Quotulatiousness

July 17, 2011

In the aftermath of Georgia’s “victory” over illegal farm workers

Filed under: Americas, Food, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Last month, I linked to a story about Georgia’s attempt to crack down on illegal agricultural workers. It was, in terms of achieving its stated goals, a big success: illegal workers left in droves for other jurisdictions. It wasn’t quite as successful from the point of view of farmers:

To combat the shortage, Governor Nathan Deal has authorized using criminal offenders out on probation to replace the mostly Latino migrant workers. It’s not working out so well:

    The first batch of probationers started work last week at a farm owned by Dick Minor…So far, the experiment at Minor’s farm is yielding mixed results. On the first two days, all the probationers quit by mid-afternoon, said Mendez, one of two crew leaders at Minor’s farm.

    “Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’” said Jermond Powell, a 33-year-old probationer. “They just left, took off across the field walking.”…

H/T to John Henke for the link.

July 10, 2011

Sgt. Major’s Over-excitable IPA

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 15:53

I’m always on the lookout for interesting beers (I’m very much into wine, but now and again a beer is the right beverage). I picked up a six-pack of “Sgt. Major India Pale Ale” from the Scotch Irish Brewing company on Friday. They’ve been in the fridge since then. I decided to open one earlier this afternoon, only to discover that the Sgt. Major is an excitable type.

As you can see from the photo, about half of the beer erupted from the bottle as soon as the crown cap was slightly opened. It’s a nice, hoppy beer, but I’d rather prefer to get six drinkable bottles from my six pack, rather than six half-bottles!

Update: The second bottle wasn’t quite as energetic: only lost about 1/4 of the contents to foam expansion.

July 8, 2011

Culinary cage match: Middlesbrough’s “Parmo” versus Canadian Poutine

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Food, Humour, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:52

I was born in Middlesbrough, but it was news to me that they have their own “signature dish”: the parmo:

As promised, our highly-trained operatives took time off from audacious spaceplane projects to tackle the parmo — a Middlesbrough delicacy whose fame has already spread as far as Sunderland, but is now set to burst onto the international stage.

However, in the interests of science, we decided to pitch the parmo against another dish whose name is uttered in hushed tones: Canadian poutine.

Yes, we hear you ask, qu’est-ce que c’est this poutine of which you parlez? Since you ask, it’s an unholy alliance of chips, gravy and cheese curds, which will now do battle with the parmo’s deep-fried pork fillet for the ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch crown.

I should probably warn you that poutine is really a Quebec dish, and has only recently become well known outside the province of its birth. It’s also been described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec.”

So, what’s the verdict? Well, I’d like to be able to report that the Spanish locals were willing to give these two tempting dishes a go and report back, but no sooner did we emerge from the kitchen bearing platters of goodness, than the bar immediately emptied.

Among the excuses offered for not being able to stick around to try our hearty fare was one bloke who’d forgotten it was his mother’s funeral in 10 minutes, and another chap who after 40 years as a committed atheist, decided it was an opportune moment to go to Mass and be reclasped to the bosom of the Church.

July 6, 2011

Restricting your salt intake? It may not help you

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:36

Rob Lyons recommends you take the constant barrage of advice about lowering your salt intake a bit less seriously:

The advice to reduce our salt intake has been so ubiquitous for so long that it simply must be correct, right? Those white crystals may make our food taste better, but it’s a Scientific Fact that salt increases blood pressure and, therefore, cutting back on it will reduce blood pressure and we’ll live longer. Trouble is, while this seems to make sense, the evidence keeps failing to back it up — and a study published today raises further questions about this simplistic advice.

The new study is the latest Cochrane Review, an effort to revisit the evidence on a wide variety of healthcare interventions to provide clearer guidance to medical practitioners and patients. The review took in seven studies involving 6,489 patients. ‘Intensive support and encouragement to reduce salt intake did lead to a reduction in salt eaten and a small reduction in blood pressure after more than six months’, according to the article’s lead author, Professor Rod Taylor of the University of Exeter. But the real question was ‘whether this dietary change also reduced a person’s risk of dying or suffering from cardiovascular events’.

And the answer was ‘not really’. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Previous studies have come to a similar conclusion: reducing salt does seem to reduce blood pressure a little, but the effect on cardiovascular disease is so small as to be hardly worth bothering with. If your blood pressure is high enough that you’ve been prescribed drugs to reduce it, then there may be some benefit in also reducing how much salt you eat. But that’s about it.

June 21, 2011

In unrelated news, Georgia now has farm issues

Filed under: Americas, Food, Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

After a passing a hugely successful bill to exclude illegal immigrants from the state, politicians are astounded to find that actions do have consequences:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

Driving out competing labour from illegal immigrants has created a lot of farm labour jobs for Georgia’s unemployed citizens, but for some unexpected reason, they’re not moving into those jobs:

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide “$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.

In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out — a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly — it wouldn’t fix the problem.

June 6, 2011

Oxfam’s latest report a Curate’s Egg

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Tim Worstall points out the good bits first:

Oxfam’s latest campaign, “Grow”, seems so lovely and cuddly that to criticise it is almost like torturing puppies. What could be wrong with trying to feed the hungry and thus make the world a better place? Alas, if wishes were kings we could all be monarchs for the day and what’s wrong with the campaign is not the initial wish but the list of damn fool things it intends to do.

Praise first: Oxfam is quite right that there are several entirely stupid things that are being done about food currently. The first and most obvious is the biofuels nonsense: food should go into people, or at least animals we can eat, not into cars. But the European Union has insisted that 10 per cent (to rise to 15 per cent) of all petrol/diesel must be made from plants instead. Oxfam seems to think that this will reduce emissions: despite every scientist worthy of his slide rule pointing out that growing and processing the plants emits more than the oil being replaced.

Another policy we should stop yesterday is the subsidy of the rich world’s farmers. Can’t make a profit growing what people want to eat? Then stop and do something else. We say this to car makers, to buggy whip makers and there’s nothing about wading in cow shit that makes farming any different. New Zealand did it and farming profits went up.

Well, that’s about it for the good:

And then the report goes entirely doolally over commodities speculation, over futures and options. One of the points the report makes (in one of the good bits) is that price volatility is damaging both to producers and consumers. So we’d like to have some method of dampening such volatility. At which point it insists that this means we must lessen speculation in foodstuffs. But, umm, speculation in foodstuffs is what dampens price volatility in foodstuffs.

If any Oxfam type happens to read this by mischance, here’s why. To make money in commodities you have to buy low and sell high. When you buy low you prevent prices from falling further, in fact you raise them: maybe only a little depending on how much of the market you’re buying, but raise them you do. Good, so we’ve just reduced the slumping of prices which do so much damage to farmers. When you sell high you’re increasing the supply onto the market at a time of shortage. This reduces the price volatility at the high end which does such damage to consumers. So, our speculator making money reduces price volatility: it’s only the speculator who buys high and sells low who increases it and as he goes bust very quickly we don’t need to worry about him.

The term in the headline explained.

June 5, 2011

The Marmite affair hits Port Hope

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Apparently the bureaucratic reach of Danish food nannies now extends as far as Port Hope, Ontario. I dropped in to the British Pantry to stock up on my usual assortment of pickled onions, crisps, toffees, and floral gums, to discover that not only did they not have any Marmite, they couldn’t get any more. This is serious . . . food DefCon Three level serious.

A quick interrogation of the sales person revealed that this is due to some strong disinformation activity on the part of the anti-Marmite faction: “Oh, we can’t bring that in anymore because it’s got beef extract in it. We’re not allowed to import that without a beef importing permit.”

My (sadly) empty jar of Marmite proclaims on the front that it’s 100% Vegetarian:

20110605-105004.jpg
100% Vegetarian
20110605-105347.jpg
Ingredients: Yeast Extract
Salt
Vegetable Extract
Niacin
Thiamin
Spice Extracts (contains Celery)
Riboflavin
Folic Acid
Vitamin B12

June 3, 2011

QotD: New York City, the capital city of Nanny State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:49

The lowest blow in City Hall’s war on wicked food is its recurring efforts to ban the buying of fizzy pop with food stamps. In an initiative that could easily be titled ‘No Coke for poor black folk’, the Bloombergers have sought federal permission to prevent welfare recipients from using government cash to purchase fizzy drinks. The killjoyism of this campaign, the Scrooge-infused miserabilism of it, is astounding. City Hall has launched an advertising campaign demonising sugary drinks as one of the great evils of our time, and its internal email correspondence about the campaign, which was leaked to the New York Times, shines a rather harsh light on the evidence-lite nastiness of the modern-day nudge-and-nanny industry. Scientific advisers emailed Thomas Farley, Bloomberg’s overactive health adviser, to say that the ad’s claim that drinking pop can make you gain 10 or 15 pounds is ‘simplistic’ and ‘exaggerated’. Overriding them, Farley responded: ‘I think what people fear is getting fat, so we need some statement about what is bad about consuming so many calories.’ Who needs evidence when you have fear? The ad shows human fat gurgling from the top of a can of soda. One City Hall employee could barely conceal his excitement: it is ‘deliciously disgusting’, he said in one of the emails that was leaked.

‘Deliciously disgusting’ — that just about sums up how New York’s new rulers view the huddled masses of this extravagant city. In a complete reversal of the traditional democratic relationship, Bloomberg and co don’t consider it their duty to mirror the desires and outlook of those who elected them. They want to remake New Yorkers as models of what they consider to be healthy citizenship. Much of this stuff comes from Thomas Farley, who is championed by both Bloomberg and the liberal media as an admirably thin jogging aficionado who believes in the power of the nudge to remould the citizenry. He is a ‘superman’, the New York Times recently gushed, who has ‘grasshopper-like legs’ (eurgh), a result of the fact that ‘he exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette’ (boring). This fanboy fluff piece was illustrated with a picture of Farley leading a workout of not-so-thin black New Yorkers, his grasshopper-like legs just as sure a sign of his superiority as his white skin would have been 100 years ago.

Brendan O’Neill, “The men who killed New York”, The Spectator, 2011-06-04

June 2, 2011

When menu translators go feral: “Timid and rapidly grown prostitutes”

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:16

Victor Mair finds the menu items lost something, but gained humour, in the translation:

The basic Bèn School Method seems to be to look each content word up in a bilingual dictionary, and to pick the most amusing and least grammatical option among the alternatives on offer. The word order of the translation seems to be a semi-random compromise among the various languages involved.

H/T to Tom Vinson for the link.

May 29, 2011

More on the Anglo-Danish Marmite affair

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Colby Cosh rounds up the details on the Marmite affair:

Nothing stirs the blood of the British like a nice slapfight over European regulation, and this goes double when food is involved. The UK press has found its latest excuse for tut-tutting and finger-waggling in the unlikeliest of places: at the bottom of the squat, distinctive little jar in which the vile breakfast spread Marmite is sold. This week, English-language journals in Denmark reported that the Scandinavian kingdom’s food regulator was having the dark brown yeast extract cleared from the shelves of shops which serve Brit expatriates.

The British reared up as one, displaying a spirit of indignant unity. “What have the Danes ever done for global cuisine?” thundered the Belfast Telegraph, breaking Godwin’s Law into splinters over its knurled Ultonian knee. (Unfortunately, a good answer might be “Not given it Marmite, at any rate.”) Fans of the quasi-foodstuff gathered on Facebook to form a “Marmite army”. Social campaigners used the ban to call attention to dubious patches in Denmark’s record on human rights and environmentalism.

As he points out, nobody at the Danish food nanny office suddenly issued a ban: technically Marmite had never been cleared for import at all. So it’s just a matter of filling in a form or two and Bob’s your uncle? Not quite:

Marmite’s status as a “fortified food” has apparently only just been noticed, and the DVFA says that “it has not received an application for marketing in Denmark of Marmite or similar products with added vitamins or minerals.” A glance at the DVFA’s procedure for obtaining approval to market these foods reveals why brand owner Unilever might not be in such a hurry to file. (And it also reveals that free-trade fanatics like me should probably rein in their admiration for the EU’s trade barriers just a little.) The agency not only requires compliance with EU-wide regulations, but insists that each product pass an “individual risk assessment” performed using a made-in-Denmark scientific procedure.

May 26, 2011

The Danish Marmite affair thickens

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Lester Haines has the latest on the plight of ex-pat Brits suffering under a dictatorial food regime in Denmark:

According to this official statement, neither Marmite nor its Oz rival Vegemite are banned in Denmark, because they’ve never actually been approved for sale.

A 2004 law controls the distribution of products with “added vitamins, minerals or other substances”, and in order to punt such foodstuffs, they “need to be approved by the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration before the product can be marketed”.

[. . .]

In effect, then, those shops selling Marmite are dealing in unauthorised enhanced substances.

We and the Daily Mail have no doubt that any attempt to legalise Marmite would be met with a swift rejection, in defiance of EU directives on free trade. As Copenhagen-based expat Lyndsay Jensen put it: “They don’t like it because it’s foreign. But if they want to take my Marmite off me, they’ll have to wrench it from my cold dead hands.”

It’s been said that Marmite is an “acquired taste”, but Denmark’s health regulators are moving quickly to ensure that Danes never have the opportunity to develop that taste. Of course, like most other forms of prohibition, it might actually increase the attractiveness of the “forbidden fruit”.

Denmark has a long coastline, so smuggling in the little black jars across the North Sea would be quite possible . . .

May 25, 2011

Denmark moves to save its citizens from Marmite

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Food, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:22

Danish diners will no longer be subject to the horrors of Marmite, thanks to swift and decisive action by the country’s Veterinary and Food Administration:

According to the advert, you either love it or hate it. As far as Marmite goes, the Danish government hates the stuff. That at least is the conclusion that many foreigners have drawn following a ban on the sticky brown yeast extract.

The sales ban enforces a law restricting products fortified with added vitamins. Food giant Kellogg’s withdrew some brands of breakfast cereal from Denmark when the legislation passed in 2004, but until now Marmite had escaped the attention of Danish authorities.

“What am I supposed to put on my toast now?” asked British advertising executive Colin Smith, who has lived in the country for six years. “I still have a bit left in the cupboard, but it’s not going to last long.”

I celebrated the decision by having some Marmite on crackers for lunch yesterday. More for me!

Update: “Let the rise of the Marmite Army begin!”:

“Spread the word, but most importantly spread the Marmite,” wrote Kelly. “On every street in good old Denmark, show ’em what they’re missing after they’ve banned this iconic product from our supermarket shelves! Make it a Marmite day everyday folks! Let the rise of the Marmite army begin!”

But even on the page, opinion remained divided. A perplexed Ray Weaver wrote: “but… it’s horrible…”

On the page calling for a boycott of Danish goods, fan Joe Figg feared the ban could have far-reaching consequences. “This dastardly move could bring about global warming of toast,” he wrote. While Mark Salisbury wrote: “Down with spread fascism!”

April 2, 2011

The continued risk of antibiotic resistance

Filed under: Food, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:59

The Economist has a good piece on the problems with mis-use of antibiotics:

Convenience and laziness top the list of causes of antibiotic resistance. That is because those who misuse these drugs mostly do not pay the cost. Antibiotics work against bacteria, not viruses, yet patients who press their doctors to prescribe them for viral infections such as colds or influenza are seldom harmed by their self-indulgence. Nor are the doctors who write useless prescriptions in order to rid their surgeries of such hypochondriacs. The hypochondriacs can, though, act as breeding grounds for resistant bacteria that may infect others. Even when the drug has been correctly prescribed, those who fail to finish the course are similarly guilty of promoting resistance. In some parts of the world, even prescription is unnecessary. Many antibiotics are bought over the counter, with neither diagnosis nor proper recommendations for use, multiplying still further the number of human reaction vessels from which resistance can emerge.

Nor is the problem confined to people. Analysing official figures, Louise Slaughter, an American congresswoman who is also a microbiologist, calculates that four-fifths of the antibiotics used in America are given to livestock, often to get perfectly healthy animals to grow faster. That is convenient, because it produces cheaper meat, but it creates yet more opportunities for bugs to evolve resistance.

All this matters because antibiotic resistance has both medical and financial costs. It causes longer and more serious illnesses, lengthening people’s stays in hospital and complicating their treatment. Sometimes people die unnecessarily. In one study, which sampled almost 1,400 patients at Cook County hospital in Chicago, researchers found resistant strains of bacteria infecting 188 people, 12 of whom died because they could not be treated adequately. At the moment, resistant bacteria threaten mostly children, the old, cancer patients and the chronically ill (especially those infected with HIV). However, there could be worse to come. Nearly 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are recorded each year; one-third of these people die from the disease. More than a quarter of new cases of TB identified recently in parts of Russia were of this troublesome kind.

March 30, 2011

For the bacon fans

Filed under: Food, Randomness, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:19

Restaurants have been known to capitalize on food trends, but few dare go as far as Denny’s:

Denny’s is bringing on the bacon.

The all-American diner is about to begin advertising a new limited-time menu of seven bacon-centric items for breakfast, lunch and dinner dubbed “Baconalia.” While the bacon trend has been several years in the making, the $548 million chain is capitalizing on it now because “we truly believe the bacon trend is here to stay” said John Dillon, VP-marketing and product development at Denny’s. “We’re not on the cutting edge, but, we’re really bringing it mainstream by being the first chain to offer it on a fully dedicated menu. No chain has embraced it like we have.”

Among the items included in Baconalia are Bacon Meatloaf, Ultimate Bacon Breakfast Triple Bacon Sampler — with, you guessed it, three kinds of bacon — as well as items that employ more unconventional uses for bacon, such as Bacon Flapjacks and the Maple Bacon Sundae, an ice-cream sundae with maple-flavored syrup and sprinkling of bacon. Mr. Dillon said that so far, the sundae has generated the most buzz and excitement.

March 20, 2011

Stilton cheese

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

In the comments to a post at BoingBoing about something called a shooter’s sandwich (which itself sounds remarkably edible) was a link to Huntsman cheese. I’ve actually had Huntsman cheese, although I didn’t know it had a formal name: it’s Stilton and Double Gloucester cheeses in alternating layers (very tasty).

Having already made myself hungry — I got up late this morning and still haven’t had breakfast — I followed the link for Stilton cheese to discover the following little bit of EU nomenclature inanity:

Stilton is a type of English cheese, known for its characteristic strong smell and taste. It is produced in two varieties: the well-known blue and the lesser-known white. Both have been granted the status of a protected designation of origin by the European Commission, together one of only seventeen British products to have such a designation. Only cheese produced in the three English counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, and Nottinghamshire — and made according to a strict code — may be called “Stilton”. This means that cheese produced in Stilton, the village in Cambridgeshire for which the cheese is named, would not legally be allowed to be called Stilton Cheese.

Absurd, right? Well, for a change, there is actually a good reason for the restriction:

It is commonly believed that the pioneer of blue Stilton was Cooper Thornhill, owner of the Bell Inn on the Great North Road, in the village of Stilton, Huntingdonshire. Traditional legend has it that in 1730, Thornhill discovered a distinctive blue cheese while visiting a small farm near Melton Mowbray in rural Leicestershire — possibly in Wymondham. He fell in love with the cheese and made a business arrangement that granted the Bell Inn exclusive marketing rights to blue Stilton. Soon thereafter, wagon loads of cheese were being delivered to the inn. Since the main stagecoach routes from London to Northern England passed through the village of Stilton he was able to promote the sale of this cheese and the fame of Stilton rapidly spread. However, the first known written reference to Stilton cheese was in William Stukeley’s Itinerarium Curiosum, letter V, dated October 1722, and in his 1724 work A tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain Daniel Defoe describes Stilton cheese as “famous”.

So the cheese called “Stilton” isn’t actually made in Stilton. However, the Bell Inn is still there, and you can indeed get a meal with Stilton cheese in the building that helped to make it famous. I’d dig out my photos of the building, but I was there in the pre-digital photography age, so I’m not at all certain where they are . . .

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