Gilroy, California will probably hold the Garlic Capital of the World title for as long as it wants to claim it, but China is exporting garlic into the U.S. which sells at much lower prices than the local crop. Even with a 376% tariff, Chinese garlic is coming in cheaper and the produce is of equal quality; even the owner of Christopher Ranch says the cloves are “beautiful.” Some Chinese garlic makes it way past the tariff by being sent through another country such as Thailand. It is easy to claim a different country of origin and the higher the tariff, the more reason to get around it. “Trace mineral profiling” can be used to verify where the garlic was grown, but Customs can’t check all of it. I still have to get myself to the Garlic Festival one of these years. If local farmers are to be believed, I probably should not put it off too long.

Amazon has started a catalog and menu search which I’ve found to be very similar to Google’s catalog search. Actual printed catalogs and menus are scanned in and the text is searchable. I’m not finding the menu search very practical yet, since it is currently full of ritzy places, but I suppose that could change as more are added. It would be most useful to me if it had local takeout and pizza places, not expensive restaurants who already have their own websites. A friend mentioned that a personal scan and search mechanism would be very helpful to him. Then he could have all the pieces of paper that he has accumulated digitized and catalogued for search. He was willing to pay good bucks for this too. Perhaps a service could be created where customers used their own scanners and then sent or uploaded the results to an online service for character recognition and indexing for search. The customer could log in and search their own set of documents as needed. Anyone done this already? I’m writing up the patent right now.

This yummy Observer article about Britain’s new wave of upscale Indian restaurants has some interesting details on the evolution of Indian food in Britain. “More than 90 per cent of Indian restaurants in Britain are owned and run by Bangladeshis.” This, they claim, accounts for the homogeneity of Indian restaurant food. There are also details on the substitutions made for original ingredients. The new upscale places are trying to import the right raw materials, such as rock moss from Hyderabad, an essential ingredient for steaming up a true biryani. But the mainstream curry shops make do with jarred curry pastes and powdered food colorings. This formula is true for restaurants of all cuisines, though. High-class places use authentic ingredients. At the end of the article is a list of facts, the most disheartening for me being that chicken tikka masala, one of my favorites, was invented in the oh so Asian land of Glasgow. Ah well, bring on the chop suey and fortune cookies. Evolution is OK (and often more affordable). (via randomWalks)

While Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center (with acoustics designed by Artec Consultants) is designed with customizable acoustic panels and walls, the two concert halls in the Rome Auditorium were created for classical music. There is a third theater that can transform in size, but the acoustic engineers at Muller-BBM maintain that a more versatile space will sacrifice reverberation. So they made the compromise of designing the larger halls for symphony orchestras. However, “the largest hall exceeds the theoretical limit of a naturally acoustic hall.” They built a scale model to determine how sound would track inside it and are hoping that the curved ceiling will funnel the sound appropriately.

Jamie Oliver (aka “The Naked Chef”) has a regular column in The Times and the archives of his chatty writing are available. Use the dropdown menu to access recipe listings. Alton Brown is out on his book tour. Check the listings carefully; some of the city headings don’t match where the actual booksigning is (e.g. when did San Francisco move across the bay to Oakland?).

Mexico used to be a leading vanilla supplier, but the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and discovery of oil near where the crops grew put a halt to much of the industry. Then synthetic vanilla and Madagascar’s hefty vanilla crop created a price drop, prompting Mexican farmers to raise cattle or citrus and bananas instead. But prices have recently gone up after the cyclones of 2000 and political problems in Madagascar, so Mexico is aiming to ramp up production again, with the help of their already established orange trees which, fortuitously, provide excellent support for vanilla plants. They also hope to retain some of the workers who prefer to go to the U.S. for jobs. Caring for and harvesting the crop is labor intensive. Some clever marketing to the gourmet food crowd would help them gain an edge over Madagascar, Indonesia, and, also ramping up, Uganda.

The latest elevator news from the Wall Street Journal. The acceleration of elevators is tailored to the city. “In a high-rise in New York, they want to feel the acceleration,” says Ray Moncini, president of Otis North America. But in Japan, people like a smooth ride. And elevators have apparently become the latest place to hold people captive while they endure the assault of media. I guess the Muzak wasn’t enough.

Following its rebirth, Iridium has been doing well. In addition to their government contracts, deals with private firms have been increasing and now make up about half of their revenue. Their data transmission business is pulling a lot of weight and the company could have broke even this year had they not decided instead to invest in creating short-message service. But they are facing a dilemma. Iridium is required to sign a contract to build and launch a new batch of satellites, even though they don’t need them until 2012. This is a regulation from the FCC to guarantee their commitment to use a reserved set of airwaves. Unfortunately, the satellite business is shifting to the ground. Competitor ICO, who had also struggled to survive, is turning to a terrestrial solution to cover more area and even bring broadband service to rural locations. Iridium could alter their satellite model to take advantage of on-ground repeaters as well, but they’ll need to ask for flexibility from the government to keep their money from being tied up in this federally enforced contract.

Johnjoe MacFadden’s “cemi field theory” proposes that “human consciousness is actually the brain’s electromagnetic field interacting with its circuitry.” Author of Quantum Evolution, McFadden’s emphasis on the electromagnetic field as an entity that defines the human mind, rather than a side effect, as it were, of how our brains happen to work, is likely to be controversial. But there are benefits to his line of inquiry and potential experimentation to discover if he’s correct. Even if he can not prove scientifically that this wireless field is what makes us conscious and human, finding the effects of magnetic fields on the brain may be helpful in treating those whose minds are not wired as properly as they could be. Hopefully it won’t be as rash as shock therapy, but there is so much we don’t understand about how our brains function that a new perspective is welcome. The article notes that McFadden’s approach brings back philosophy of mind’s dualism, although in a slightly different manner from the original.

The NY Times article on exhibitors at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair is chock-full of nifty links to funky furniture designers. Fold Online has interesting wall-hangings and furniture with dramatic wood grain. Truck Product Architecture brings their name to life with pieces that are easy to ship, functional and appealing in minimalism. They were hoping to sell to Design Within Reach, a retailer looking for new items. Blu Dot was showing their stacking storage systems.
Lolah has funky, whimsical shapes. C-Design Studio‘s pieces seem boxy. R&D; Design gets my vote with simple designs in interesting forms. They have a circular steel table laser-cut into a lace pattern. It’s named Doily.