Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:48 — 18.5MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

It came as quite a shock to me to discover that a couple of my favourite craft beers in America were nothing of the sort. Both are brewed by behemoths. That’s just one of the revelations in a recent study by Phil Howard, Associate Professor of rural sustainability at Michigan State University. He’s probably done more than anyone to uncover the ownership relationships offering what looks like a mind-numbing assortment of brands.

In most sectors, from seeds to prepared organic meals, very few companies lie behind that cornucopia of apparent choice. In addition to charting trends in patterns of ownership, Howard also explains some of the ways in which the concentration of power hurts both ends of the chain, those who grow ingredients and we who eat and drink.

Notes

1. Phil Howard’s website offers access to all his work. It is an eye opener.
2. Reading around the topic, it quickly became clear that a Budweiser commercial broadcast during the 2015 Superbowl might, possibly, represent a tipping point of some sort. It’s all rather funny. See for yourself. And read all about it. And then tell me: why can’t AB-InBev just leave people who don’t want to drink their beer alone? ((I know, it’s business. But why?))
3. Incidental music by Podington Bear.

   Huffduff it

Having linked to the original piece at 538, it would be remiss of me not to link to these two threads rebutting its main conclusions.

Alas, I have no idea what will happen to those threads in the future. I do wish people would not entrust their only copy of these things to a place they cannot control.

When Nathan Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki talked to me about the myths embedded in the folk history of American agriculture, they made the point that the Democratic Party had more or less abandoned farmers and, more generally, rural people. It’s almost mutual, too, the biggest farmers apparently being staunch Republicans. But maybe that’s a myth too.

While I normally avoid straight politics, I thought it important to point to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, the data-driven website. What If Tariffs Cost Trump The Farm Vote? makes some really interesting observations. Perhaps the most salient is that farmers seem far more interested in farming than in politics. That is, they’ll vote for whoever promises to do them most good, or least harm. They voted for Jimmy Carter, and abandoned him for Ronald Reagan after Carter stopped grain sales to the USSR.

Fast forward 40 years. We’re told that farmers overwhelmingly voted for the current President. And he’s just launched a trade war that could hurt a lot of farmers. FiveThirtyEight points out that:

[T]here are three states that Trump won by narrow margins in which a mass farmer defection could prove pivotal: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In each of these states, the number of farmers far exceeds the president’s margin of victory in 2016. If all three states saw significant ag defection, a Democratic challenger could pick up a total of 46 Electoral College votes — enough to tip the balance even if Trump performs up to his 2016 standards in every other state in the union.

There’s more to it than that, of course, and it would undoubtedly help if the opposition actually had some policies to help the vast bulk of rural people, but what if …

1. Not fraud, just a lack of information. That’s how the head of the association of Ibérico ham producers regards ham that isn’t from a black Iberian pig, doesn’t roam freely and has never eaten an acorn. This year, there’s a labelling scheme to inform buyers, a coloured ring around every ham’s ankle. Black (naturally; this is pata negra ham after all, Iberian pigs having black hooves) is from acorn-fed, free-range, pure Iberian animals. White, the lowest grade, indicates feedlot pigs of dubious origin. The problem, according to The Economist, is that over half the ham sold in Spain now comes ready sliced in supermarket packs rather than on the (black) hoof, and the packs are not, yet, colour coded. Buyer beware.
2. Pooh-pooing ancient meat pigeons. Archaeological sites in the Negev desert show that around 1500 years ago it was not a desert but a pretty productive agricultural area. One mystery is that the loess soils of the area are not very fertile. So how did they support all that productivity? Pigeon poop, maybe. A site called Shivta contains a remarkable collection of pigeon bones, remarkable mostly because bird bones are fragile and do not often survive intact. The Shivta haul contained enough birds to compare with specimens of modern pigeons, including some studied by Charles Darwin in his treatise on The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. The comparison showed that the Shivta birds were not domesticated. They were essentially no different from wild birds and had not been selected to be meatier. The conclusion, according a news article and the original research report is that the birds were kept for their guano, which fertilised fruit trees and vines, while wine from the vines offered a product that could be stored and traded for staples in a bad year.
3. Sie essen Pferde, nicht wahr? Unlike the French, and indeed the Italians, the Germans by-and-large have seldom knowingly eaten horsemeat. And the reason seems to be that Pope Gregory III banned the practice in 732. Volker Bach considers the reasons and the consequences in his blog post Having Friends for Dinner and fascinating stuff it is. The one topic it doesn’t address is why Germany, but not Italy nor France. The thrust seems to be that early German Christians might be tempted to backslide by pagan burial rites involving horses. I guess mother church had no such fears for the people of France or Italy.
4. Unmitigated pseudoscientific tosh. On the whole I try not to share stuff that really makes me mad, but I’m making a special exception for Wealthy Americans know less than they think they do about food and nutrition, an article in The Conversation puffing some “research” from Michigan State University. They asked a bunch of people a bunch of questions about food and also how much they earned. They then decide, looking down from high up in an ivory tower, that ordinary people – wealthy and otherwise – are foolish for “demonising” chemicals because chemicals are “fundamental to the ways we see, hear, smell and interpret the world”. And, just for the record, what is the correct answer to this gem?

Please tell me whether you think the following statement is true or false: Genetically modified foods have genes and non-genetically modified foods do not.

Next!

5. Alas, there is a next. People waste nearly a pound of food a day, where people means Americans and a pound means 422 grams. I should explain that nobody actually measured the food people waste; they inferred it from other sources. There’s more. “Fruits and vegetables and mixed fruit and vegetable dishes accounted for 39% of food waste.” So the healthier your diet, the more you waste. I suppose that could be correct, for Americans and the food system that supplies them with “healthy” items, but I wonder how generally applicable the conclusion is.
6. The truth about mother’s milk. A fascinating article on the differences between infant formula and mother’s milk sets out all the extra things (human milk oligosaccharides) that make the real thing better for baby, and especially for baby’s gut microbiome. This surely adds to the argument that formula should be avoided, especially when it might be over-diluted or prepared with less-than-wholsesome water. But can it really be true that “There doesn’t seem to be any strong evidence from long-term studies suggesting that breast-fed babies grow up to be better or smarter adults than formula-fed babies.” Maybe it depends on how you define better? The article makes a strong case that fewer infants fed formula actually survive to become adults. That sound pretty much like “better” to me.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:38 — 18.6MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Dairy cows unavoidably produce male calves that are of no use to the dairy industry. They used to end up as veal, and in 1960, Britons ate more than 600,000 calves worth of the stuff. By the 1980s, that had dropped to less than 35,000. Ten years ago, a UK trade magazine said that “public opinion … generally regards veal as ethically somewhere between dodo omelettes and panda fritters”.

And yet, today there’s no shortage of veal and no surplus of dairy bullocks.

Time was when veal calves were kept in the dark. These days, it may be the shoppers who have helped to solve the problem of surplus male dairy calves. Behind the shift is a complicated story of moral outrage, utterly unpredictable disease outbreaks and the willingness of some strange bedfellows to work together to solve a difficult problem for the food supply system.

Notes

1. Gillian Hopkinson is a senior lecturer at Lancaster University School of Management.
2. Clips from BBC Radio 4 – You and Yours and BBC World Service – Witness, Mad cow disease – CJD.
3. Music by Podington Bear.
4. Banner photo of two Dutch dairy calves by Peter Nijenhuis and cover by debstreasures.

   Huffduff it