Quotulatiousness

November 15, 2012

Fisking the Williams-Sonoma catalog

Filed under: Business, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:22

Drew Magary made a critical mistake once, paying for an overpriced Williams-Sonoma cheese grater with a credit card, thus ending up with yet another glossy catalog landing in the mailbox every year. “Every holiday season, my mail slot gets bukkake’d with monstrous catalogs packed with shit I would never, ever buy, and the W-S catalog stands out among them.”

Inspired by the offerings of the Williams Sonoma catalog, Drew responds to some of the juiciest items:

Item #02-4381232 Acorn Twine Holder

Williams-Sonoma says: “Polished alderwood with 76 yards of linen twine. Made in Italy.”

Price: $26

Notes from Drew: Oh, thank God! Thanksgiving was mere weeks away and I was like OH FUCK, WE’RE OUT OF TWINE. AND WE HAVE NO PLACE TO DISPENSE SAID TWINE. Sure, any asshole can go to the store and buy a roll of cooking string for half a penny and keep that twine in a drawer for the one time per year someone in the house has to tie up a raw turkey only to fail miserably and get salmonella deep inside his palms for years and years. But I want CLASSY twine, you know? I want my twine to say something about ME.

[. . .]

Item #02-741009 Callie’s Charleston Biscuits

Williams-Sonoma says: “Flaky, buttery, and made by hand by celebrated caterer Callie White.”

Price: $72 (set of 24)

Notes from Drew: That’s $72 dollars for biscuits. At Popeye’s, the biscuit comes free with your order. At Williams-Sonoma, it costs you the rough equivalent of your phone bill. How good could these biscuits possibly be? There’s a threshold past which biscuits cannot improve. Even the best goddamn biscuit in the world isn’t $72 better than a Popeye’s biscuit. Unless that biscuit can make you teleport.

And what kills me is that there are clearly people out there who have shitloads of money and NO cooking skills who order this shit. Who are these people? How are there so many of them that Williams-Sonoma can sustain its business model? Are we all just racking up massive biscuit debts that will soon break the economy? I imagine that 60 percent of Williams-Sonoma’s business come from a group of six Persian oil barons, who buy everything in every catalog five times over every year for no good reason at all. Seventy-two-dollar biscuits. WHAT THE FUCK.

[. . .]

Item #02-410423 Assumption Abbey Fruitcake

Williams-Sonoma says: “Baked by trappist monks at a monastery in the Missouri Ozarks. Order early. Supply is limited.”

Price: $39.95

Notes from Drew: Everything about that sales copy just blew my skull. There are trappist monks in the Ozarks? Do they brew artisanal meth? I don’t trust fruitcake to begin with. I sure as shit am not trusting fruitcake that comes from a redneck friar. They’ll swap out uppers for candied fruit. And yet, supply is limited. Apparently, the market for $40 Ozark fruitcake is ENORMOUS. White women from Bridgehampton ALL THE WAY to Westhampton rely on the monks to deliver their holiday fruitcake every year. Ina Garten’s ADORABLE HUSBAND JEFFREY WHO MAKES A LOT OF MONEY loves the sight of a fine white-trash-monk fruitcake any time he comes home. TIE IT UP WITH THE TWINE!

H/T to John Kovalic for the link.

November 13, 2012

Denmark discovers that “price elasticity” is a real phenomenon

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Denmark is getting rid of its “fat tax” imposed last year, as it has failed to solve the problem it was intended to address:

Gone, by popular demand: Denmark’s fat tax. ‘The fat tax is one of the most maligned we [have] had in a long time’, said Mette Gjerskov, the Danish food and agriculture minister, in a press conference on Saturday announcing the decision to ditch the policy. ‘Now we have to try improving the public health by other means.’

[. . .]

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that slapping taxes on things doesn’t necessarily persuade people to consume less of them. So Danes either went downmarket in their buying habits by buying cheaper products, or popped across the border to Sweden or Germany to buy their fatty foods there instead. The only real effect was to hit the profits of Danish companies. Chastened by the experience, the Danish government has also scrapped plans for a sugar tax, too.

As the OECD notes: ‘The impact of imposing taxes on the consumption of certain foods is determined by the responsiveness of consumers to price changes, ie, price elasticity. However, it is difficult to predict how consumers will react to price changes caused by taxation. Some may respond by reducing their consumption of healthy goods in order to pay for the more expensive unhealthy goods, thus defeating the purpose of the tax. Others may seek substitutes for the taxed products, which might be as unhealthy as those originally consumed. Depending on the elasticity of the demand for the taxed products, consumers will either end up bearing an extra financial burden, or changing the mix of products they consume in ways that can be difficult to identify.’

So, simply from a practical point of view, food taxes — indeed, any sin tax, including extra duty on tobacco or minimum prices for alcohol — can have some unwanted negative consequences while largely failing to achieve their intended aim.

November 2, 2012

Modern inventory control and Hurricane Sandy

Filed under: Business, Economics, Food, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Unlike major disasters of the past, storm-hit New Jersey and New York City won’t have to face the crippling shortages of food and other essentials in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The just-in-time food supply chain is proving its versatility yet again:

The day Hurricane Sandy made landfall, the Jersey City, New Jersey, warehouse for food distribution giant Sysco Corp. (SYY) sent out 30,000 cases of food and drinks. Most of the shipments were headed across the Hudson to New York City. On Tuesday, the day after the storm ravaged the city, the warehouse sent out none.

Yet while news of flooding, power outages, downed trees, and other storm-inflicted wreckage abounds, you won’t hear stories of mass starvation in the streets. Food may not be moving in or out of the city, but the data-driven supply chains perfected by some of the world’s biggest companies in the pursuit of profits have become so resilient that even a cataclysm like Sandy registers as little more than a logistical hiccup. While the subways have stopped indefinitely, few in the storm’s path will have to deal with empty shelves for long, if at all.

[. . .]

Wilson says the key adjustment Sysco made ahead of Sandy was to shift shipments to mainly non-perishable goods to ensure customers would have food to last through power outages. The company also prioritized getting orders to institutions that would have to keep large numbers of people fed through the storm, such as hospitals, hotels, airports, shelters, jails, and college campuses. Restaurants will stay near the bottom of the list as the recovery proceeds. But Wilson says the process of getting back to normal won’t drag out. “It’ll be a week or so of business-not-as-usual. But we’ll get back to business-as-usual eventually.”

Large companies like Sysco with nationwide reach and a long history of managing supply chains can adapt quickly to natural disasters because they’ve been there before, and they have the data to show for it. Over the years, as real-time inventory tracking and analysis has become the norm, companies know what people buy before and after disasters. They know how demand has varied between a Gulf Coast hurricane and a New England blizzard. By cross-referencing that granular data with the latest weather predictions, companies can forecast changes in their supply chain needs in parallel with coming storms.

H/T to Charles Stross for the link.

October 29, 2012

Who actually benefits from the expansion of “self-service” retail?

Filed under: Business, Food, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:25

In the Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan meets the modern grocery store checkout:

At the end of my visit to my town’s brand-new supermarket the other day, the cashier said she would be more than happy to help me self-check-out my purchases.

I said, “No, thank you, I would prefer that you do that.” She said, “Actually, we prefer that the customers get into the habit of checking out their groceries.” I said, “Actually, I would prefer to never get into that habit. I would prefer that you handle the entire operation. You are the cashier. You are the vicar of groceries. You, not I, work here. So earn your money and ring up my purchases. And then bag them. Please.”

Are we entering a dark, deeply un-American era when we literally have to do everything for ourselves?

Retailers love the idea of self-checkout and other forms of selling goods to customers with fewer staff members and more volunteer labour donated by the customers themselves. Some customers even prefer this, as it makes them feel more empowered about their retail experience. Bring your own bags (so we don’t need to provide you with bags we have to buy)! Pack your own bags (so we don’t have to hire as many checkout clerks)! But don’t fool yourself that the store is doing it “for the environment” or any other such catchy excuse: they’re on board with ideas like this because it’s more profitable for them.

October 28, 2012

Got Milk (mutation)?

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, History, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:33

Lactose intolerance is part of humankind’s genetic inheritance, which is why the mutation that allowed (some) adult humans to digest milk is of great interest to geneticists:

A genetic mutation appeared, somewhere near modern-day Turkey, that jammed the lactase-production gene permanently in the “on” position. The original mutant was probably a male who passed the gene on to his children. People carrying the mutation could drink milk their entire lives. Genomic analyses have shown that within a few thousand years, at a rate that evolutionary biologists had thought impossibly rapid, this mutation spread throughout Eurasia, to Great Britain, Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, India and all points in between, stopping only at the Himalayas. Independently, other mutations for lactose tolerance arose in Africa and the Middle East, though not in the Americas, Australia, or the Far East.

In an evolutionary eye-blink, 80 percent of Europeans became milk-drinkers; in some populations, the proportion is close to 100 percent. (Though globally, lactose intolerance is the norm; around two-thirds of humans cannot drink milk in adulthood.) The speed of this transformation is one of the weirder mysteries in the story of human evolution, more so because it’s not clear why anybody needed the mutation to begin with. Through their cleverness, our lactose-intolerant forebears had already found a way to consume dairy without getting sick, irrespective of genetics.

[. . .]

A “high selection differential” is something of a Darwinian euphemism. It means that those who couldn’t drink milk were apt to die before they could reproduce. At best they were having fewer, sicklier children. That kind of life-or-death selection differential seems necessary to explain the speed with which the mutation swept across Eurasia and spread even faster in Africa. The unfit must have been taking their lactose-intolerant genomes to the grave.

Milk, by itself, somehow saved lives. This is odd, because milk is just food, just one source of nutrients and calories among many others. It’s not medicine. But there was a time in human history when our diet and environment conspired to create conditions that mimicked those of a disease epidemic. Milk, in such circumstances, may well have performed the function of a life-saving drug.

H/T to Marginal Revolution for the link.

October 19, 2012

Vegemite: it’s not just Australian for Marmite

Filed under: Australia, Cancon, Food, History, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

BBC News celebrates the 90th birthday of that uniquely Australian spread, Vegemite:

Vegemite and Marmite
Photo via Wikimedia

Vegemite started as a wartime substitute for Marmite, but it’s now as symbolic of Australia as Sydney Harbour Bridge and the koala. How did this salty spread become so popular?

What’s the link between German U-boats, the beer industry, processed cheese and the Men At Work’s 1983 hit, Down Under?

The answer is, they all played a part in turning Vegemite from a humble yeast spread into an Australian icon. Stop any Aussie on any street, anywhere in the world, and they will have a view on Vegemite – for, or against.

Now, on the eve of its 90th birthday, the first official history has just been published. The Man Who Invented Vegemite is written by Jamie Callister, grandson of the man who created it.

[…]

Walker put Callister on the case in 1923, and by the end of the year, the pair were confident they had a finished product. Walker decided to launch a competition so the public could name it and claim a £50 prize. Hundreds entered and it was Walker’s daughter Sheila who pulled the word Vegemite out of a hat.

Like the product itself, the name stuck. But sales were sluggish.

Walker had heard about an ingenious Canadian called James Kraft, who had perfected what came to be known as processed cheese. It was a sensation, as it allowed people who couldn’t afford fridges to store cheese for much longer periods.

In 1924, Walker met Kraft in Chicago. The two men got on well and Walker persuaded Kraft to grant him rights to sell his cheeses in Australia.

[…]

As World War II unfolded, Vegemite became associated with the national interest. Posters put up in Australia had pictures of it with the slogan, “Vegemite: Keeping fighting men fighting fit.”

For Vegemite, the war was a turning point, marking its entry deep into the hearts and consciousness of the Australian public.

October 11, 2012

French fishing fleet dabbles in piracy, maritime intimidation

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Food, France — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

The BBC reports on a recent incident between British and French fishing vessels:

Fishermen are calling for Royal Navy protection after claims they were attacked by French vessels.

Kevin Lochrane, from East Sussex, said he was surrounded by seven or eights boats in international waters 15 miles off Caen in a dispute over scallops.

One Scottish fisherman, Andy Scott, said he feared for his crew’s safety during the incident.

Other crewmen said they were also surrounded by the French fishermen, who they said tried to damage their gear.

October 7, 2012

Recycle, re-use, re- … oops.

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The EU is being its traditional bureaucratic self again, this time in the home-made jams and jellies department:

It’s a fairly usual part of modern government to try to increase the rate at which people recycle used items. Sometimes it’s a very sensible practice indeed (we’ve been recycling gold for millennia precisely because it is so valuable) and sometimes it’s really rather silly (no trees are saved by paper recycling as we make paper from trees that we grow specifically to make paper). But more recycling is generally seen as a good thing. Which is what makes this latest piece of tomfoolery from the European Union so strange:

    But the thousands who regularly sell their home-made jam, marmalade or chutney in re-used jars may have to abandon their traditions after a warning that they are breaching European health and safety regulations.

    Legal advisers to Britain’s Churches have sent out a circular saying that while people can use jars for jam at home or to give to family and friends, they cannot sell them or even give them away as raffle prizes at a public event.

No, it’s not a spoof. It really is true that those tasked with running an entire continent, the bureaucrats in Brussels, think that putting home made jam (jelly to you perhaps) in used jam jars should be and is a crime. With serious penalties too:

    The agency said it was up to local authority environmental health officers to enforce the regulations, and penalties can reach a maximum of a £5,000 fine, six months’ imprisonment, or both.

Swedish lunch lady ordered to discontinue food that is “too good”

Filed under: Education, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:37

Everyone wants the best for their kids, but heaven help you if you provide higher quality food than kids at other schools get:

Annika Eriksson, a lunch lady at school in Falun, was told that her cooking is just too good.

Pupils at the school have become accustomed to feasting on newly baked bread and an assortment of 15 vegetables at lunchtime, but now the good times are over.

The municipality has ordered Eriksson to bring it down a notch since other schools do not receive the same calibre of food — and that is “unfair”.

Moreover, the food on offer at the school doesn’t comply with the directives of a local healthy diet scheme which was initiated in 2011, according to the municipality.

“A menu has been developed… It is about making a collective effort on quality, to improve school meals overall and to try and ensure everyone does the same,” Katarina Lindberg, head of the unit responsible for the school diet scheme, told the local Falukuriren newspaper.

However, Lindberg was not aware of Eriksson’s extraordinary culinary efforts and how the decision to force her to cut back had prompted outrage among students and parents.

Of course, Toronto is rapidly catching up to Swedish standards in this regard: we have an active “parents group” that protests against school fundraising efforts because not all schools can raise the same level of donations, so they want equality imposed: either all funds raised should be shared with every school or no fundraising should be allowed at all.

October 3, 2012

Foodies and foodism

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:43

Getting tired of pretentious twaddle over only slightly out-of-the-ordinary dishes? You’re not alone, as Guardian writer Steven Poole is calling for a “foodie backlash”:

Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers. Food festivals (or, if you will, “Feastivals”) are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking. As one dumbfounded witness of a stage appearance by Jamie Oliver observed: “The girls at the front — it’s an overwhelmingly female crowd — are already holding up their iPhones […] A group in front of me are saying, ‘Ohmigodohmigodohmigod’ on a loop […] ‘I love you, Jamie,’ yells a girl on the brink of fainting.” The new series of The Great British Bake-Off trounced Parade’s End in the ratings, and canny karaoke-contest supremo Simon Cowell is getting in on the act with a new series in development called Food, Glorious Food! — or, as it’s known among production wags, The Eggs Factor.

[. . .]

It is not in our day considered a sign of serious emotional derangement to announce publicly that “chocolate mousse remains the thing I feel most strongly about”, or to boast that dining with celebrities on the last night of Ferran Adrià’s restaurant elBulli, in Spain, “made me cry”. It is, rather, the mark of a Yahoo not to be able and ready at any social gathering to converse in excruciating detail and at interminable length about food. Food is not only a safe “passion” (in the tellingly etiolated modern sense of “passion” that just means liking something a lot); it has become an obligatory one. [. . .]

People with an overweening interest in food have been calling themselves “foodies” since a Harper’s & Queen article entitled “Cuisine Poseur” in 1982, one of whose editors then co-wrote the semi-satirical The Official Foodie Handbook of 1984. The OED‘s very first citation of “foodie” is from 1980, an oozing New York Times magazine celebration of the mistress of a Parisian restaurant and her “devotees, serious foodies”. “Foodie” has now pretty much everywhere replaced “gourmet”, perhaps because the latter more strongly evokes privilege and a snobbish claim to uncommon sensory discrimination — even though those qualities are rampant among the “foodies” themselves. The word “foodie”, it is true, lays claim to a kind of cloying, infantile cuteness which is in a way appropriate to its subject; but one should not allow them the rhetorical claim of harmless innocence implied. The Official Foodie Handbook spoke of the “foodism” worldview; I propose to call its adherents foodists.

The term “foodist” is actually much older, used from the late 19th century for hucksters selling fad diets (which is quite apt); and as late as 1987 one New York Times writer proposed it semi-seriously as a positive description, to replace the unlovely “gastronaut”: “In the tradition of nudist, philanthropist and Buddhist, may I suggest ‘foodist’, one who is enthusiastic about good eating?” The writer’s joking offer of “nudist” as an analogy is telling. I like “foodist” precisely for its taint of an -ism. Like a racist or a sexist, a foodist operates under the prejudices of a governing ideology, viewing the whole world through the grease-smeared lenses of a militant eater.

September 29, 2012

Regulating the size of soft drinks won’t solve the obesity problem, but will infringe on individual rights

Filed under: Food, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:41

At Reason, Baylen Linnekin explains that even if all the claims about the nutritional evils of sweetened soft drinks are completely true, regulations will not actually make much difference:

As an opponent of increased regulations, I find these latter scientific points noteworthy. But I also believe that even if sugar-sweetened drinks turn out to be virtually everything their opponents claim, people still have a right to buy and drink these beverages — just as much, as I argued in a recent Bloggingheads debate, as they have a right to buy a Big Mac. After all, we don’t have a right to free speech or to travel from one state to another because speech or travel has been proven by the scientific community to promote good health.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, I was to take at face value the assertions of those who claim the NEJM studies justify some combination of sugary drink taxes and bans.

There is still this problem: The solutions these advocates propose won’t likely solve the problem of obesity. For example, studies have suggested taxes will have little or no impact on obesity. And not one person has (to the best of my knowledge) even attempted to argue that soda bans would have any specific impact, either — unless one counts “sending a message” or “creating a debate” as conditions precedent to weight loss.

There is also the issue of a genetic predisposition, which again is one finding of the studies. Many people are genetically predisposed to certain food allergies — including soy, dairy, gluten, nuts, and seafood — and food intolerances. I have never seen a researcher or AP journalist like Marchione argue seriously that the widespread impact of food allergies “adds weight to the push for taxes” on wheat, tofu, and shrimp. Yet if one were to buy the argument of those calling for taxes and bans to combat consumption of sugary drinks in light of the NEJM studies, one would have to accept the idea of taxing society writ large based largely on the outcomes of what these researchers argue is a genetic condition.

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.

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