"A company-run store in Fresno sells a Big Mac for $5.69, but another company-run restaurant two miles away sells the same sandwich for $6.89, a 21% premium." The upshot of AI-based pricing is that there's now a ton of direct evidence that pricing power exists in very small geographic markets.

Corn Chowder. End of summer. Broth like light itself.

J. Lee of @Emily_Sundberg's Feed Me fame presents Chicago's Eighth Wonder: Crispy Pad See Ew

Shoutout to @GustavoArellano for connecting us with Matt! Read it here: buffetmagazine.net/lou-po-be…

After taking a sweet dive into the family life of Phoenix Bakery in L.A.'s Chinatown, our baking correspondent Matt Azuma developed his own recipe for sweet and flaky Lou Po Beng (winter melon pastries), made with a lard-laminated double dough.

How does a neighborhood go from zero bakeries to four bakeries in the span of a few years? How much power can a neighborhood association really have?? How beautiful can a brownstone-lined block be on a crisp autumn day??? @cal_hitchcock reports from Brooklyn

A disaster. Invite friends over! Live a little! We have so many things you can cook them (thread)

Buffet magazine reports out why there are suddenly so many fancy bakeries in Brooklyn Heights buffetmagazine.net/brooklyn-…

PepsiCo is running out of carrots. At about 790 million gallons of Gatorade a year, coloring fruit punch alone would take around 90,000 tons of black carrots, a crop the US mostly imports from India and Turkey. Gatorade will pull artificial color from three flavors this fall: fruit punch, lemon lime, and orange. Fruit punch switches to color from black carrot and purple sweet potato. Lemon lime to beta-carotene, the orange pigment in carrots and dark leafy greens. But to match the same shade, a plant-based color takes up to 10x the volume of a synthetic dye like Red 40. For fruit punch, about two black carrots per bottle. Once the whole US food industry switches, demand for natural colors rises 400 to 500%. Orange was supposed to get natural beta-carotene, but will use synthetic beta-carotene for now. PepsiCo told the FT: "We just couldn't get enough to do the orange." The Danish company Oterra sells about 1,200 natural colors, black carrot color among them. Black carrot color already exists and the FDA permits it. PepsiCo, Conagra and Smucker have said they'll drop artificial dyes by the end of 2027. All three will buy natural color from many of the same crops, at the same time. Natural colorant prices are modeled to rise anywhere from 53% to over 1,000%, depending on how fast the industry moves. The solution is precision fermentation. Put the genes for the plant's pigment-making enzymes into a microbe, feed it sugar, and let the microbe make the pigment. It already works for other colors. Impossible Burger's red comes from a soy gene put into yeast, and the FDA has allowed it since 2019. Anthocyanin, the red in black carrots, is harder. A beet red needs about three plant genes in the yeast. Anthocyanin needs about ten, and the yeast breaks down some of the pigment it makes. So far this only works in the lab, and in tiny amounts. Oterra is working toward FDA approval for a fermented replacement for Red 40, with a commercial product targeted in about three years. The future of Gatorade depends on fermentation.

The average voter seems as hostile to alfalfa farming in the desert as data center construction

Much of the history of Silicon Valley remains to be written. I've just released a new tool to make it easier to discover material on the history of the Valley. Start here. silicon-valley-archives.gith…

Jcal studies the blade

Who among us

Sen. Jim Justice throws a huge birthday party for his dog on Capitol Hill 🎂 🎥: @hicharliecotton

Japanese Americans grew most of the state’s celery once in Venice Beach. I found some still growing wild in Ballona Creek this past weekend and wrote about it in Lunch Box. frankbear.substack.com/p/jap…

NEW ODD LOTS: Hollywood was falling apart even before AI, now it's getting worse @tracyalloway and I had great time chatting with, TV writer, podcaster, former LA City hall guy @hayesdavenport about what the industry's trouble mean for the city overall podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…

Slated to start October 13. Seems fair to guess the White House might be planning to launch immigration raid showdowns in the two biggest cities and media hubs three weeks before the midterms.

NEWS: DOJ is recruiting military lawyers for October prosecutor posts supporting immigration related law enforcement surges in Manhattan, LA, & Sacramento, per Pentagon email reviewed by @BLaw. I’m told this is unheard of for SDNY. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law…

Hot news: If you're a qualified purchaser, you can actually buy yourself a Bullfrog, RIGHT NOW, from cuas.mil

It only took 5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water (over a quarter of total consumption in the basin) for alfalfa farmers to lose $2.86 billion last year. Great system.