So I went to a Mexican restaurant yesterday...

...And finally lost my mind with the menu. You probably have seen this menu. The menu is the same at almost every Mexican restaurant I go to. The specific item that has made me realize this is the Vegetarian Combo D: A bean burrito, a chalupa, and a quesadilla.

I know of 5 restaurants in Kansas, 1 in Texas, 1 in Oklahoma, 2 in Indiana, and 1 in Missouri that all have the same, exact, menu. The combinations are all the same, the lunch specials are all the same ("The Speedy Gonzales"), the appetizers are all the same.

Why are all these menus the same? (and yes, I realize this is a different topic for the blog but this is analyze EVERYTHING, not just "Analyze Animals")

My co-worker Eric Johnson and I came up with several hypotheses in our 9+ hours driving the last two days:

1. The restaurants are all owned or financed by the same firm.
2. Random chance (we'll call this the null hypothesis).
3. The food supply firms are selling/promoting this menu.
4. This is the menu all restaurants have in mexico. (which just pushes the question into mexico)
5. There was some 'immigrant worker' promotion years ago which started this and it has just been passed down.

I'm skeptical that this many restaurants all decided to label that particular combination of food items the "Veggie D". Mexican restaurants that don't have this menu (I know of several) generally don't have any Veggie menu at all.

Possibility 4 is one I can't get at, because I haven't spent any real time in Mexico. Anyone got any clues?

I am skeptical that a single entity finances all these restaurants across the country. Maybe something like this is happening, but how would these random guys who start the small town restaurants all over find the investors?

So I really think it comes down to 3 and 5.

The food service industry is the possibility I deem most likely. This thread on Chowhound seems to suggest this possibility, without having any direct evidence. There are only a handful of large-scale food suppliers in the country though: Dot Foods, Sysco, Keith, Hawkeye. I've been unable to find anything online that looks like this kind of menu being sold, but I'm sure they don't have everything online.

Quick Aside Here: The industry group that represents food suppliers (the International Foodservice Distributors Association) has an article on their website that is accompanied by pictures which, for reasons I can't even articulate, I find incredibly humorous ("Look at how serious I am"). Some of the quotes are equally priceless: "We are now insisting that they begin to bring their logistics people to our top to tops that we have with them throughout the year." That quote is repeated twice, so I doubt it is a typo, but seriously, does that mean something?

At any rate, I'm totally stumped. I asked reddit and got back a bunch of irrelevant gibberish. Anyone got any clues?

Is it (energetically) cheaper to can or freeze?

I know some of you had a garden this summer. And you were probably thinking to yourself “Man, what the hell am I going to do with all these zucchini?” I’m grateful that so many people overplant, because lots of people gave me excess zucchini. However, I was eventually faced with a quandary about the best method of preservation.

I was thinking about the carbon footprint of different foods, and how the processing affects that carbon footprint.

For instance, if I walk out to my garden and pluck two tomatoes, and just slice one up and eat it, I’m not really increasing the carbon footprint of the tomato. If I take the other one and fry it, I’m obviously using more energy to cook it, and therefore I’m increasing the carbon footprint of my food just by the way I process it.

Thinking about this is actually pretty huge, and I’m going to focus in on one particular aspect of processing: Preservation.

I’m going to focus on peaches, because I preserved 25 lbs of them this summer using a variety of methods. Peaches can be canned relatively easily (without a pressure boiler), and can be frozen equally easily (adding a little anti-browning agent keeps them from turning dark). Figuring out the carbon footprint between different energy sources can be difficult, so to simplify things, I’m just going to compare electrical usage.

The equation should be pretty simple really. We want to estimate the energy used per day of storage via these different methods: The electricity used divided by the duration of storage. For canning, almost all of the energy use will be up-front, and the longer you store the cans, the better overall energy use rate you get. On the other hand, foods stored in the freezer will continue to cost energy as long as you preserve them, so long storage times will lead to bad energy efficiency.

So here's the data I collected for this little exercise. Basically, I needed to figure out the energy cost to keep a pint of peaches frozen. I used dedicated freezers because A) its a hell of a lot easier and B) I've been thinking about getting one. I've cut some of the significant digits off to make this a little more legible, and I'm not going to give you the brands of the freezers, because I don't think it really matters much.

	chest	chest	upright	upright
Energy per year	274	279	442	582
Energy per day	0.731	0.744	1.179	1.552
Capacity in cubic feet	6.8	7.2	14.2	15.8
Peach pints per cubic foot	59	59	59	59
Peach pint capacity	401.2	424.8	837.8	932.2
energy per day per peach pint	0.0018	0.0017	0.0014	0.0016

Ok, so now we've got an estimate of the energy used per day to store peaches in these freezers. Now we've got to figure out what the energy costs of canning the peaches are on a per-pint basis. This becomes a little bit of a problem. The cooking phase has a limited capacity: My boiler only holds 5 pints at a time (for instance). So really, I'm going to assume you're canning in the appropriate increments. I had a hard time actually finding data on my stove, so I just used the data from a 2600 watt replacement burner. Remember, for most canned foods you have to first sterilize the jars and lids (for ten minutes), then heat the food, then process the cans.

So I opted against figuring out the units of energy that would actually be required to do this work, because I've found that I usually just have to crank my burner on high or close to high for the entire time I'm doing the sterilizing, cooking or processing. Therefore, I'm making a worst case scenario here for the canning. Although I'm making a best case scenario in terms of getting 'even' numbers of cans per process. Regardless, here are my estimates of the energy used to can:

Burners	8-inch burner
Energy consumption	2.6
Sterilizing jars	0.166
boiling peaches	0.333
processing jars	0.333
kilowatt hours	2.1632
Peach pints per process	5
kW/h per pint	0.43264
# of Pints	15
Total energy for canning	6.4896

Ok? So what does this mean? Like I said, the critical part here is how long you actually store the food. Let's take a look at a graph demonstrating this:

What we're seeing here is the estimate of energy use through time. Obviously, the canning doesn't change. Once you've done the canning, you're done. On the other hand, the freezer gets progressively worse through time. However, it takes a surprisingly long time for the freezer to get more energetically expensive. Between 8-10 months depending on the brand.

Obviously, there's a lot of wiggle in these numbers. My estimates on the freezer assume that the entire freezer is in use (if not for peaches, then for something) and if this isn't the case, then your energy cost per unit goes up. Let's look, for example, at a scenario where the freezers are operating at 80% capacity:

Now we're talking about a 6-8 month time-period where freezing is more effective. However, we've still got a lot of assumptions built in here. For one, each time you remove a can, but do not turn off the freezer, you've got to replace that can with something, or you'll be incrementally be increasing the cost per unit to keep the other ones cold. The decision to use a freezer is committing you to an unknown proportion of energy going towards keeping empty space very cold, and unless you're willing to turn off the machine and eat the remainder at some point, you could end up with some really bad efficiency. On the other hand canning uses only the resources necessary to preserve the food you've got.

The other set of assumptions revolve around manufacturing costs and cleaning costs being approximately equal.

So now that I've identified all these problems, I'm a little less sure about my result. I think that if you already own the jars and the freezer, this analysis gives you an idea of how best to utilize them, but I think in terms of the original question, I'm going to have to dig deeper.

The Monster

There is no more obvious face of American environmental problems than the cow. In the name of cattle production the American farmer has damned up streams to create livestock watering opportunities, ripped out native grasses to plant brome and fescue, plowed under wetlands and riparian lands to plant alfalfa and hay, and concentrated them into a location so densely that rainwater becomes lethally toxic. Cattle production (or maybe just farming in general) is probably directly responsible for more species becoming extinct than any other human activity in North America.

But that doesn't mean the cow itself isn't a fascinating animal with a cool story. The scientific name of the cow is Bos primigenius (at least, that's my understanding...there's some taxonomy confusion here), and it was first domesticated back in the 6th millenia BC in Mesopotamia. The original animal is known now as the Aurochs and holy god is it a cool animal. Aurochs once roamed basically all of Europe and Asia, and were independently domesticated at least 3 times. This is particularly amazing if you read the following account by Caesar about the aurochs in Germany:

Gallic War Chapter 6.28, "...those animals which are called uri. These are a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied. These the Germans take with much pains in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this exercise, and practice themselves in this sort of hunting, and those who have slain the greatest number of them, having produced the horns in public, to serve as evidence, receive great praise. But not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. "

I've never seen much written about animals using domestication as a life-history strategy, but this is one species where it has obviously been an advantage. The domesticated aurochs (i.e., cattle) began wiping out the wild aurochs almost immediately. Humans found cattle to be incredibly useful animals: You can hitch your wagon to one to pull things, you can feed it grass and it will produce milk, and killing even a single adult will give you enough food for months. As a result, humans agressively aided the expansion of cattle at the expense of aurochs. The last known aurochs lived in Poland and were 'protected' by royal decree. Nevertheless, the last individual died in 1627 and its skull currently resides at the Livrustkammaren in Stockholm. Two brothers, Heinz and Lutz Heck, had the bright idea of recreating the aurochs back in the 1920s (oddly enough, as part of a Nazi propoganda campaign). Theoretically, this might be possible if all the original genes are still around, you would just need to combine them. The results of these efforts are the Heck cattle, and man, you need to look into this yourself, because there is no end to the awesome (see awesome picture below).


Modern cattle have been developed into distinctive breeds for different purposes. In the United States, a federal grading standard in 1927 somewhat stupidly lead to meat quality becoming associated with 'marbling', and so breeds like Angus and Hereford have been the ideal. Marbling was considered important primarily because it made farmers more money. Marbling happens because grass fed cattle are 'finished' on a grain-heavy diet. In particular, a guy named Alvin H. Sanders, editor of Breeder's Gazette, promoted this idea so strongly that it caught on with the Department of Agriculture. The stated purpose was to promote meat that was of high quality culinarily, but as it turns out, marbling contributes relatively little to the overall tenderness of cooked meat. The U.S. eventually altered the grading system to lessen the importance of marbling, but is still one of only three countries in the world that grade beef on fat content (Japan and Korea are the others).

Cattle are generally slaughtered between 15 and 24 months in the U.S. (usually closer to 2 years), while in Europe the slaughtering times vary with the culinary traditions (Italians: 16-18 months; 3-4 years in France and England prior to prion diseases). Generally these variations have to do with the toughness of the meat and the flavor, although a lot of both has been sacrificed on the alter of efficiency. For instance, most culinary applications value the flavor of grass-fed beef, yet in the U.S. the economies of scale and a traditional over-abundance of cheap corn have resulted in massive feedlots where cattle are raised for 4-8 months on grain instead of grass.

I've never eaten veal and I can't honestly say I see the appeal. Veal is essentially beef that tastes and feels nothing like beef. The longer an animal uses its muscles, the tougher and more colored the meat becomes. Veal are usually confined so they can't move and slaughtered before ever given a chance to eat solid foods. The result is meat that is pale, extremely tender, and delicate in flavor. My feeling is that if you want to eat pork, just eat pork!

Because cattle are so closely associated with humans, there is ton more information out there: Their relationship to other ungulates, the amazing amount of fish kills that they caused prior to the clean water act, and their impact on rangeland birds are all interesting topics. However, I just got back from vacation and this is all I'm going to write today.