Some thoughts.
I’m guessing that I’m in Megan’s class when it comes to the number owned, but I also rare use them any more. It really is a lot easier to just look up a recipe on the web with a netbook on the kitchen counter. I mainly use them for traditional recipes that I’ve made for years for special occasions, like holidays (I’ve been using the New York Times cookbook for decades). Also, most cookbooks I have don’t do well with a paleolithic diet.
My favorite is How to Serve Man.
Plagiarized here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act
Some are classics. My favorite is The Vincent Price Cookbook, which my wife gave me on our first anniversary (a mint first edition). Price took the top recipes from all of the five star restaurants he frequented, and published them along with the menus from those restaurants. It has not only the original recipe for Steak Diane, but a menu showing the price of a Maine lobster in 1963 New York at $2.50.
Then there’s a ccokbook I have which gives an absolutely foolproof recipe for roast beef. I’ve never found the equivalent anywhere, and it is exquisitely simple.
There are gems out there. Of course, the web has even more. Look up “bacon jam” sometime. It is awesome!
Most of the material available on the web is either dated or amateurish. I buy cookbooks because their recipes are restaurant-quality dishes, and often even Michelin-star quality. Most of the recipes on the web are fine…for my grandma. Yes, some recipes from new cookbooks do trickle out onto the web, at least eventually. But it is far from exhaustive. I just purchased a cookbook that has 400+ recipes (Modernist Cuisine at Home), you might be able to google around and find maybe a half dozen of these recipes. And cookbooks are more than recipes, they also discuss important techniques and other related advice.
And, as Megan McArdle points out, only the newest cookbooks have recipes that incorporate sous vide, which we use extensively. Information on the web for sous vide is harder to come by, and is hit and miss.
As for those of us on a paleo diet, I haven’t had too much problem adapting the vast majority of recipes to a paleo or low-carb version. There are, in fact, modern techniques and ingredients now available that, in fact, help modify or replace flour, grains, starches, and sugar. For instance, we use xanthan gum to thicken stews and sauces, replacing flour and roux. Don’t want to use starch to set your casserole? Use agar agar. And I know we all miss noodles, there are in fact ways to make flourless, grainless, and, in fact, zero carbohydrate noodles (Wylie Dusfrene’s shrimp noodles, for instance). There is even a replacement for gluten available now (Wellence).
I don’t usually buy the newest cookbooks, but for the cookbooks I own, most of the recipes do seem to be available on the web. The problem is one of trust and quality control. Neither the poster nor the original source is identified in many cases. Some recipes have transcription or errors or deliberate modifications. Some of those might be improvements, others might be mistakes.
I’m fascinated that xantham gum, invented in 1960, is considered “paleo.”
On the Paleo Diet Lifestyle website, I see recipes for coffee-flavored chocolate mousse, mussels in white wine sauce, herb scones — I’m pretty sure there’s no archeological evidence that cavemen ate any of those things. It appears that “paleolithic,” like “organic,” is a marketing term that has little to do with its scientific meaning.
I think you’re taking the phrase a little too literally. Do you expect us to eat carrion, too?
As the Scientific American article points out, your ancestors probably weren’t fighting off many lions and hyenas to get carrion.
But yes, if you truly believe the Paleo hypothesis that the human body evolved to fit the diet X,000 years ago and is perfectly optimized for that diet, then you ought to follow it literally to get the benefits — because genes are literal.
If your genetic makeup require a diet of truffles, chocolate truffles are not likely to be interchangeable. 🙂
If you want to make exceptions for foods you like, that’s fine, but then you have little grounds to criticize others for doing the same with foods they like.
It’s better to eat a good diet, with some exceptions, than to eat a lousy diet. This isn’t hard, Ed.
“Some” exceptions? Accepting your hypothesis that Paleolithic humans ate a “good” diet, rather than a survival diet, 98% of the recipes on the Paleo Diet Lifestyle website would have been impossible in Paleolithic times. That’s a lot of exceptions.
The “Paleolithic diet” seems to be about as close to the real thing as the “Medieval” food at the Renn Faire.
This is getting ridiculous. No one is proposing that one restrict one’s diet to only that available to cavemen. The point is to eat as much as you want of foods that are good for you, and to avoid as much as possible those that aren’t, and if you want to indulge, just be aware of it. The more you do this, the healthier you’ll be.
98% of the recipes on the Paleo Diet Lifestyle website would have been impossible in Paleolithic times
Those paleo’s didn’t have data that indicates cholesterol and blood pressure have meaningful relationships to life expectancy. To ignore the data, which is an option that they never had, but we do, is probably something even they wouldn’t do.
Also, biologists point out that the evolution of the human digestive system did not begin and end with Homo erectus or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or whatever other magic cutoff date “Paleo” authors assume. The real story is much more complex, as a recent Scientific American article states:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/07/23/human-ancestors-were-nearly-all-vegetarians
Which paleo diet should we eat? The one from twelve thousand years ago? A hundred thousand years ago? Forty million years ago? If you want to return to your ancestral diet, the one our ancestors ate when most of the features of our guts were evolving, you might reasonably eat what our ancestors spent the most time eating during the largest periods of the evolution of our guts, fruits, nuts, and vegetables—especially fungus-covered tropical leaves.
OTOH, we have pretty good large-scale animal experiments that show that a ancestral diets are *not* necessarily optimal for maximizing lifespan. The lifespan of horses, for example, has increased by almost a decade in recent years, largely due to developments in modern diet. My senior horse is doing quite a bit better since we put him on supplements — none of which would have been available in the wild. I’m pretty sure he would not have survived the past two years on a Paleolithic horse diet.
That is not surprising, since evolution did not optimize horses for long lifespans. It was optimized them for producing baby horses.
Humans might be different, but until there is real experimental evidence, we can’t assume that. (Meaning experiments with a real Paleolithic diet, not a Geiko Caveman diet filled with soufflĂ©s and such.) It is quite possibly that humans, like horses and other animals, would do better with a diet designed with modern scientific knowledge rather than an ancestral diet.
There is plenty of science to support getting away from grains and back to something closer to what our ancestors ate.
I note that is really a compound statement: 1) There is plenty of science to support getting away from grains, and 2) there is plenty of science to support getting back to something closer to what our ancestors meant.
1) seems hard to square with your postings about beer, which is made from grain. Unless, as I say, you simply make exceptions for grain products you happen to like. But in that case, you have little basis to criticize others who do the same.
Statement 2) is meaningless unless a) you define precisely which ancestors you are talking about and b) you know accurately what those ancestors ate.
As the article points out, Paleo dieters can’t even agree on which ancestor they are trying to reenact, and their ideas of what those ancestors ate are probably inaccurate. (The elaborate recipes in those Paleo cookbooks are certainly inaccurate!)
1) seems like the easier hypothesis to test and does not depend on 2) at all. It is quite possible that Americans eat too much grain even if the Paleo hypothesis is completely wrong.
Yes, I occasionally make exceptions for things I like. I’m not a monk.
I don’t know. Has anybody seen Rand in a hooded robe? Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack ya know.
Didn’t Jack-in-the-box have a sous vide hamburger recipe a few years back… oh wait, That was E. Coli, this is a recipe for botulism.
Why can’t you copyright a recipe? Because sanity occurred. You can’t copyright some other formulas for the same reason. But you can copyright Micky Mouse for eternity (if you have good lawyers.)
Plagiarism is wrong, but at what point does it actually occur? A lot of people have no scruples about stealing ideas from others and calling it their own. That I think is when the line is crossed. The solution is shame but we’ve taken shame out of modern society.
The concept of intellectual property came about because people realized that the originator of an idea has rights to profit. It was to encourage others to follow with their own original ideas. Fine. But society benefits if those ideas become public domain as soon as possible with many making products that compete in the open market.
Lawyer battles decrease the wealth of society. IP does so even more. It’s much better for society if ideas are used by many rather than controlled by a few or one.
Copyright is simple. Once you publish something it is copyrighted. But then you have the idea of fair use which gets sticky when your use isn’t quite so fair.
Patent is more complicated and should not be. It takes years and money to get a patent which ironically does exactly the opposite of what IP is supposed to do which is reward rather than penalize the originator of an idea.
Make patent as simple as copyright. In the age of 3D printers you can see how this starts to make sense. Let ideas distribute through society rather than being controlled by a few. Instead of the original idea of patent encouraging ideas it’s now used to control ideas by powerful corporations. This is a perversion of the original intent.
Perversion of free markets is what people do using politics and lawyers (but I’m being redundant.) The idea of IP allows them to. Human nature is what it is. We shouldn’t be institutionalizing this bad idea.
OTOH, I think my ancestors came up with the idea of using an alphabet, so you all pony up the license fee now…
No right to profit. Right to ownership.. with the usual justification: no-one has a better claim.
I’m sure most recipes are protected the old fashioned way: secrecy. I think there’s a even a few little guilds which require you to contribute a great original recipe to join and ostracize anyone who shares.
Chefs are much like magicians in that their work is unprotected by law and they like it that way.
Yes to all your points. Protecting ideas without secrecy is the benefit that IP is supposed to produce. It’s a tradeoff. Not perhaps a good one.
Ownership is an ideal, but profit is the point. I’m not sure how to express that well. If ownership for the purpose of profit is the intent then it’s not working.
It’s not working because the powerful can tie others up in IP wars. It’s not working because the process is so onerous that little guys have such a high barrier to overcome.
Copyright works a lot better because society still has some of the right perspective on plagiarism. Patent and copyright are starting a fuzzy merge with 3D printing. The state is already being used against people that just want to make things.
Elon doesn’t do patents.
Nathan Myhrvold, cookbook author and man of many patents, has noted that there really isn’t any money to be made off of patenting techniques for food production, with only very rare exceptions. It is not going to be the kind of thing you make at home for your family dinner, or even something a fine dining restaurant will produce. He did patent the technique he developed for making french fries in an ultrasonic water bath, but that has potential industrial-scale applications to feed the millions of McDonalds patrons throughout the world.