Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2012

The Crazy Years: today’s exhibit – the junction between bad parenting and bad nutrition

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:21

May we present Stacey Irvine, 17, the new poster girl for neglectful parenting and test case for even more Nanny State intervention:

A teenage girl who has eaten almost nothing else apart from chicken nuggets for 15 years has been warned by doctors that the junk food is killing her.

Stacey Irvine, 17, has been hooked on the treats since her mother bought her some at a McDonald’s restaurant when she was two.

[. . .]

Miss Irvine, who has never eaten fruit or vegetables, had swollen veins in her tongue and was found to have anaemia.

[. . .]

Her exasperated mother Evonne Irvine, 39, who is battling to get her daughter seen by a specialist, told the newspaper: ‘It breaks my heart to see her eating those damned nuggets.

‘She’s been told in no uncertain terms that she’ll die if she carries on like this. But she says she can’t eat anything else.’

She once tried starving her daughter in a bid to get her to eat more nutritious food – but did not have any success.

Miss Irvine, whose only other variation in her diet is the occasional slice of toast for breakfast and crisps, said that once she tried nuggets she ‘loved them so much they were all I would eat’.

Of course, this is reported in the Daily Mail, so the story’s relationship with reality may be a bit looser than one might hope.

January 24, 2012

The Crazy Years: today’s exhibit, the $100 hot dog infused with 100-year-old cognac

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

There are undoubtedly culinary discoveries yet to be made, some of which may well be amazingly tasty. Pulling together unlikely combinations is certainly one way to discover new and interesting flavours. This one, however, strikes me as being just a little bit crazy:

dougieDog Hot Dogs, a popular Vancouver eatery renowned for its creative all-natural hot dogs, has just added the Dragon Dog to its menu — with a price tag of $100. The hot dog features a foot-long bratwurst infused with hundred-year-old Louis XIII cognac, which costs over $2000 a bottle. Also on the dog, Kobe beef seared in olive and truffle oil and fresh lobster. A picante sauce (ingredients undisclosed) ties the flavors together for 12 inches of absolute culinary decadence.

“In designing this hot dog I wanted to come up with something super tasty and high-end that stays true to the traditional identity of the hot dog — a hot dog that any hot dog lover would enjoy,” explained dougieDOG proprietor and Chief Hot Dog Designer dougie luv.

I’m surprised the owner’s name isn’t C.M.O.T. Dibbler …

December 19, 2011

Kelly McParland: “Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Food — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:24

Don’t worry, my Norwegian friends, it’s just small-minded Canadian jealousy that you tend to beat us in all the “Smug Country” polls and your national monopoly is even more constricting and incompetent than our equivalent national monopoly:

Everyone knows the Norwegians are the most revoltingly perfect people in the world.

They consistently top all lists of Things Good Countries Do.

They give more to foreign aid than just about any other country in the world. Countries are supposed to give 70¢ for every $100 of national production, but hardly any do. Norway gives about 40% more than the benchmark. They’re sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in oil profits, and instead of blowing it on short-term expediencies (like a certain western province we could mention) they squirrel a lot of it away in an investment fund to help maintain their high standard of living when the oil runs out. And believe me, their standard of living is high: a cradle-to-grave nannyism that revolts conservatives but seems to work for Norwegians. (In Norway, life is so soft that even cows are required to have rubber mats in their stalls so they can rest comfortably between shifts).

They’re so perfect they’re annoying. Even Swedes get tired of hearing about them. So it’s kind of fun to read about how they’ve completely buggered up their supply management system, so that the entire country has been stripped of its butter supply just as Christmas arrives and everyone gears up to make lots of stuff for which butter is required. And if it reminds you of Canada’s own supply management system (think: dairy products and Quebec), all the better.

Chiquita, supporter of narco-terrorist groups, calls for a boycott of Canadian oil

Filed under: Americas, Cancon, Economics, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:39

When corporate social media goes wrong:

I used to work for an ad agency, and I often had animated discussions with my colleagues about the danger of confusing cause marketing with product marketing. I have always maintained that they are separate disciplines that don’t mix, while many of my colleagues disagreed.

As a society, we have become distressingly pious and self-righteous — and as a natural consequence advertisers wish to capitalize on this instinct. Like my erstwhile colleagues, they see this as an easy path to identifying their product with a strong public sentiment. This is such a bad idea that it merits a blog entry of its own, but what lead me to write today was a satisfyingly spectacular self-immolation by a large American brand that managed to make the wrong choice in just about every decision their communications and marketing teams have made over the past few days.

[. . .]

Worse, Chiquita Brands seemed to forget completely about their Canadian market. It’s easy to underestimate Canada. It’s a little country with a tenth the population of the United States. On the other hand, it’s a terrific export market, and much too accessible and rich to be ignored.

Canadians are understandably touchy about the Oil Sands. The majority of Canadians are very proud of the fact that they’ve transformed the country into an energy superpower by successfully accessing a resource that was considered nearly worthless only a decade ago – and they have done this with unprecedented care, investing billions of dollars in developing new technologies to protect the environment. Canadians are also very proud of the fact that they are the only net exporter of oil that is a liberal democracy and respects human rights. They’ve even coined the phrase “ethical oil” to describe their unique approach to oil production.

What Chiquita Brands succeeded in doing with their announcement was to make millions of Canadian consumers very unhappy. People who couldn’t have told you on Monday morning what brand of bananas they bought were determined by Thursday afternoon that it wouldn’t be Chiquita. Worse yet, hundreds of consumers decided to make their feelings known by commenting on the Chiquita Bananas Facebook page. And this is where Chiquita’s marketing and communications team took one bad decision and turned it into a disaster

H/T to Five Feet of Fury for the links.

November 29, 2011

Oh, the jarmanity!

Filed under: Britain, Food, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:08

The Reg reports a terrible traffic accident in Yorkshire:

A flood of yeast extract has blocked the M1 motorway in South Yorkshire after a truck containing the Marmite ingredient crashed and spilled its load.

The road is still closed this morning, according to the latest traffic information, as cleanup workers scoop 23.2 tonnes of the gloopy brown stuff off the road surface.

[. . .]

The dumped yeast extract was described as “waste” by the BBC, so is highly unlikely to now end up in Marmite jars.

Left uncleaned, the vitamin-rich syrup, packed with denatured yeast cells, could cause a minor biohazard as it is highly nutritious to bacteria cultures.

November 15, 2011

Stephen Gordon: One does not simply end supply management

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

Stephen Gordon in the Globe and Mail‘s Economy Lab on the economically indefensible Canadian anomaly known as “supply management”:

The best way to get a rise out of Canadian economists is to ask us about our dairy supply management system. It’s simply indefensible: a government-enforced cartel whose only purpose is to generate high prices for what most would view as essential goods. This sort of arrangement wouldn’t be — and isn’t — tolerated in another sector of the economy. Nor is it tolerated anywhere else in the world. So the news that the federal government is considering putting supply management on the table in order to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal is guaranteed to generate a certain amount of excitement among my colleagues.

It’s hard to believe that the interests of 13,000 Canadian dairy farmers could consistently trump the interests of 34 million Canadian dairy consumers, but yet the system is still with us. Why can’t we simply end supply management and let consumers benefit from lower dairy prices?

The problem is that current dairy farmers are — for the most part — not earning monopoly rents from what they produce. In order to sell their output, dairy farmers must first obtain a permit to do so, and dairy quotas are not cheap: more than $25,000 per cow. To a very great extent, the higher prices that they receive simply cover this initial investment.

October 24, 2011

Wendy McElroy: Get government out of the food-banning business

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Wendy McElroy thinks that governments should get their “greasy hands” off her food choices:

Thus, when government dictates what you may or may not eat — takes away your choice — it is restricting your heritage, your religious and political choices, the control over your own body; telling you that a choice every bit as personal as freedom of speech or the art you view is not yours to make. It is making a fundamental decision for you, and they try to make it better by telling you it’s for your own good.

Imagine if the government had literary experts that decided that certain books weren’t good for you. They didn’t make you smarter or teach you anything. They weren’t classic pieces of literature. And even though you were happy to buy your books with your own money and read them privately, the state still decided it didn’t want you to have access to them. People would be outraged. Why is it any different when the government is counting calories instead of artistic merit?

The typical counter-argument is to say that since society pays for our health care, we owe it to society to lead healthy lives. In short, your neighbour has a vested financial interest in what goes into your body. If you won’t take care of it, the government will make you.

This line of reasoning — rather than justifying a Nanny State or a nosy neighbor dictating your personal choices — constitutes a powerful argument against socialized medicine, but it doesn’t do much to say that the government should control what you eat. If socialized medicine had been advertised decades ago as a government mandate to control the minutia of your daily life, then it would probably have never been implemented.

All of us should of course take care of ourselves, but for our own sake. We are the architects of our own lives and that includes our health. It is not the place of the state to try and control what we can eat because some people make bad decisions. Though it seems trivial to many, it’s an important point to make. Food is part of who we are and how we related to the world. We need to kick the government out of our kitchens.

October 21, 2011

Is the cost of living really rising?

Filed under: Economics, Food, History, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

October 14, 2011

Green beliefs, but brown realities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:35

Patrick J. Michaels reviews a new book by Todd Myers, Eco-facts:

Just about every organo sacrament withers under Myers’ scrutiny. “Buying local” often means more dreaded greenhouse gas emissions from inefficient short-term shipment compared to the economies of scale when carloads of spuds ride the Burlington Northern Santa Fe across the country. “Certified Organic” means so much paperwork and oversight that mom-and-pop farms (another organo icon) get pushed out by corporate agriculture, which can afford to spend the time and resources satisfying bureaucrats.

Then there are “green jobs.” Solyndra is no outlier; governments are just very bad at picking winners and losers in the energy world. Myers documents the decline and fall of biofuel plants throughout the northwest. Inefficiencies destroy jobs. The Teanaway “Solar Reserve”, supported by an ever-increasing feed of taxpayer dollars, was supposed to be the “world’s largest”, supplying power to a grand total of 45,000 homes. That’s all you get?

John Plaza, CEO of the failed biofuel facility Imperium Renewables (you would think a better name would have helped) thinks it’s all the government’s fault. “What the industry needs,” he said, “is a two-fold support, a mandated floor, and incentives and tax policy to get the outcomes we’re trying for.” In other words, more expensive energy subsidized by you and me, and the government rigging the market. That will create jobs!

What is missing here (and everywhere else) is a comprehensive analysis of how much money the organo fads, follies and delusions cost us. Hopefully that will be in Myers’ next book. The incredible constellation of policy errors, wrongheaded logic and downright stupidity has to be extracting a dear cost from our very sick economy. It’s time to stop this. It’s time for you to read this book.

October 11, 2011

“Fat taxes” are doomed to failure

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:06

Patrick Basham and John Luik handily dismiss the potential of government-imposed “fat taxes” on certain foods as tools to reduce obesity or to change peoples’ food choices:

The obesity crusaders’ argument is that a fat tax will reduce junk-food consumption, and thereby improve diets and overall public health. There are many reasons, however, to suspect that a fat tax would be at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful.

For example, scientifically rigorous evidence suggests that higher prices do not reduce soft-drink consumption. There are no studies demonstrating a difference either in aggregate soft-drink consumption or in child and adolescent body mass index (BMI) between jurisdictions with soft-drink taxes and those without such taxes.

[. . .]

These results are confirmed in a study by Christiane Schroeter in the Journal of Health Economics which examined the link between food prices and obesity. The study concluded that while increasing the price of high-calorie food might lead to decreased demand for these foods, ‘it is not clear that such an outcome will actually reduce weight’.

Why do fat taxes fail? The economic answer is that demand for food tends to be largely insensitive to price. Considerable research on food prices has demonstrated this inelasticity. A 10 per cent increase in price, for instance, reduces consumption by less than one per cent.

[. . .]

Furthermore, fat taxes have perverse, unintended consequences. According to the US government’s Economic Research Service, another unintended consequence of a fat tax on consumer behaviour is that taxes on snack foods could lead some consumers to replace the taxed food with equally unhealthy foods. Adam Drewnowksi similarly found that poorer consumers react to higher food prices not by changing their diets, but by consuming even fewer ‘healthy’ foods, such as fruits and vegetables, and eating more processed foods.

A Danish study confirmed this problematic outcome, finding that sin taxes on junk foods would fail to reduce consumption by the population (that is, the poor) who consume these foods most frequently. Additionally, it found that taxes levied on sugar content — the basis for the soft-drinks tax — would increase saturated fat consumption.

October 6, 2011

Why the LCBO isn’t like Foodland Ontario

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Government, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Michael Pinkus tries to decide who to vote for in today’s Ontario election on the basis of who’d be the most likely to put Ontario’s wineries on an equal footing with foreign wineries in their own province:

It’s election day, and I don’t want to take up a lot of your time on a day when you should be concentrating on who to vote for. Over the past few months I have given you food for thought from Tim Hudak’s vision of the wine industry in Ontario to Andrea Horwath’s working with the LCBO option, and I heard or received nothing about the reigning Liberal party’s platform on the subject of the wine industry, I guess for them it will remain status quo. So I guess it’s up to you to decided where your loyalties lie and who you chose to believe as to what difference they’ll make, if any.

[. . .]

Part of an email I received about election promises …
“David Peterson campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1985 and he won — twice!
Mike Harris campaigned on putting wine in corner stores in 1995 and he won — twice!
Where are those promises in this campaign [I need to know who to vote for].”
– John

[. . .]

The LCBO affects all wineries in Ontario, but truthfully it is not the sole fault of the liquor board, they are just following their mandate to make money for the government. Two days before the election, the Grape Growers of Ontario released this plea:

“Consumer access to the wines made from Ontario grapes is a keystone issue for the future success of the industry, and unless Queen’s Park is willing to make substantive changes to the way it promotes and sells Ontario wines, the industry will continue to tread water … The domestic market share of Ontario wines is stagnant at around 39% while other winemaking regions are flourishing in their own backyard, some with market shares in excess of 90% … By making changes in the way the LCBO presents Ontario VQA wines on its shelves, how many Ontario VQA labels are available and how those wines get onto the LCBO list, accompanied by an increased, year-round promotional effort within the LCBO, the sales of Ontario’s wines will grow.”

They’re not telling you who to vote for, but they are asking you to be mindful of your vote. But I think it’s more to do with what happens after the election that counts, not the foreplay leading up to it. After the euphoria of victory has subsided we have to hold elected officials to what they promise, or pressure them to give us better and help our wineries, who are after all, tax payers themselves, yet work in a very restricted and restrictive environment. As a lover of Ontario wine you have to demand more. As the Grape Growers point out in that same plea: “We want to see provincial politicians who understand that marketing foreign wines in an agency owned by the province is like Foodland Ontario launching a promotion of Georgia peaches. It’s just not right. We can no longer afford to just sit back and watch.” Now that would be a nice change.

September 28, 2011

“Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:14

The feel-good virtue implied in the Fairtrade label is actually a deal with the devil for the poor farmer, says Tim Black:

The purpose of the Fairtrade Foundation, we are told, is to guarantee that the producer gets a good deal. The Fairtrade-labelling system, then, is meant to assure us that, when we buy something with the Fairtrade logo, the producers get a better cut of the cash than they would do otherwise. So we effectively pay a little bit more — hence the price premium — to feel a whole lot better about our purchases. Or at least that’s the theory.

But as researchers pointed out earlier this year, the actuality of Fairtrade is not quite as easy on the self-regarding eye of ethical shoppers as the Fairtrade Foundation would have us believe. For a start, it has been suggested that only 25 per cent of the premium price paid for Fairtrade products reaches the producers. Not only that, already-poor farmers actually have to pay to join up to the Fairtrade scheme. And in doing so, they also have to ensure that their business meets certain requirements, whether it is in their long-term interests or not.

And here we come to the main problem. The Fairtrade Foundation demands certain things of the producers if they are to be accepted on to the scheme. For example, producers have to employ what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be ‘environmentally sound agricultural practices’ and, to qualify as small producers, they have to ‘rely mainly on their own or their family’s labour’. It’s almost cruelly ironic: while champions of Fairtrade claim it is freeing producers from the exploitative relations of the market, it simultaneously ties them into the oppressive and exploitative moral relations of ‘us’ and ‘them’. They have to stick to the letter of ‘our’ vision of the world, in all its sustainable, anti-growth glory. That is, in exchange for a marginally better deal on the market, producers have to adhere to what the Fairtrade Foundation deems to be the right way of farming or harvesting.

This effectively condemns producers desperate for a bit more cash to a low level of material and economic development. In the Fairtrade vision of production, you can forget about the large-scale industrialised production of cocoa; you can forget about the crop-protecting usage of pesticides. What Fairtrade insists upon instead is small-scale cottage industry free of anything that looks too modern, let alone chemical. As Patrick Hayes noted on spiked a couple of years ago, citing a WORLDwrite film called The Bitter Aftertaste, Fairtrade locks many Africans into non-mechanised, back-breaking cheap labour ‘as they cull weeds by hand rather than being able to destroy them with chemicals’.

So while Fairtrade might make us feel good when shopping, it does nothing of the sort for those doing the producing. Which is something to bear in mind when enjoying a bag of non-Fairtrade Skittles.

September 14, 2011

A response to the chefs’ open letter

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Politics, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:42

A group of well-known chefs recently issued an open letter about the relationship of cooking to the wider world. Rob Lyons would prefer them to stick to what they do so well and avoid being pawns for dietary puritans and scolds who want us to live poorer lives:

Dear chefs,

I would like to be a great admirer of your collective works. However, I’ve never had enough money to eat in your elite restaurants, so I’ll just have to trust that you really are the best in the business. I read with interest your recent Open Letter to the Chefs of Tomorrow. It clearly expresses your views on the way you think cooking should be done and how the restaurant business can interact with the rest of the world. But what you are suggesting is just nonsense. You should stop talking to your well-off customers and the food industry’s dreadful hangers on, and get a sense of perspective.

[. . .]

Please, stop now. St Jamie of Oliver is doing quite enough on behalf of chefs to scare us about what we eat without you lot joining in. Authoritarian busybodies have spent the past two or three decades lecturing us about our eating habits. They now want to exploit your reputations as chefs to justify their prescriptions. You may be flattered by the attention, but those miserable puritans have nothing in common with you.

Good food — especially restaurant food — is about pleasure and excess. It’s about oodles of butter, oil, salt and vino. It’s about staggering away from the table stuffed but happy. The petty puritans of the health lobby want low-fat, low-salt and no booze, in mean and miserable portions. If you go along with that health agenda, it will only prove you’re not the sharpest knives in the cutlery drawer.

[. . .]

Face it, guys. What you do isn’t about food at all. You’re an expensive and exclusive branch of the entertainment industry; you have more in common with high opera than family dinners. And in that respect, I wouldn’t want you to change a thing (except, perhaps, those prices). But please don’t use your success and reputation to parrot the sickly prejudices of the foodie crowd.

September 10, 2011

Debunking the notion of “unspoiled nature”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Food, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:00

ESR has a glowing review of 1493 by Charles C. Mann (a book I’ve been meaning to pick up myself), which includes a wonderful bit of debunking:

According to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature”, there is a natural equilibrium state of any given ecology (or the biosphere as a whole) which changes only on timescales of a kiloyear or longer. This pristine state is what the ecology tends to return to after major shocks such as volcanic eruptions. Humans are not part of this pristine state. Fortunately, pre-industrial humans have neither the power nor the desire to greatly alter it, and walk lightly on the land. Nevertheless, human presence degrades the pristine state into something that is inevitably less complex, valuable, and natural.

This romantic view has dominated Western popular culture since the early 1800s and underpins a great deal of the silliness and anti-human hostility evident in the modern environmental movement. It motivates, as one very current example, hostility to “unnatural” GM crops and intensive agriculture in general.

Without ever announcing the intention to do so, Mann takes a poleaxe to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature” and dispatches it without mercy. First, he shows how pervasive ecoforming is as a cultural practice. Then, he shows how ecoforming or its sudden cessation can lead to rapid, profound transformation of ecosystems on a continental scale. Then he proposes a not-too-implausible coupling between large-scale ecoforming by neolithic-level savages and the entire planetary climate!

In reality, there is no almost “pristine” nature anywhere on Earth humans can survive with pre-industrial technology. When we look at almost any “wilderness”, part of what we are seeing is the results of millenia of ecoforming by the humans that came before us. And, while attempts at ecoforming sometimes have destructive consequences (salinized soils in the Middle East; rabbits in Australia), as often or more often they lead to a net increase in ecological complexity and resource richness. Mann is not afraid to show us that the world is a better place because, for example, capsaicin peppers native to the New World are now naturalized all over Eurasia and have become important to dozens of Old World cuisines.

September 5, 2011

“Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison.”

Filed under: Food, Health, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:48

Rob Lyons calls out hypocritical attitudes toward processed food:

Listening to some foodie types, you would think that anything that has been remotely industrially processed was as deadly as nerve poison. Yet even food snobs eat plenty of processed food. It’s just the right kind of processed food.

A great illustration of the fact that there is nothing wrong, per se, with processed food is a little bit of self-experimentation by Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University. Last year for 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie bar every three hours instead of a meal, adding variety to his diet with Doritos, Oreos and sugary cereals. He kept up some semblance of good nutrition by taking multivitamins and throwing in a few vegetables, too.

But most importantly, Haub stuck to eating no more than 1,800 calories per day — well below the 2,500 calories per day usually suggested for men. The result was that Haub lost 27 pounds. This ‘convenience store diet’ may not have been ideal, but in many respects his health appeared to be better. His cholesterol test results suggested he was in better condition than before, despite this diet of ‘junk’.

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