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Fear of Falafel

Posted on April 17th, 2011 by David in culture, eating

Are you afraid of falafel?  Well, if you is or if you ain’t, I direct your attention to a bout of the limeduck national sport, overthinking, going on over at the Clover Food Lab (and trucks), where they sell a sandwich called “chickpea fritter” that might actually be… falafel.

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There doesn’t seem to be much debate that the chickpea fritter sandwich is in fact falafel.  I can also say that it seems quite popular and is in my opinion, a delicious lunch and  quite satisfying for $5, too.  So…  why not just call it falafel?  Clover opened that can of worms themselves in a blog post in February, which I’ll quote most of here:

Yesterday at MIT one of our customers, Nittin, was giving us a hard time about the chickpea fritter. “Why don’t you just call it falafel,” he was saying. “It’s just like the falafel I’ve had in the Middle East.” It’s not the first time we’ve gotten this comment. I think Nittin felt like calling it a chickpea fritter made it seem gourmet, or like we were trying to rename something that already exists.

I was telling him (Ayr and Rolando, let me know if I have this right) the reason we don’t call it falafel is pretty simple. We don’t want to alienate anyone with our food, and a word like falafel might make someone walk away at first glance. We don’t want the only people who eat our food to be those who know what falafel is. Calling it a chickpea fritter almost forces a discussion between you and the person taking your order.

You’re operating a food truck outside of MIT (and a restaurant in Harvard square, plus more trucks in Boston) and are worried that people won’t know about falafel?  I’ve got to say, this just doesn’t hold water for me.  Sure, Clover is pretty plain-spoken about their food, but would it hurt anybody to put one more word on the menu board? You can look up the nutritional content of Clover’s fritters and find mention of tahini and hummus and even Israeli salad, but a strange absence of the word falafel.

Two of my friends had identical but oddly opposite darker interpretations, wondering if Clover were somehow anti-arab or anti-israeli.  I’m certainly not going to take sides on the falafel origin debate, and I don’t buy this unpleasant take on Clover’s choice of words either.  So what gives?  Why is Clover so defensive about the issue on their blog?

spacer I’ve got a funny story to add.  On my first visit to the Clover truck was back in August, before garbanzogate, I opted for the BBQ Seitan sandwich because I didn’t know what a chickpea fritter was.  That’s right, I chose seitan, a food whose actual composition I cannot describe or explain [it's wheat gluten, dude, also known as mock duck, go figure] but one that I had eaten before, over the chickpea fritter which I did not recognize as familiar falafel.  Also on the menu board that day were tabbouleh and quinoa, make of that what you will.  So I guess food ignorance can go both ways, but the last thing you want at a food truck’s lunch line is to have to take time to discuss the menu with your order taker.

The way I see it, Clover has three choices on this:

  1. Admit a mistake, change it, move on.
  2. Outgeek us all by pointing out that some falafel is made with fava beans, so by calling theirs chickpea fritters, they’re being more precise and descriptive and catering to those who wish to avoid fava beans in their diets.
  3. Test it.  Change the menu item to falafel for a day, a week, even an hour, and compare it to a comparable time period.  You either sell fewer sandwiches or you don’t.

So what’s it going to be?  Until something changes (and I’m not holding my breath) I encourage both of my loyal readers to visit your nearest Clover truck and order the falafel.  It’s delicious.

Tags: boston, cambridge, denial, falafel, food trucks

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Mammoth tintypes and the magic of the meniscus

Posted on April 3rd, 2011 by David in media, photo, science!

Yesterday I attended a rare demo of the 19th-century tintype photographic process by photographer Nathaniel Gibbons at (or at least just outside) Gallery Kayafas, where Gibbons’ “Mammoth Plate Tintypes” are on display.

For those of you who are not civil war re-enactors, it’s worth mentioning that the tintype process was popular in the mid to late 19th Century as a relatively cheap, fast, portable, durable, and faithful mode of photographic reproduction.   An ordinary citizen of even a medium-sized town could get a tintype portrait made for money equivalent to $20 today.  A tintype (a kind of wet-plate collodion print) is a metal plate coated with collodion (a cocktail of nitrocellulose and ether), photosensitized with silver salts, exposed in a camera while still damp, developed and then fixed with a cyanide solution.  Not for the faint of heart of sloppy of hand in any century as these ingredients can explode, poison and/or blind you, as well as ruin a good pair of pants.

I’ve covered both vintage and modern tintypes before, but this was the first time I’d seen one made in person.  Most of the action – coating and developing – happened in a dark box built into the back of Gibbons’ truck, but we were able to see the setup of the shot and then watch plate go into the fixer and witness a breathtaking reversal and transformation of tone.

Besides the magical reveal of the image, it’s also interesting to see the level of craft required.  It takes months or years to get even competent at coating a plate, and the same skill is needed to apply the developer evenly enough to avoid various artifacts. Nobody will ever know or care if I hit these keys right in the middle or on the edges as I type, but it’s that sort of finesse that makes the difference between good and great tintypes.

Gibbons called it “the magic of the meniscus.”  I think he might have meant surface tension, but it’s no less impressive what a skilled hand can do with simple materials.  Go see the work, but don’t try this yourself without professional help.

Tags: boston, Collodion, kayafas, tintype

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Empty desk, beginners mind

Posted on March 28th, 2011 by David in working

Apparently, it’s time for my biennial office shuffle, as in the spring of 2009′s deckchair destiny and the great cube shuffle of 2007, we’re moving the office.  But this time, just after we got everything packed up and labeled, a last-minute hitch prevented the actual move.  So here we sit at empty desks with only our laptops.  No phones, no files.  The water cooler and coffee maker have been removed.  We’ve drawn down office supplies and kitchen snacks.

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I, for one, am loving it.  Minimalism FTW, I say.  If only I could have accomplished a similar clean sweep of my email inbox and file system.  Not having this stuff to futz around with helps us focus, and frankly, the office has never looked better (except for that stack of boxes in the hallway).  A clean sweep lets you reconsider what you need and what you don’t.  Reviewing old files usually means throwing most of them away, but it also means thinking about old projects in new light.

Every other year is probably not often enough, and you probably can’t work like this for too long, but as spring cleaning goes, it feels pretty good.

Tags: minimalism, office space

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Last purchases from Bob Slate

Posted on March 17th, 2011 by David in design, economics, urbanism

Yesterday, I popped in at the Church Street Bob Slate Stationers, which will close forever this Sunday.  The other two branches will follow a week or two later. I bought these items.

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Mini Binder Clips, 1/4″ capacity, box of 12, Charles Leonard Inc, Hauppauge, NY, made in China.  $0.95
Dozens of household and office uses.  I keep some in the kitchen for keeping bags shut.

Received of Petty Cash pad, Tops form # 3008, made in USA. $1.25
I have no earthly use for this.  I don’t know how long it’s been since I even saw a “petty cash” box in use.

Tags with string, 12, $0.69
Tags.  String.  Unpackaged but for a rubber band.  Price and quantity hand-written in pencil.

Erasing shield, C-Thru Ruler Company, Boomfield, CT, made in China.  $1.25
To protect your architectural drawing when using a mechanical eraser.  Does anybody still make architectural drawings on paper?  I last touched one of these in 1991 when I bought it for a fellow architecture studio student who had helped me study for a dreadful art history exam.

Pilot Razor Point pen, dark blue, $0.95
I don’t actually much care for this sort of pen, but the sparkly plastic barrel and yellow top to the cap are utterly unchanged from 35 years ago when my mother kept a bunch of them in different colors in a long wooden drawer in the old sewing machine table.

I received a rare Guam quarter in my change and later noticed that I had been undercharged by a dollar.

 

Tags: 02138, Bob Slate, stationery

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Thanks! :D

Posted on March 16th, 2011 by David in culture, reading & writing, technology

I was putting away my ducky thank-you notes from Mrs. L’s class when I noticed something else interesting.  These kids hand-write something that I thought was only typed: sideways emoticons.

Way back in the pre-intertubal age, people might close an informal note with a smiley face not unlike the one on those yellow buttons, a circle enclosing two or three dots and a wide U shape.  But once we all started keyboarding, we had to turn sideways (usually to the left) to make a smiley face out of a colon : sometimes a dash – and a right/closed parenthesis )

:-)

Of course, this has spawned endless variations.  About half my DonorsChoose thank-you notes employed a hand-written noseless open-mouth smiley.  An expression of joy and thankfulness if ever I saw one.

:D

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Kudos to Karina for the triple standard smiley and a “correctly” oriented :D at the end.  FTW, I guess.  Interesting that she writes (: and not :) which seems more common in typing.  Maybe she’s a lefty.

For those still befuddled, you can use Skype to convert a pretty good array of punctuation emoticons into round yellow faces.  Some are even animated.

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Lest you think “ugh, kids these days” note that these typographic sideways smiles have been employed by major corporations, notably in the naming of the Samsung :) best described by C|Net thusly:  If you don’t mind the small keyboard and can get past the cringe-inducing name, T-Mobile’s Samsung Smiley is an easy-to-use messaging phone.”

Also, at least according to some clever wags, the Scion xD was named for the eye-scrunching joy of driving a sporty compact.  Your mileage may vary.

Tags: :D, emoticons

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