| Baby Lee |
08-11-2005 04:51 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by patteeu
Rush Limbaugh, who many probably know used to live here and work for the Royals, has said that Strouds in Kansas City has the best shrimp he has ever eaten anywhere. He had some kind of economic theory (provided by an economics guy he knew) about why a restaurant in the center of the country would have better shrimp than that found in coastal cities, but I didn't really catch the nuts and bolts of the theory.
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Same way Mercedes makes el cheapo cars for their domestic market and sends luxury cars to us.
Seafood is not fungible [ie, there is choice seafood, run of the mill seafood, and puny seafood not worth the effort of cooking], and it doesn't travel well. As opposed to gold which is funglible and travels well, so even if you're somewhere where gold is plentiful, you know it's worth collecting and sending to a place where the scarcity makes it valuable. That dynamic is so reliable that the value of gold is universal, meaning it's even valuable right where the mother lode is located.
But on the coast, people realize that crab is just a term for sea spider. They're so numerous that they run of the mill stock in the plentiful season has been washed up onto shore, decomposed and used for crop fertilizer [where it's more valuable than as a foodstuff]. Seafood used to be poor people's food in colonial times, like potatoes in Ireland before the famine.
But inland, where seafood is rare, you can take the very best specimens send them live overnight, get some foo-foo chef to braise them and plate them with some God awfully complicated reduction, and charge $30+ for the experience. |
