Quotulatiousness

September 28, 2012

Even when they quote you accurately, they can still miss the point you’re trying to make

Filed under: Economics, Food, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Tim Worstall, after thanking all the folks who got him to the point he can be quoted (and quoted accurately) in the Los Angeles Times, realizes that they’re using his words to present a point he isn’t trying to make:

I wrote here about the coming bacon famine. My point was that we’ve just had a bad crop and this requires a modest change in how we use that crop that we do have. We’d rather like people to stop feeding the now in short supply grains to pigs to make bacon and leave rather more of it to be eaten directly by humans. Further, I gloried in the fact that we have a system which achieves this. We have the futures markets: the future price of corn and soy and wheat has gone up. Farmers are culling their pig herds to avoid the future higher costs of feeding them. This will cause a shortage of bacon in the future and if not an excess then certainly more grain than otherwise that can be eaten by humans. I do regard this as a good result, yes. But what I am pointing to is the way in which in a market, price driven, system the entirely selfish pursuit of gelt and pelf, the desire purely for filthy lucre, brings about such a desirable result. The sole desire of agricultural commodity speculators is to increase the amount of cash in their wallets and reduce the amounts in those of other such speculators. Yet from this system we get a rebalancing of the use of a scarce resource which leads to more humans leading longer and better lives even if we’ve a certain shortage of pigs. At which point Hurrah! for capitalism and aren’t we all such lucky people.

[. . .]

Which is indeed what I said. However, we’re then told this:

    Worstall doesn’t go so far as to say we should stop eating meat, but his line of thinking is headed in the right direction. If we didn’t use grain as feed for livestock, we could take significant steps toward ending global hunger while also drastically reducing greenhouse gases. Meantime, we’d spare a whole lot of pigs — and maybe even our health.

All of which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, advocating vegetarianism and the equitable distribution of the world’s resources. When what I’m actually applauding is the way in which financial capitalism red in tooth and claw solves our distribution of scarce resources problems.

September 17, 2012

Harming the poorest during a food price hike

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:54

The Economist on the least effective ways of dealing with rising food prices:

Although the weather is the proximate cause of the price rises, governments are making matters worse. Look at America’s biofuels policy. By ensuring that a third of the country’s maize is turned into ethanol and fed to cars, it has driven up grain prices and made them more volatile by reducing stocks. At the start of this year America scrapped the subsidy for ethanol, and abolished the tariff on imports of the stuff — steps in the right direction. But a certain amount of ethanol still has to be blended with petrol by law. That keeps prices high.

Bad policies in America are encouraging bad policies elsewhere. Higher prices have spooked importing and exporting countries alike, causing them to turn away from volatile world markets and seek to insulate themselves. Between 2007 and 2011, 33 countries imposed export restrictions on food. Agriculture accounts for less than 10% of world trade, but more than two-thirds of the cost of all border distortions.

[. . .]

Farm protection is like a weed: it grows everywhere and seems impossible to eradicate. This newspaper has been making the case against it since 1843, when we were founded to oppose Britain’s protectionist Corn Laws. Sadly we seem to have made too little progress. At the moment governments are making farming less efficient than it should be. They are increasing poverty. Their policies are otiose, since there are better ways to help the poor, such as direct cash transfers. And they are counterproductive, because they exacerbate the problems they seek to solve.

September 10, 2012

Warren Ellis on the near-future of 3D printing

Filed under: Food, Science, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:03

Warning: Warren Ellis is not one to mince his words (especially early in the morning). This is his first of a weekly column for Vice UK:

3D printing’s been around for a little while now, and it’s improving in leaps and bounds. On one end of the scale, I was talking to someone from a very famous special effects studio the other week, who was telling me they now have the facility to print cars. One of their wizards took a current-day standard 3D printer (which tend to look like dodgy breadmakers), took it apart to see how it worked, and then used it to print the parts to make a massively larger 3D printer, which he then used to print off a car. Street-furniture set-dressing for movies.

On the other end of the scale, home 3D printers like the Makerbot Replicator now cost twelve hundred quid and can crank out several thousand different objects. It’s a start. (A cheaper machine, the Stratasys, was recently used to print off a gun, after all.)

A start that led to a lot of other people thinking about what else could be printed. NASA have been developing something they call a “bioreactor” since the 1980s, wanting to supply long-haul astronauts with the onboard ability to perform skin and bone grafts by cloning and growing tissue. This has been developed into the idea of printing meat. Printed meat would be ethical meat, as nothing has to die in order to make it. The one drawback being that cultured meats of any kind tend to have textural issues: they’ve not been stuck to anything alive that can flex and secrete into it, so they’re kind of limp and nasty and may have to be artificially “exercised” by mechanical systems or electroshock therapy. A fine printed steak would have convulsed under electrical torture many hundreds of times before it reached your plate.

I don’t actually have a problem with that, but I am a full-on omnivore who is looking forward to being able to print off dolphin-and-mastodon sandwiches. You can, however, understand the reticence of those who gave up meat for ethical reasons being served a pork chop that’s been worked on a rack and then electrocuted for your pleasure.

September 5, 2012

The positive side to rising food prices

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:06

Tim Worstall responds to an article by Michael Hanlon:

    The storm is coming. One of the great dependables of modern life — cheap food — may be about to disappear. If a growing number of economists and scientists are to be believed, we are witnessing a historic transition: from an era when the basics of life have been getting ever more affordable, to a new period when they are ever more expensive.

Ah, no, I’m afraid you’ve not understood the projections. Yes, food is expected to become more expensive. But also more affordable at the same time.

For the driving force of the rise in food prices is expected to be that people are getting richer. Thus able to afford three squares a day, some of them even containing meat. The rise in incomes is expected to be greater than the rise in food prices: thus food becoming both more expensive and more affordable as a portion of incomes.

BTW, if you think that’s not how the word affordable is used in such contexts then do speak to the booze puritans. They say exactly this: booze has become more expensive but cheaper as a portion of incomes: more affordable.

And if incomes do not rise as predicted we don’t expect to see the food price rises. For it is not the idea of 10 billion people that is predicted to raise the prices. It’s the idea of billions currently on $2 a day becoming billions on $20 that is.

Also, as I’ve mentioned before, a significant part of the rise in global food prices is driven by particularly stupid government policies on ethanol production.

September 4, 2012

True-but-misleading factoid: “7 kg Of Grain To Make 1 kg Of Beef”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:05

Tim Worstall on the mis-use of a vegetarian-friendly data point:

I asked Larry Elliott where the number came from and was sent this from Fidelity Investments (not online so far as I know).

    The demand for more protein has a significant knock-on impact on grain demand. Livestock is reared on grain-feed, making production heavily resource intensive. Indeed, it takes 7 kilograms of grain to produce just 1 kilogram of meat. As demand for meat rises, this increases the demand for and prices of feedstock — these increased costs of productions flow back to the consumers in the form of higher meat prices. Adding to the upward pressure on feedstock price and much to the dislike of livestock farmers, have been US environmental regulations (the Renewable Fuel Standard) that require a proportion of corn crops be used for the production of bio-fuel.

So, case closed, right? We all need to give up eating meat to save Mother Gaia? Not necessarily. The numbers given are accurate, but only in a particular context: that of raising meat for the US (and, probably, Canadian) market. The rest of the world doesn’t do it this way:

It is only in US or US style feedlot operations than cattle are fed on this much grain. Thus the equation is useful if you want information about what is going to happen with US cattle and grain futures: for that’s the general production method feeding those cattle futures. But very little of the rest of the world uses these feedlots as their production methods. I’m not certain whether we have any at all in the UK for example, would be surprised if there were many in the EU. Around where I live in Portugal pigs forage for acorns (yes, from the same oak trees that give us cork) or are fed on swill, goats and sheep graze on fields that would support no form of arable farming at all (they can just about, sometimes, support low levels of almond, olive or carob growing). Much beef cattle in the UK is grass fed with perhaps hay or silage in the winters.

My point being that sure, it’s possible to grow a kilo of beef by using 7 kilos of grain. But it isn’t necessary. The number might be useful when looking at agricultural futures in the US but it’s a hopelessly misguiding one to use to try and determine anything at all about the global relationship between meat and grain production. And most certainly entirely wrong in leading to the conclusion that we must all become vegetarians.

Which brings us to the lesson of this little screed. Sure, numbers are great, can be very informative. But you do have to make sure that you’re using the right numbers. Numbers that are applicable to whatever problem it is that you want to illuminate. If you end up, just as a little example, comparing grain to meat numbers for a specific intensive method of farming really only used in the US then you’re going to get very much the wrong answer when you try to apply that globally.

September 3, 2012

A bit of common sense in food news

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:39

Rob Lyons reviews a new book by Mike Gibney that attempts to bring some common sense back to counteract the epidemic of fear-mongering about food:

Given much of the popular discussion about food, it would be easy to despair that we face a future where half the world’s people starve to death while the other half drown in their own fat. The words ‘new food research’ in a news report are often just the lead into another sorry tale about how some aspect of what we eat is going to kill us or how some specific food will provide ‘miracle’ protection against the chronic illnesses of our age.

Professor Mike Gibney’s new book, Something to Chew On, is a welcome step back from all this noise, offering an expert take on many of these claims. Gibney is director of the Institute of Food and Health at University College Dublin and has served on many national and international advisory committees.

[. . .]

Take pesticides, for example. Many people are prepared to pay through the nose to buy organic food which is free of artificial pesticides. But as Gibney points out, those people are actually consuming a far greater weight in natural, plant-produced pesticides that are potentially every bit as cancer-inducing as modern chemicals. ‘Nature abounds with chemicals which, while beautifully natural, are nevertheless risk-laden’, he says, from the deadly poison ricin, found in castor beans, to substances in fava beans that induce a lethal form of anaemia in some susceptible people. The key is in the dose: for both natural compounds and their highly regulated artificial counterparts, the amounts that we actually eat are too small to represent any threat to health.

Indeed, Gibney goes on to make mincemeat of all of the claims made for organic foods: they don’t taste better than conventional crops, they offer no nutritional advantage, and, by being less productive, they are actually wasteful of land. That’s hardly environmentally friendly.

Part of the reason we get such overblown nutritional and health “advice” from the media is the difficulty of conducting nutrition research:

While trying to figure out the effect of eating, or not eating, a particular kind of food on cancer or heart disease, for example, there are numerous confounding factors that get in the way of drawing robust conclusions. People lie about what they eat or simply don’t record it accurately; factors that look like cause and effect can turn out to be mere associations. Even finding enough subjects to look at the effect of diet on a relatively unusual disease, like ovarian cancer, can be very difficult.

[. . .]

The truth is that every study’s results need to be treated with caution and there needs to be open-mindedness about other possible explanations. While it is relatively easy to see the effects of vitamin deficiency, for example, for the most part nutrition research moves forward on the basis of a lot of evidence that is unsatisfactory in one way or another. The endless stream of claims that red meat, sugar, eggs and myriad other foodstuffs cause harm should be treated with an almighty pinch of salt (as do claims about salt, for that matter).

Along the way, Gibney offers his thoughts on personalised nutrition — the possibility of creating diets specifically suited to our own DNA — and epigenetics — the idea that different elements of our DNA can be switched on or off by environmental factors in the womb or the first years of life. He also offers a Jacques Cousteau-like tour of the human gut. Did you know there are 10 times more bacteria living in our guts — 100 trillion — than there are cells in the human body? Did you know those bacteria can sometimes switch on or off changes in our bodies to suit their own needs? Gibney describes our relationship to this mass of bugs as a permanent state of ‘armed peace’, with mutual benefits to both parties: body and bacteria.

The great maple syrup heist must have been an inside job

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

The first time I heard about Quebec’s strategic maple syrup reserve was when someone made off with a quarter of the province’s sweet, sticky liquid:

On Friday, news broke that thieves had stolen $30 million dollars worth of Quebec’s strategic maple syrup reserves. Much as the United States keeps a stock of extra oil buried in underground salt caverns to use in case of a geopolitical emergency, the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers has been managing warehouses full of surplus sweetener since 2000. The crooks seem to have made off with more than a quarter of the province’s backup supply.

[. . .]

But harvesting maple is a fickle business, and that makes expanding the industry tricky. The trees need cold nights and mildly warm days to yield sap, meaning production can vary greatly year to year based on the weather. That’s a potential problem for the big syrup buyers, whether they’re bottlers or large food companies that make cookies or cereal. Quaker can’t pour a bunch of time and money into developing a maple-and-brown-sugar-flavored version of Life, only to find out it won’t be able to get enough of its ingredients, or that they’ll have to pay through the nose for each liter of syrup.

H/T to Nicholas Packwood for the link.

August 30, 2012

Exaggerating your points to make them seem more important than they are

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Geoff Chambers does a bit of Google searching to track down a few of the claims made in Stephen Emmot’s critically acclaimed one-man show “Ten Billion”:

The reviews were full of superlatives. The Times’ critic calls it “utterly gripping, terrifyingly lucid”; Time Out: “monumentally sobering”; Billington in the Guardian: “one of the most disturbing evenings I have ever spent in a theatre”; the Financial Times: “one of the most disturbing shows I have seen on a stage”; the Mail on Sunday “certainly the most scary show in London”. Almost all of them cite Emmott’s conclusion: “We’re f*cked”.

Here are some of the key “facts” (or “f*cts”) cited by Emmott and picked up by critics. (It is of course impossible to check whether the critics have quoted Emmott correctly, since no record of what he says exists):

1) A google search uses as much electricity as boiling a kettle.

2) It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a hamburger, (that’s 10 trillion litres of water annually to sustain the UK’s burger industry).

3) It takes 27,000 litres of water to make a bar of chocolate

4) Animal species are currently going extinct at a rate 1,000 times their natural level.

5) Bangladesh will be under water by the end of the century.

TL;DR for those who don’t feel up to reading the whole thing: 1) false, by a factor of 100. 2) true-ish, but massively misleading. 3) false, or Emmott eats humongous chocolate bars. 4) false, even though Wikipedia thinks it’s true. 5) false, the land area of Bangladesh has actually grown over the last 50 years thanks to land reclamation projects.

August 25, 2012

Yet another factor in obesity

Filed under: Food, Health, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:09

“I want to say one word to you. Just one word.” Antibiotics.

We aren’t single individuals, but colonies of trillions. Our bodies, and our guts in particular, are home to vast swarms of bacteria and other microbes. This “microbiota” helps us to harvest energy from our food by breaking down the complex molecules that our own cells cannot cope with. They build vitamins that we cannot manufacture. They ‘talk to’ our immune system to ensure that it develops correctly, and they prevent invasions from other more harmful microbes. They’re our partners in life.

What happens when we kill them?

Farmers have been doing that experiment in animals for more than 50 years. By feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy farm animals, they’ve found that they could fatten up their livestock by as much as 15 percent. You can put the antibiotics in their feed or in their water. You can give the drugs to cows, sheep, pigs or chickens. You can try penicillins, or tetracyclines, or many other classes of antibiotics. The effect is the same: more weight.

It seems reasonable to assume that this effect is also true for humans. And we dose ourselves with antibiotics far more than we should (often for things that do not respond to antibiotics at all … a twist on the placebo effect). In addition, many of the animals we raise for meat are regularly dosed with antibiotics.

For now, two things are clear. First, antibiotics have done a huge amount of good in treating bacterial infections and if we’re even talking about reducing their use, it’s because we have the luxury of health that they have provided. Second, they are clearly overused: prescribed for illnesses that they have no power over, and used to fatten livestock that aren’t sick. Currently, on average, every American child gets a course of antibiotics ever year.

The overuse of antibiotics has fuelled the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but their impact on our beneficial bacteria could be equally detrimental. Blaser has been vociferously banging on this drum for years. As he wrote in a comment piece for Nature, “Antibiotics kill the bacteria we do want, as well as those we don’t… Overuse of antibiotics could be fuelling the dramatic increase in conditions such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, allergies and asthma… We must make use of the available technology to protect and study our bacterial benefactors before it is too late.”

August 24, 2012

The new Malthusian miserabilism

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Food, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Brendan O’Neill on the once-again popular theories of Reverend Thomas Malthus:

Malthusianism is back in vogue. Not only in theatres in Sloane Square, but across the opinion-forming spectrum. Last year, the human population hit seven billion, giving rise to a boom in handwringing commentary. BBC reporters tell us that ‘uncontrolled population growth threatens to undermine efforts to save the planet’. The Guardian’s environment reporters are forever warning of the dangers of our ‘rapidly growing global population’. Then there’s much-loved celebs like David Attenborough, who recently signed up to the population-panic group the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) and frequently declares: ‘I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.’

The New Malthusians are getting cockier. At the UN Rio+20 Earth summit earlier this year, 105 respectable institutions, including Britain’s increasingly Malthusian Royal Society, urged the international powers-that-be to look beyond the ‘ethical sensitivities’ around the population issue and ‘confront rising global population’. All those wailing babies mean we are now ‘living beyond the planet’s means’, they declared. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pumping millions of dollars into the distribution of birth-control tools in the developing world. Well-off westerners can now even offset their carbon emissions by helping to prevent the birth of babies in less fortunate places. A website called Pop Offsets, launched by the OPT, allows you to work out how much carbon you emit in your daily life and then tells you how many births you must help to prevent in order to offset that carbon. You make a financial contribution to a reproductive charity; that charity encourages a woman somewhere not to have more kids; and, hey presto, your personal emissions are cancelled out by your contribution to the non-creation of resource-demanding babies. The Guardian’s report on this initiative was illustrated with a photo of babies, 12 of them, just lying there like the problematic drains on nature.

Malthusianism is so ingrained in the outlook of greens and other trendies that people can fantasise about loads of human beings dying off without anyone batting an eyelid. Population panic-merchants often claim that the ‘carrying capacity’ of the planet is two billion human beings, so at least five billion less than at present. In a discussion on Radio 3’s super-respectable Nightwaves a couple of years ago, the psychologist and writer Sue Blackmore declared: ‘For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.’ There were no complaints to the BBC: the idea that humans are a problem in need of a solution is widespread in respectable ­circles.

August 23, 2012

The historical “locavore” diet: seasonal gruel and mush

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:40

sp!ked has an article by authors Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, on the disadvantages of the true locavore diet:

Perhaps the most ludicrous claim made by some ‘locavores’ — activists who argue that food produced near final consumers is superior in a myriad of ways to distant imports — is that the globalised food-supply chain is guilty of crimes against seasonality. Limiting our intake of fresh produce to whatever can be obtained locally at certain times of the year (and preserving the surplus for the remainder), we are told, will not only help atone for agri-business’ fossil fuel-driven ways and constrain us to live within regional ecological limits, but it will also make fresh local food more enjoyable when it is available. As one locavore puts it, ‘deprivation leads to greater appreciation’.

The emphasis on local seasonality by food activists, however, is problematic on several counts. For instance, why do militant locavores limit themselves to local seasonality when they could further insist on truly ‘native’ produce and livestock? Seen in this light, North American agriculture should be essentially limited to turkeys, farmed salmon and a few other fish and shellfish, sunflowers, blueberries, cranberries, Jerusalem artichokes and some varieties of squashes. (Though the really hardcore North American locavore could go even further by reverting to problematic native crops such as sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, maygrass and little barley that were replaced about one thousand years ago by Mexican imports such as corn and beans.)

Basic logic aside, limiting our food intake to local productions is a one-way ticket to chronic famines and malnutrition. Having in most cases no direct experience with massive crop failures, locavores typically ignore the historical and contemporary toll taken by factors ranging from droughts, floods, heavy rains and frost to hail, windstorms, earthquakes and tsunamis, to say nothing of insect pests, rodents, soil erosion and plant and animal diseases. Yet, the historical evidence on the issue is unequivocal. It was only the development of cost-effective long-distance transportation (primarily the railroad and the steamship) that finally eradicated famines through the large-scale movement of foodstuff from regions that had experienced good harvests to those that had struggled with mediocre ones.

August 22, 2012

“The good old days” were actually pretty crappy for most

Filed under: Books, Economics, Environment, Food, Health, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:22

An excerpt from The Locavore’s Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu in the National Post:

To a locavore, food in the future should be created pretty much like it was in the not-so-distant past: produce and animals raised lovingly in urban backyards, turning domestic waste into hearty dishes. Farmers’ markets in every small town and city neighbourhood, where people rediscover the joys of real food and get reacquainted with one another. The rebuilding of small-scale slaughterhouses and canning factories to serve area producers and foster the preservation of local food items for consumption in the off-season.

Ideally, this local system would also be built on seeds saved from the previous harvest rather than purchased from giant corporate seed producers; ancient “heirloom” cultivars developed before synthetic fertilizers and pesticides became available and that, as a result, are better able to seek nutrients in the soil, don’t require any chemicals and are naturally resilient to drought and pests (“If it’s old seed, it’s good seed!”); and “heritage” animal breeds better able to withstand diseases and harsh environments and grow fat and happy on pastureland alone. Pest control would be achieved through traditional “natural” products based on plants and minerals; manual labour, such as crushing or picking bugs and larvae off foliage or removing weeds by hands; and biological control methods, such as introducing exotic animals, insects and bacteria that feed on invasive pests. Finally, factory-made fertilizers would be replaced by animal manure and rotating fodder crops, such as clover and alfalfa.

[. . .]

Isn’t it possible that crushing bugs and removing weeds by hands were neither very effective nor the most productive use of one’s time? That seeds purchased from commercial suppliers offered access to superior genetic material, were not mixed up with unwanted material and were readily available when needed? That “natural” manure has always been dirty, smelly, chock-full of pathogens and requires several months of composting? That the “slow release” of nutrients from green manures and organic compost could never be as adequately controlled to match crop demands with nutrient supply as is now possible with synthetic fertilizers? Further, that old mineral (including arsenic) and plant-based pesticides were less harmful to plant pests (and thereby more likely to promote insect resistance) and more problematic to human health than more recent offerings? That introducing nonnative insects, mammals and bacteria in a new ecosystem often had unintended, broader and longer-lasting negative consequences for nontargeted species? And that, unlike chemical pesticides that typically do not persist in an ecosystem once application has ceased, exotic insects who have successfully adapted to a new environment are practically impossible to eradicate and do not remain confined to one geographical location? In the end, why are modern agricultural producers willing to purchase costly synthetic inputs, hormonal growth promoters, antibiotics and genetically modified seeds when the methods agri-intellectuals prefer are either completely free (such as giving up on the use of these inputs and on equipment such as poultry housing) or seemingly much cheaper (such as feeding cattle entirely on pastureland and saving one’s seeds instead of relying on those marketed by specialized producers)?

Ontario’s ban on a large number of pesticides and herbicides for domestic use is re-acquainting many home owners with the joys of hand-weeding their lawns. It’s getting to the point that Ontario’s provincial flower might as well be the dandelion, as they’re everywhere. There’s a reason your ancestors couldn’t wait to get off the farm…

August 14, 2012

Ethanol: starving the third world, by government policy

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

Jeffrey Tucker on the absurd and cruel implications of a government mandate:

Corn prices are officially through the roof, spiking to record highs. It’s been headed this way through six years of crazy volatility. Now the spike is undeniable. At the same time, crop yields are lower they have been since 1995.

Everyone blames the drought, as if the market can’t normally handle a supply change. The real problem is that the corn market is fundamentally misshaped by government interventions that have made a mess of this and many more markets. The distortions are never contained, but spread and spread.

[. . .]

“Corn is the single most important commodity for retail food,” Richard Volpe, an economist for the USDA told the Los Angeles Times. “Corn is either directly or indirectly in about three-quarters of all food consumers buy.”

Fine, then, answer me this, Mr. Government Economist Man: Why is 40% of the corn crop being burned up in our gas tanks? The answer is a Soviet-like, fascist-like, stupid-like government mandate. It is actually relatively new. It came about in 2005 and 2007. It mixes nearly all the gas we can buy with a sticky product now in rather short supply.

Of all the government regulations I’ve looked at in detail over the last 10 years, the ethanol mandate is, by far, the worst. There are no grounds on which it is defensible. None!

Like so many government initiatives, this was supposed to do something good: reduce the consumption of fossil fuel for gasoline production by substituting a proportion of ethanol. While gas was expensive and ethanol was cheap this might make sense — but when ethanol becomes more expensive, and the raw material used to produce the ethanol would be far better used for food and feedstock, the whole policy becomes an act in the theatre of the absurd.

August 5, 2012

Tolerance Is Different From Approval

Filed under: Business, Food, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

In his Forbes column, Tim Worstall explains his puzzlement over the ongoing Chick-Fil-A uproar in the US and why tolerance is not the same as approval:

As to the basic point about gay marriage I can only offer my personal opinion: all for it. On the grounds that everyone’s going to understand the miserableness of us middle aged heteros a great deal better after 20 odd years of societally enforced monogamy. Slightly more seriously gay marriage or not gay marriage has little to do with a business column.

What does have to do with a business column is that this whole idea of a market means that we don’t have to care about the personal beliefs of either those who supply us or whom we supply. It’s the very impersonality of market exchange that means that it just doesn’t matter a darn what anyone’s sexual (or indeed any other) preference is. We get to care only about whether it’s a good chicken sandwich or whether the customer has enough money for one.

[. . .]

The other point that occurs to me is that we seem to be separating tolerance from approval in a way that some in the US are not.

Just as background, in the country I live in, Portugal, there is as far as a legal marriage ceremony goes, only civil marriage. Any two consenting adults, in whatever mixture of genders and sexes makes sense to those two individuals, can be married by the State. Religion doesn’t even get a look in.

If you do want a religious marriage, according to the rites of a church, then off you go after your civil marriage and have one. That marriage will be limited by whatever that church decides the limitations upon marriage are. It has no legal effect at all.

At which point everyone tolerates gay marriage but no one demands approval of it. For the two are different. Tolerance being the necessary requirement for a free and liberal society: that you get to do what you want to do as long as everyone else is also given the same freedom to follow their path from cradle to grave. Approval is something else again. I, to take a very trivial example, certainly tolerate the existence of Simon Cowell and his shows but that doesn’t mean that anyone can demand that I approve of them.

July 20, 2012

Reason.tv: How the Government Makes You Fat: Gary Taubes on Obesity, Carbs, and Bad Science

Filed under: Food, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

“The government can come along and, with all the best intentions, cause enormous problems” says Gary Taubes, a science writer and author most recently of Why We Get Fat And What To Do About It.

Reason.tv’s Zach Weissmueller talked with Taubes about his controversial work in the world of nutrition and epidemiology, including Taubes’ hypothesis that carbohydrates, not dietary fat, overeating, or lack of physcial activity, are the primary factor causing obesity. Other topics include the inability of governments and large informational institutions such as the American Heart Association to adapt to new information, the mess of bad legislation and bad science that Taubes believes led to America’s obesity problem, and why many libertarians seem to love the Paleo Diet.

Taubes’ work has unsurprisingly invited criticism from scientists, government officials and journalists, even in the pages of Reason Magazine, where he went back and forth with Reason contributor Michael Fumento.

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