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Daily Archives: January 13, 2007
A Traveler’s Look at Russia, Via its Airports
WORKING as a journalist in Russia, with its eleven time zones, its endless steppe and perpetual taiga, means spending a lot of time in the air. It involves flying in planes so creaky that landing in one piece is a pleasant surprise —then disembarking in airports so inhospitable that some visitors may want to take off again immediately.
But, if he has the strength, beyond the whine of the Tupolev engines and the cracked runways, a frequent flyer can find in Russia’s airports a useful encapsulation of the country’s problems and oddities. In their family resemblances, Russia’s airports show how far the Soviet system squeezed the variety from the vast Russian continent; in their idiosyncrasies, they suggest how far it failed to. They illustrate how much of that system, and the mindset it created, live on, 15 years after the old empire nominally collapsed. Russia’s awful, grimy, gaudy airports reveal how much hasn’t changed in the world’s biggest country—but also, on closer inspection, how much is beginning to.
Traveling in Mexico many years ago, I remember purchasing a ticket at an airport for an AeroMexico flight to the Pacific Coast city of Mazatlan. Walking away from the counter, I glanced at my paper ticket and noticed that there was no seat assignment. I quickly turned around and inquired as to where I might be sitting. The flight (horribly delayed) was sold out. I asked why he sold me a ticket? “There might be another flight…”. And, there was, 10 hours later.
The Case for Artisan Meats
The artisans themselves also continue to use the same methods they have always used. At some point after the second world war, as food production across Europe became industrialised, making hams in the traditional labour-intensive manner ceased to be a necessary way of life and became a wonderfully tasty two-finger salute to all the boiled, pink, anaemic, mealy, tasteless hams sitting on supermarket shelves and in refrigerated cabinets.
Curing meat celebrates heterogeneity like no other culinary process. McDonald’s manages to make hamburgers that taste the same from Cape Town to Novosibirsk; cured meats, with almost identical ingredients from region to region, taste wildly different. Italy produces six denominazione di origine controllata varieties of prosciutto, all of which are made from the whole leg of a pig, salt and perhaps a bit of sugar or spice. But by virtue of the airborne yeasts and moulds native to the particular region, variations in humidity, temperature and air quality, the diet and care of the pigs and the storage of the resulting hams, each of them tastes and feels quite different from the rest. The only other product for human consumption that varies so greatly from one area to another is whisky, which also relies on tradition, fanatical attention to detail and environmental alchemy. Just as Suntory can buy all the disused stills it wants, mimic the chemical and mineral composition of Scottish water and still produce something completely different from a Highland single malt, so a prosciutto from Parma will be softer, pinker and milder than a prosciutto from Modena, and a Lyonnais saucisson will have a tang that a salame Piacentino lacks.
Related: Fra’Mani:
Our mission is crafting salumi in the finest Italian pastoral traditions, using the highest-quality, all-natural pork.
Our pork comes from family farmers committed to the well-being of their animals and their land. The hogs are never given antibiotics, artificial growth hormones, growth-promoting agents or meat by-products. They eat only the finest grains and natural feed. This old-fashioned way to raise hogs produces pork of outstanding quality, which is the essential ingredient in all Fra’ Mani salumi.
The Art of Conversation
An excellent article from the Economist:
The Brown and Levinson model says, roughly speaking, that Person A probably does not want to be rude to Person B, but in the way of things, life may sometimes require Person A to contradict or intrude on Person B, and when that happens, Person A has a range of “politeness strategies” to draw on. There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The first is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I’m going to shut the window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I’m going to shut the window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: “Gosh, it’s cold in here.”
A Chronicle of Allen-Edmonds Sale
Stollenwerk and some partners bought Allen-Edmonds in 1980 from descendents of the founders. Later on, Stollenwerk bought out his partners and built the brand into one recognized around the world.
Unlike his competitors in the footwear industry, Stollenwerk has kept production in the U.S. Allen-Edmonds employs about 550 people in Wisconsin and Maine and makes more than 500,000 pairs of men’s shoes a year. Thanks to the introduction of lean manufacturing and cell concepts, the company can make a pair in seven hours. Shoes are made to order, with the inventory of finished products kept very low.
The shoes are handcrafted from imported leather and can sell for more than $300 a pair. During his tenure, Stollenwerk has seen a decline in the number of independent shoe stores interested in carrying the line, and his distribution channels have become limited. As a result, the company has opened a chain of retail stores that carry not only shoes but also upscale accessories. Sales are about $100 million annually.
As he reached his mid-60s, Stollenwerk knew the company would need to invest in even more stores – at about $1 million each – to continue to grow. That meant “I would have to go to a bank and borrow a considerable amount of money,” he said.
He had done that in the past, and the idea of managing it in the future did not appeal to him. He has children, but none is interested in taking over the company, so his mind turned to other options.