One night in the late 1960s, Eugene Gagliardi was lying awake in bed trying to figure out how to save his company. He was thinking about the Philly cheesesteak.

Gagliardi was trying to figure out a way to turn the Philly cheesesteak into something people would want to make at home. But the meat used for the sandwich was, as Gagliardi says, “so tough you couldn’t chew through it.”

At 3 in the morning, he had an idea. He got up out of bed and went to the plant and tried it.

His idea was complicated — he put the meat through the grinder a bunch of times, then he mixed it, put it in a mold, froze it, then he tempered it, then sliced it — and, finally, he cooked it and ate it to see if it was any good.

In The Kitchen With The Inventor Of Steak-Umm

Everybody talks about food and gas prices when they’re rising. Think of gas prices in the past few weeks, and earlier this year. But, somehow, we don’t hear so much about gas prices falling, as they did for much of the spring.

“People focus on bad news more than they focus on good news,” Paul J. Healy, an Ohio State University economist who has studied how people perceive inflation, told me. “When prices go up, they notice it. When prices go down, they don’t care.”

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Everybody Always Thinks Inflation Is Higher Than It Really Is

What A Very Old Menu Tells Us About The Price Of Steak

Almost two centuries ago, he says, meat was one reason why immigrants found America so amazing. “When the Irish come in the 1840s, they write letters back saying ‘I eat meat every day,’” Horowitz says. “And they get letters back saying, ‘You must be kidding. It can’t be true.’”

Back in Europe, says Horowitz, the growing of livestock was often organized and regulated in a way that funneled meat straight to the wealthy or the landed aristocracy. In the new world, though, meat was much easier to find. Grazing lands were close to cities; sometimes right inside cities. Farmers quickly realized that raising animals was a good business. Cities set up markets for them. “And the result is a flourishing of the livestock industry, very early in American history.”

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The Making Of Meat-Eating America

Would Greece Leaving The Eurozone Make Greek Yogurt Cheaper?

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The Psychology Of The Honor System At The Farm Stand

npr:

Still, seller (and hugger) beware: Cunningham says in more than two decades of research on honesty, he’s found that about 25 percent of people are consistently honest in the way they behave, 25 percent mostly honest, 25 percent are dishonest, and 25 percent are erratic. “Even if most people do the right thing or add extra money to an honor till,” he says, “eventually somebody’s going to come along who tries to take all the cash.”

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…in Paris, American food is suddenly being seen as more than just restauration rapide. Among young Parisians, there is currently no greater praise for cuisine than “très Brooklyn,” a term that signifies a particularly cool combination of informality, creativity and quality.

All three of those traits come together in the American food trucks that have just opened here, including Cantine California, which sells tacos stuffed with organic meat (still a rarity in France), and a hugely popular burger truck called Le Camion Qui Fume (The Smoking Truck), owned by Kristin Frederick, a California native who graduated from culinary school here.

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Food Trucks in Paris? U.S. Cuisine Finds Open Minds, and Mouths

(Source: The New York Times)

Felix Salmon asks: “Why is the food at food trucks better than the food in restaurants, at least when it comes to tacos?

— http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/13/the-taco-truck-mystery/