Sublime

The store was established in 1977 by two men from Bombay, and I once asked one of them, Mohan, how many customers it gets every day; it’s open from 6:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. He thought a moment and estimated the number at 4,000. By my own calculations that seemed about right: figure 14 hours times 60 minutes times 4 or 5 customers in any one minute.

from local farmers, creating enough market demand to encourage a move back to family farming? This is the dominant way food gets to market in many developing countries, and it’s now making a comeback in the developed world, driven by the desire for fresh food, picked when it’s ripe and bought from the people who grew it. Even in the United States,

MADAME SOLIVA, the eighty-year-old chef whose nom de cuisine was Tante Yvonne, had first told us about an olive oil that she said was the finest in Provence. She had better credentials than anyone we knew. Apart from being a magnificent cook, she was olive oil’s answer to a Master of Wine. She had tried them all, from Alziari in Nice to the United

Economically relevant information is discovered from experimentation, not deduced from a model.

Drawing Out Sweetness

remarkable record of English “consumable” prices since the year 1264, compiled with great care by Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila Hopkins. This index shows that market prices of food, drink, fuel and textiles in the south of England have tended to rise for more than seven hundred years, at an average rate of about one percent each year.2

It is astonishing how many experts there seem to be nowadays whose mission in life is to lecture us about the perils of pleasure. Scarcely a week goes by without some ominous pronouncement about the price we must pay for our brief moments of indulgence. Even moderation, which used to be an acceptable excuse for the beef on your plate or the wine in