sense these days that anyone would favor a pie over a cake, and I think I know why. Pies don’t tempt household cooks to scrimp on ingredients. That’s why pies generally taste better.

If it’s apples, it’s apples, and most people don’t think a half a cup of sugar in something is “too much.” So it is for lemon and blueberry and a host of other pies made from fruit. As for the seasonal pumpkin pie, it’s just vegetables in a crust, so who is to complain? Even pecan lives in the age of the decline of dessert, since most people think corn syrup is not objectionable, even if the pecan pie requires two cups.

But cake? People don’t have the stomach to make a good one anymore. So we buy ice-cream “cakes” for birthdays for kids and otherwise don’t bother. When people do bother to bake a cake, they succumb to the temptation to substitute ingredients. Instead of butter, they use margarine or mezoline spreads of whipped smear stuff of some sort or another. And then they cut back the sugar, and use strange sugar-like chemicals. And perhaps instead of eggs, its “egg beaters” or who-knows-what. Pretty soon, there’s nothing left but a vague cake-shaped object.

The cake seems to have fallen on hard times indeed! We eat them when we are at buffets and civic events when they are available on paper plates, but that’s because we weren’t there to see them being made. Cakes have become like sausage: we love it but don’t want to know about the process, much less undertake it ourselves.

This is why the world’s greatest cake—I speak of the pound cake of course—is so hard to come by in American homes these days. It is contrary to the prevailing ethos, which is all about “substitutes” rather than the real thing. We spritz our pans with veggie oil rather than lard them as we should. We use fractioned rather than whole milk. We fear flour as if it is poison.

Modern civilization has given us glorious ingredients at our fingertips, all of us wherever we are, and what do we do but ungratefully spurn them all as if real food is nothing but a conspiracy to cut our lives short. Then when nature calls us to eat as we should, we give in to temptation and eat ice cream and candy bars in private as if we are partaking in secret sins.

What a dreadful life this puritanical attitude of mind leads to!

The pound cake is the key to breaking this cycle of false piety followed by guilt. It is the cake that embraces our age and says yes to life and love.

To begin with, you have to appreciate a food with a history to its name. In the middle ages, the term cake itself referred to a bread that was sweetened. According to this history, the pound cake dates to the early 18th century, and was favored because its ingredients were easy to remember: one pound each of four things. It was improved immeasurably (in my view) by the invention of rising agents in the 19th century.

Then it became an international food.

In France: Gâteau Quatre-Quarts.

In Spain: Queque Seco.

In Germany: Sandkuchen

Traditions, even international ones stretching back centuries, are great but never decisive. What convinces you of the pound cake’s magnificence is the tasting. Here we have the perfect dessert treat. It is subtle, balanced, and robust. The texture is spongy but not flaky. It is moist without having the uncooked pudding-like quality you get from those “extra-moist” box jobs you buy at the store. Nor it is puffy and dry as so many homemade cakes can be (a result of pulling back on essential ingredients).

The other stopping point for many people today is the name pound cake, which sounds like something that will put on pounds. It might as well be called calorie cake or scale-busting cake or make-you-fat cake.

So let us be clear: the pound part refers not to its effects but to its ingredients. Now, to be sure, making it is not for the faint of heart.

Pound one: You know those boxes of butter that have four sticks of butter in them? You will use the whole box.

Pound number two: Do you know how much sugar is required to weigh in at a pound? Two cups.

Pound number three: Are you worried about your cholesterol intake from too many eggs? This cake requires half a dozen. That’s half a carton.

Pound number four: Flour, Dr. Atkins, and three full cups!

If that sounds alarming to you, and you aren’t prepared to face the reality that making something astonishingly delicious requires these ingredients, do not read further. If you would rule out making this just on grounds of its decadent ingredients alone, drop out of this article right now. You can continue to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution, as is your right.

But for those who want to take history in their hands and help bend it back toward sanity in cooking and taste in eating, the pound cake can recapture our history and lead us to the future.

The pound cake can be eaten by itself, or with coffee or hot chocolate. It can have a side of sweetened fruit or ice cream. It can be glazed with sugar or merely dusted with powered sugar. It can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or after dinner. Can you imagine this as a midnight snack? Even the thinnest slice is satisfying.

After trying other variations, here is the one I settled on (pounds rendered here as normal measurements):

Mixed dry ingredients: 3 cups flour, ½ tsp. salt, ½ tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. baking powder, 2 cups of sugar. Pour in 4 sticks of melted butter, 2 tsps. vanilla, and stir lightly. Add ½ cup of sour cream, ¼ cup milk, and six eggs. Blend on slow. Bake in tube pan, buttered and floured, at 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until toothpick comes out clean. Cool for half an hour.

Now I ask you: wouldn’t you choose this cake over a pie?

52

The Work of Human Hands

October 9, 2002

War is coming, we’re still in recession, the public is still angry about 9-11 (hey, is all this connected?), so we must do something to rekindle a sense of joy in our own private lives. But what? What people on the home front have always done: throw themselves into the domestic arts, preferably something that is beyond the time and connects us with ancient truth. For my part, it is all about bread.

I know that bread is out and meat is in. In the Age of Atkins, bread is the great taboo, the thing that puts inches on your frame. Anti-breadism runs rampant.

And yet, we must keep some perspective here. Some things in life are not dispensable, no matter what the dietary trends. Bread is among them. Man cannot live on it alone, but it isn’t called the staff of life for nothing. It is the substance Christ chose to become, through the sacrament of communion, His own Body. Surely that means something.

We should not contemplate life without bread any more than we should imagine living without wine, the choice of which to become Precious Blood makes Prohibition and teetotalism radically objectionable.

Once you accept the inevitability of bread, that it must be fresh from your own kitchen is proven by a taste test of the greatest store bread against bread from even a moderately good home baker. The results speak for themselves.

Now, quick breads have much to recommend them. I favor the mix from the old (and out of print) Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (10 cups flour, 2 cups lard (yes, lard), ⅓ cup baking powder, one-quarter cup sugar, some salt) , which turns into biscuits, pancakes, or muffins in no time. This repertoire is a regional favorite, and the kids love it. It is quick, easy, and versatile.

I don’t know if other quick-bread people are the same way, but I’ve found the prospect of cooking with yeast intimidating. In college, I thought I had it all figured out. On Sundays, I would make six loaves of bread, eat one, and give the rest away. But it only took one bad experience in a mucky coastal town (the bread wouldn’t rise!) and I gave it up.

But social and political calamity calls for taking new risks. So, yeast bread it is. And yeast is all about giving life and avoiding death that comes from the wrong temperature. We are fortunate nowadays to have access to electronic temperature checkers. For those of us without infallible wrist-based temperature gauges, these are a godsend for getting the yeast to 100 degrees and the milk-sugar-butter mixture to 110 degrees before the addition of eggs cools it down a bit more. One mistake can kill the yeast, so the gadgetry is a help.

What kind of bread? This is the real glory: the ritual of the dough itself. Once you understand it, and can make this part, anything is possible. Baguettes? Sure. Cinnamon rolls? Homemade are the best. Or make just plain white bread, eat a slice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and French toast tomorrow morning. Somehow, just the smell of it provides comfort and security, a sense that all is right in the home even if not in the world.

And as much as we love technology, as much as we favor time-saving devices, ideally bread should be the work of human hands. The mixing and kneading is the very essence of what bread making is all about. Turn the job over to a machine, and you drain the entire exercise of life and joy. Why not just buy bread at the store?

When you give some of your bread away (as you should), you don’t really want to say that you used a bread machine, do you? You want to say that you mixed and kneaded it yourself. And why does this please people? Because it suggests integrity and truth, that you care enough to mix your labor with basic ingredients to generate a new creation, and do this for another as a pious act of generosity.

We have all seen those flour commercials that claim that this or that product gives you confidence in what you cook. Perhaps. But it’s not really the product that matters. It is the doing itself. When you make bread, you are given a sense of extraordinary accomplishment, as if you have conjured up something spectacular out of nothing. This sense spills over to life itself, granting you an overall confidence, the belief that whatever else is going on around you, you have within you the capacity to create glorious things, things that rise and grow and become something completely new and life-sustaining.

I’m sorry, but quick-bread just doesn’t have these mystical properties. Neither, for that matter, do meats and vegetables. Bread alone among all foods seems to touch the very soul of man and contains within it the power to remake our spirits and bring us life.

Make one loaf, one pan of cinnamon rolls, one baguette, and you have a vision of yourself doing it every week, or every day. It seems possible.

Anything seems possible. Making bread all the time could become a part of the liturgy of life, and then—and then—you are complete. Though the politicians call for war, the stock market sinks, the terrorists plot, as a baker of bread you are the bringer of life and health and happiness to yourself and the world of your own choosing.

53

Bring Back the Breakfast Drink

July 16, 2005

Everyone knows the rule: drink no liquor before noon. How insufferable such advice is! It has caused morning drinkers to hide their habits, deny them when confronted, and otherwise feel like they are doing something wrong or immoral or socially intolerable, a combination which leads to other forms of pathology.

It is time for them to stand up and proclaim themselves and their habit as the noble act that it is. All over the world, there exists a grand tradition of including a bit of spirits with one’s breakfast, or at least a bit of beer or wine. How tragic that those who struggle mightily to uphold this practice are reduced to doing so alone, enjoying their pleasure only in the privacy of their own kitchen for fear of inviting public humiliation.

I was reminded of this tradition recently when a friend—a brilliant and productive young composer and musicologist who has to remain nameless—partook in his favorite breakfast, which he does every day insofar as it is possible. The food part is simple: a chocolate cake donut, with or without icing. The drink part: a pint of Guinness Stout. The method: dip the donut in the stout and chomp it down. It is the adult version of the child’s milk and cookies trick.

Splendid!

It turns out that in the sweep of history, when water was not always safe and orange juice rarely accessible, this practice of morning drinking was the norm for all classes in society, and remained so for the upper classes far into the modern age. We forget that coffee and tea are relatively modern by comparison. In the middle ages, the typical British breakfast always included a mug of ale or wine.

In the South today, the tradition seems to bypass the middle class completely and last only among the truly well-formed working class blacks and upper class white aristocrats. A maintenance man I knew would never touch the “government’s liquor” but he would never start a day without a nice swig of his favorite moonshine.

I tried it once and it took two days for my lips to feel normal again! But he managed it quite well, worked hard, and had a great life.

Also, I know a delightfully old-world Southern gentleman who lives in an antebellum house and studies Holy Scripture every morning, the original Greek and Hebrew, and does this before he ever picks up the newspaper. His theory is that mornings are not for rushing around but rather contemplation of higher things.

One day I came during these early hours just for quick visit, and he invited me in.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Jeffrey?” he asked.

“Yes sir, I would, thank you,” I said.

Then he paused and said, with an impossibly charming flash in his eyes:

“Would you like some bourbon in that coffee?”

Well, of course I would! And so it was done.

Today most breakfast drinking takes place on airplanes. Why? Because we are surrounded by people we are not likely to see again, and so we feel a sense of freedom from artificial social impositions. If you think about it, once the silly taboo against breakfast drinking is crushed, many possibilities present themselves.

If you ask people their favorite breakfast drinks, and press the issue, you eventually find that in addition to the ones above, these are the best beloved:

The Bloody Mary: It is made from a jigger and a half of vodka, a few drops of Tabasco sauce, 3 jiggers of tomato juice, pepper, some lemon juice, salt, and a bit of Worcestershire sauce.

The mimosa: champagne and orange juice to taste. But actually you can add champagne to any fruit juice and create an amazingly festive break of day. It’s unclear precisely what makes the difference, but I have a theory that it is just the popping of the champagne cork first thing in the morning. You can try this at home. Wake up late, shower, and then pull out and open a chilled bottle. The action alone creates a bigger rush than you can get from any evening martini.

Both of these drinks today are called “doghair drinks” as in the old saying that one should eat a bit of the hair of the dog that bit you. Strange saying, but it refers to the idea that one should have a bit more of the same drink of which you drank too much the night before, all toward the goal of curing the hangover.

Do you see what is happening here? The breakfast drink is being snuck in under the label of medicine as a way of evading the social taboo against liquor before noon. That’s just silly. You don’t need an excuse, particularly not a medicinal one. You can have a Bloody Mary or a mimosa anytime!

Along the same lines there is rum and 7-Up, rum and apple cider, and this interesting one just called “the breakfast drink”: jigger vodka, jigger peach schnapps, cup of orange juice, 2 jiggers raspberry liqueur, ½ cup of collins mix. Fascinating!

For all the wonders and complications of that latter suggestion, I still can’t get past the simplicity and clarity of my favorite of all time: a small glass of port wine.

Maybe it is an age thing. I like the idea of the Guinness, the courage it takes to drink moonshine, the fussiness that comes with a mimosa, the bold stroke of the Bloody Mary, and the sheer decadence associated with “the breakfast drink” but somehow the clarity and stability of the glass of port—which recalls the glory of colonial America—seems just right and just what is needed to join the movement to smash this ridiculous taboo against morning drinking.

A final note on a frequent objection: morning drinking diminishes one’s productivity during the day. This is true, of course, but particularly for adults who process liquor more slowly. This underscores a point that cannot be emphasized enough: like smoking, morning drinking is particularly suited for the young, meaning under the age of 25. Their systems are robust and can handle it better. Don’t waste your youth: it is up to you to bring back the breakfast drink!