Eat This Newsletter 205: There is no Alternative
Hello
Today’s issue once again waited hours at the bus stop for a Number 75, when suddenly a whole flotilla of them arrived. Let’s jump aboard.
A Bumper Harvest of Alt-Food
It’s hard to connect the dots, so I’m just going to leave all of these here to make of them what you will. Well, not entirely. I can’t resist making of them a little what I will.
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The Future Appetite for Alternative Proteins. A very thorough, very groovy glimpse at the entire topic, long on display, short on detail.
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Aubrey Plaza’s Wood Milk ad and the controversy around it, explained. Who or where is Aubrey Plaza was my first thought. Next, I thought they (the writer, not the Plaza) doth protest too much. Finally, if people in the US have been drinking less milk for more than 70 years, why choose now to lash out at competitors?
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Annals of Marketing: Oatly’s climate change numbers from Marion Nestle looks at one way one alt-milk is hitting back: Oatly took out a two-page ad in the New York Times. On the left, it announces its climate footprint per kg of product, on the right, it is “donating this page to the dairy industry so they can tell you their climate footprint numbers too”. As Nestle says, “Cute”. Will it work? She doesn’t know.
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The American Conservative weighs in Against a Dystopian Farm-Free Future with some rather appealing arguments, even though I find myself wondering who exactly TAC represents, while too lazy actually to find out.
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By contrast, I feel I know who Janette Barnard represents (Smart Meat) because I read her newsletter, the latest of which looks at Cultivated bubbles & cell-based tulips. She uses the kind of analysis that TAC thinks doesn’t apply to conclude that “It seems increasingly unlikely that cell-based meat will ever hit retail shelves on any scale.” I’m heartened by that.
How to grow more food
Give people modern seeds and fertiliser, right? Well, that’s what the government of Malawi did in the early 2000s, and it reaped the rewards, with maize yields doubling in a year. No way, said the naysayers: Malawi just happened to strike lucky with good rains and good uptake of the subsidised maize seeds and fertiliser. Now my compadre Luigi Guarino draws attention to an article by Glenn Denning, Professor of Professional Practice at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University.
Malawi continued its Farm Input Subsidy Program despite the naysayers, and Denning concludes that “The results are impressive. Since 2005, Malawi’s farmers have generated surpluses over national requirements in all but three years.” As Luigi points out, Denning believes that while subsidised seeds and fertiliser are crucial, they are not the entire answer. Adding agricultural biodiversity would help even more.
What Price Government and Food?
Subsidies aren’t always the best answer. A follow up to last issue’s item about The Household’s Basket in Greece looks at the way Greek people have used the Basket to talk about the “the inability of neoliberalism to serve as an effective organizational system for Greek society”. Leonadis Vournelis uses the many Easter carnivals in Greece to show how the whole Basket system became a focus for discontent with government policies around food.
The Basket may or may not be good to eat from, but it is seems to be good to think about; owing its existence to the state’s refusal to organize the country’s economy in ways that do not privilege market profitability above everything else, it demonstrates the inability of neoliberalism to accommodate the kinds of sociability Greeks value most and at the same time raises the question to the minds of many: is this the best Neoliberalism can do for the majority of us?
Meanwhile, in the UK … A long piece from Zoe Wood in The Guardian asks Why are UK food prices still rocketing and when will it stop?. Some cheap take-aways.
- Food prices tend to ratchet; they go up, but they seldom come down. That’s despite some of the costs, like energy, that are dropping now, because commodities are bought on long-term contracts and apparently it “takes a long time for food cost changes at the top of the supply chain to percolate down to us as consumers”.
- Greedflation is not happening, according to the supermarkets and at least one independent expert. YMMV.
- Fish and chips has seen the biggest price inflation, up 19% in the year to March.
- Rishi Sunak will host a “food summit” with industry leaders on Tuesday. Don’t hold your breath.
Take care.