NPR’s excellent food blog, The Salt, draws our attention to a public health campaign created by researchers at Drexel University and New Mexico State University called “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” (No beating around the bush for this campaign.) The centerpiece of the campaign is a horrifying 14-second animated video that portrays germs, represented by green goo, splattering everywhere as a woman washes a chicken: onto countertops, onto nearby cheese and produce, onto paper towels, and onto the washer’s T-shirt.
"There's no reason, from a scientific point of view, to think you're making it any safer," explains Drexel food safety researcher Jennifer Quinlan, "and in fact, you're making it less safe." Studies back Quinlan up: The only way to kill the bacteria on chicken is to cook it properly.
The Salt sets up the advice of “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” in opposition to that of Julia Child, who endorsed chicken-washing on The French Chef. But Child is hardly the only famous cookbook author to recommend giving poultry a rinse before cooking it. Here are a few other food luminaries who, according to my research, have sanctioned the practice:
Irma Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker (in The Joy of Cooking)
If you feel confused and betrayed by all your favorite cookbook authors, take heart: There's one typically impeccable source that's told us the truth for almost a decade. "Don't rinse poultry before cooking," say the editors of Cook's Illustrated in The Science of Good Cooking. "You aren't killing any bacteria and you may be spreading bacteria around your kitchen." Cook's Illustrated has taken this safety-minded stance since 2004. However, a glance at their 1999 publication The Cook's Illustrated Complete Book of Poultry indicates that they recommended rinsing birds in the late 20th century. We guess nobody's perfect, especially when it comes to the counterintuitive danger of washing chicken.
How 500 Years Of Weird Condiment History Designed The Heinz Ketchup Bottle
FROM A 17TH-CENTURY FISH SAUCE, KETCHUP EVOLVED INTO A PATENT MEDICINE, A CARCINOGENIC HEALTH HAZARD, AND EVENTUALLY, A NON-NEWTONIAN FLUID. HERE’S HOW KETCHUP’S RICH HISTORY IS REFLECTED IN THE DESIGN OF A BOTTLE OF HEINZ.
What do you think about when you see a glass bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup on a table? If you’re like most people, you probably don’t pay very close attention to it. It is a means to a hot dog’s end, unremarkable except for its ability to spread a thick, sweet-and-sour tomato puree on some item of food. Otherwise, what is there to say? But even commonplace objects have been designed, and seemingly simple questions about the design of something as unremarkable as a bottle of ketchup can have remarkably deep answers.
How deep, then, is a bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup, really? What is the meaning behind the "57 Varieties" label wrapped around the bottle’s mouth, and why is it there? Why is a bottle of Heinz Ketchup transparent, instead of opaque? And why does the bottle make such a point of emphasizing that it is specifically full of tomato ketchup, when ketchup is synonymous with tomatoes?
Although we most closely associate ketchup with tomatoes these days, ketchup was around for hundreds of years before anyone even dreamed of chucking a tomato in the bottle. In fact, that most American of condiments isn’t even American. It’s Asian.
The long history of ketchup in the Western world extends back to the early 16th century, when British settlers in Fuji were introduced to a sauce used by Chinese sailors called ke-tchup. Local recipes for ke-tchup varied, butthe first recipe on record dates back to 544 A.D. and instructs any prospective condiment maker to "take the intestine, stomach, and bladder of the yellow fish, shark and mullet, and wash them well. Mix them with a moderate amount of salt and place them in a jar. Seal tightly and incubate in the sun. It will be ready in twenty days in summer, fifty days in spring or fall and a hundred days in winter."
By the time the British discovered ke-tchup, the recipe had been simplified into a pungent, amber-colored liquid made out of salted and fermented anchovies. In a very real way, the original ketchup wasn’t ketchup at all. It was fish sauce, pretty much identical to the fish sauce you can buy by the bottle in any Asian supermarket. When British traders headed back to England with a taste for the sauce, they attempted to re-create it, Anglicizing it with the addition of (what else?) beer. Eventually, anchovies were taken out of the sauce entirely and replaced with walnut ketchup (Jane Austen’s favorite kind) and mushroom ketchup (which tastes similar to Worcestershire sauce).
In fact, even as they experimented with every other variety, the English enjoyed ketchup for close to 200 years before anyone thought of chucking a tomato in the mix. The resistance to tomato ketchup can largely be chalked up to the widespread misconception among Europeans that tomatoes, which looked nearly identical to deadly nightshade berries, were poisonous. Tomatoes were largely considered an ornamental curiosity for gardens ever since Cortez had brought them back from the Americas in the 1500s, but they weren’t meant to be eaten.
Despite its status as a native fruit, Americans inherited Europe’s aversion to tomatoes. There were, of course, tomato advocates. In 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, New Jersey, stood on the steps of the local courthouse and consumed an entire basket of tomatoes to prove they weren’t poisonous. By and large, though, it wasn’t until the 1830s that America got hip to the fact that tomatoes could be delicious. In 1834, an Ohio physician named Dr. John Cook Bennett declared tomatoes to be a universal panacea that could be used to treat diarrhea, violent bilious attacks, and indigestion. Pretty soon, Bennett was publishing recipes for tomato ketchup, which were then concentrated into pill form and sold as a patent medicine across the country.
By 1876, tomatoes had undergone a remarkable turnaround in the court of public opinion. Tomato ketchup was not only popular, but because of the teachings of an influential quack promulgated by the patent medicine trade, tomato ketchup was actually considered to be a sort of tonic, a condiment that was actually healthier than normal ketchup.
At the time, though, nothing could be further from the truth.
"Filthy, decomposed and putrid." These were the words that cookbook author Pierre Blot used in 1866 to describe the quality of commercial ketchups being sold at the time. Of course, prior to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (and as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle famously showed), the food manufacturing business as a whole could largely be described with these same memorable adjectives. But ketchup was particularly bad. In fact, when you opened a bottle, the contents could literally kill you.
The reasons ketchup was such vile, potentially deadly slop are varied, but start with the shortness of the tomato season. Lasting from mid-August until mid-October, ketchup could only be made fresh for two months out of the year. However, by the late 19th century, Americans were used to expecting ketchup year around. A year’s worth of ketchup could not be made in two months, so manufacturers preserved tomato pulp to meet yearly expectations. It wasn’t a bad strategy, except for the fact that they did so with the same carelessness, filthiness, and lack of quality control that was endemic in the food manufacturing industry at the time. Entire barrels of pulp were stored so badly that, when open, they were found to be filled with mold, yeast, spores, and deadly bacteria.
The result was that commercial ketchups in the 19th century were disgusting filth from the get-go, and only got worse in processing. To prevent the ketchup from moldering further, ketchup makers filled their batches with harmful preservatives, including boric acid, formalin, salicylic acid, and benzoic acid. Then, because ketchup with the pulp sieved out is actually more yellowish than anything else, coal tar was added to dye the ketchup red. To put this particular additive in its proper perspective, coal tar is flammable enough to fire boilers, is commonly used to coat asphalt in parking lots, and in concentrations above 5% is considered a group 1 carcinogen. Still worse: Many ketchups were cooked in copper tubs, leading to a chemical reaction between the copper and ketchup that could actually make the concoction poisonous to consume. How bad were the ketchups of the time? In a study of commercial ketchups conducted in 1896, 90% of all ketchups on the market were found to contain "injurious ingredients" that could lead to death.
This was the sorry state of ketchup when Henry J. Heinz released his first bottle in 1876. But Heinz was a visionary, a morally strong man who believed that "heart power is better than horse power." Under his leadership, the H.J. Heinz Company was truly ahead of its time. The factories were models of progressiveness. Not only were Heinz employees given free life insurance, death insurance, doctor and dental services, but also access to onsite cafeterias, dining rooms, medical stations, swimming pools, gymnasiums, and roof gardens. The workers were also encouraged to be meticulously clean. At a time when many factory workers didn’t even have running water at home, Heinz provided fresh uniforms, a free laundry service, and even an in-house manicurist to help them keep their nails immaculate. In fact, Heinz’s factories were such models of cleanliness and happiness that 30,000 visitors were allowed to tour the factory every year. Heinz felt he had absolutely nothing to hide.
Heinz wasn’t just driven to make his workers happy and healthy, though. At a time when no one else cared, Heinz was obsessed with making his products as pure as possible. It was a principle that had always guided Heinz in his business dealings. In fact, when Heinz began his career selling horseradish, he refused to sell it in the brown opaque bottles common at the time. Instead, he used transparent jars, so that buyers could see his horseradish’s purity for themselves before they gave him a penny.
But the recipe to make his ketchup as pure as his horseradish eluded Heinz for nearly two decades. It wasn’t until 1904 that Heinz’s chief food scientist, G.F. Mason, was able to find a good preservative-free recipe for ketchup. Before then, Heinz used many of the same preservatives as his competitors, even coal tar to dye his ketchup red. By 1906, though, the nut had been cracked, and Heinz was producing five million bottles of preservative-free ketchup every year.
If there was one principle that Henry J. Heinz valued more than any other, it was purity and transparency. "It is always safe to buy the products of an establishment that keeps its doors open," Heinz once famously wrote. That every bottle of Heinz Tomato Ketchup sold is see-through is no accident. It’s a design statement: purity through transparency.
Each bottle of Heinz ketchup somewhat mysteriously brags about the company’s "57 Varieties" in a small label wrapped around the neck. That there are actually 57 varieties of Heinz products has literally never been true. Inspired by an advertisement he saw on a train for a company that made "21 varieties" of shoes, Heinz combined his favorite number, 5, with his wife’s number, 7, to brag about his company’s own breadth of products. When he first began to put the "57 Varieties" label on his ketchup bottles, the H.J. Heinz Company already produced over 60 different products.
So "57 Varieties" has literally always been playful nonsense. But the small label that circles the mouth of every bottle of Heinz ketchup sold? No nonsense there. It’s purely functional.
One interesting fact about ketchup that everyone should know is that it’s a non-Newtonian fluid. Naturally, ketchup is rather thin and watery, because the tomato pulp that gives it consistency is sieved out. As a result, commercial ketchup makers add a small amount of xanthax gum to their ketchup recipes to thicken it. But this ingredient has another side effect: It turns ketchup into a shear thinning fluid. In other words, how quickly ketchup flows depends upon the stress that is being placed upon it.
That ketchup is non-Newtonian is the main reason why getting it out of a glass bottle is so slow. Allowed to flow naturally, ketchup only travels at a speed of 147 feet per hour. The only way to speed it up is to apply force, which through the principle of shear thinning decreases the ketchup’s viscosity, and thus increases its flow rate. This is why you have to thump a bottle of ketchup to get it flowing from the bottle. The concussive force makes it flow faster.
But despite common opinion, the bottom of a bottle of Heinz Ketchup isn’t actually the best place to thump it. If you apply force to the bottom of a bottle of Heinz, the ketchup closest to where you smacked will absorb most of the force of impact. It will flow freely, but the ketchup that is viscously clogging the neck and mouth of the bottle won’t, leaving you no better off than you were before. The solution is to trigger the shear thinning effect at the top of the bottle, not the bottom. That unclogs the mouth and lets the ketchup below to freely flow.
So while the substance of Heinz’s "57 Varieties" label may be just a fanciful whim on the part of the company’s creator, its positioning is deliberate. It’s a target. By simply tapping the label with two fingers, you create the optimal conditions for shear thinning, transforming non-Newtonian ketchup into a free-flowing liquid. Physics!
Of course, these days, most ketchup is sold in squeeze bottles. Even Heinz’s competitors have figured out how to make ketchup that they aren’t ashamed to sell in transparent containers. Tomatoes are synonymous with ketchup, and you’d be hard-pressed to find even the most grotesque, lunatic quack recommending ketchup as a cure-all.
None of that matters, though. A bottle of Heinz isn’t just a container of ketchup. It’s a design classic because of everything besides the ketchup it manages to bottle up: not just the history of a condiment or an object lesson in non-Newtonian physics but the guiding principles of a great man who believed, more than anything else, that good design was transparent. And also, perhaps, tasted pretty good on a plate of fries.
Hazy Skies in Hong Kong? Just Pose With a Fake Skyline
Those looking for a great photo opportunity no longer have to worry about bad weather.
Hong Kong's skyline, featuring dozens of brightly-lit high-rises wrapping around Victoria Harbor, is justifiably famous, and one of the main draws in the city's $37 billion tourism industry. Unfortunately, Hong Kong's recent urban haze is more than just a health hazard: It also ruins perfectly decent photo opportunities.
So in an inspired attempt to placate disappointed tourists, large, blue-sky banners of the skyline have appeared along the city's harbor-front walkway. For these tourists, it's a perfect solution -- so long as the actual, gray sky doesn't creep into the shot.
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
Friday, August 23, 2013
The Magnificent Nightmare of the Billy Bookcase
Ikea is so good at so many things. Why is it so bad at delivery?
By Jessica Winter|Posted Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013, at 2:53 PM
A woman sits at a model room in an Ikea store.
Courtesy of epsos.de/Flickr
It all started because I wanted the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. Not a new, licensed reproduction—I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea’s Billy bookcases, which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour pairing couture with jeans on her first Vogue cover,or Mike D plonking a Target pouf smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.
We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.
June 7. We buy the bookcase.
June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: “Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.”
June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: “Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. … You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.”
June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.
And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who’d say something like, “We can’t deliver your item because it hasn’t arrived,” then call Ikea, who’d say, “They do have it—you need to call them back and find out why they’re not delivering it,” and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered—to UX Logistics, who said they didn’t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we’d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn’t yet received the delivery.
It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.
The nightmare of Ikea delivery is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own “very frustrating” Ikea delivery experience in a December 2011 Ad Age profile, which stressed the firm’s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who’s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn’t the flaw in the Eivor Cirkel rug. It’s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.
Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery. Like many big-box retailers, Ikea outsources all its delivery. “With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,” says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea’s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn’t have much competition in the bargain furniture business—there’s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, “Ikea’s target customers are consumers who prize ‘value,’ and are willing to spend their own time to save money”—by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. “Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,” Gallino says.
Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product—even heavy, unwieldy products—can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary wag.com. But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn’t have to be assembled or curated”—in other words, anything that isn’t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can’t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. “Yesterday, you didn’t know you needed a new strainer,” Frei says, “but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can’t do that.”
Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. “The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,” says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn’s recent book Happy Money makes the case that a pay-now-enjoy-later model of consumption leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.
Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article “‘The IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love”—written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely—argues that successfully assembling an Ikea product can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband’s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. “I’m not so sure the answer is no,” Norton says. “It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There’s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.”
Or not. “Working as Ikea’s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,” my husband said in a statement to Slate.
Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea’s unique alchemy. “Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you’ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn’t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. “If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can’t find it,” Frei says, “you’ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.”
Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he’d wanted to purchase a Spoka nightlight for his daughter, but Ikea doesn’t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I’m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was “most likely in stock” in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I’d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn’t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an Ikea cinnamon bun and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won’t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it’s still a little strange—a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store—to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.
