ETN 216: Wot Me, Allergic?
Hello
Sat up late last night looking for inspiration from the Perseid meteor showers, but local light pollution thwarted that plan. Nothing daunted, here are some enlightened gleanings.
All Allergies, Everywhere
If you listened to the episode on How to Be a Good Host and a Good Guest you’ll know that just about the only thing that people can agree on with respect to food allergies is that they are more common than they used to be. Why that should be remains a mystery. So I approached How Modernity Made Us Allergic in Noema magazine eager to get the straight dope. Instead, I find myself puzzled that they didn’t throw in the malign influence of Neptune in your Pisces.
The article is a catalogue, a very long catalogue, of the contending hypotheses, the evidence pro and con, the mouse models, the non-mouse models and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
What have I learned? That food allergies are more common than they used to be. Why? That remains a mystery.
What Goes Up …
… might, eventually, if you’re lucky, come down. Reuters reports that American fast food chains are enjoying bumper profits as lower ingredient costs feed into prices they raised last year, citing food inflation.
Of course, it may be that I am suffering from what Paul Krugman recently called “negativity bias in perceptions of food inflation, in which big jumps make a stronger impression than big declines. For example, the Eggpocalypse of 2022 got a lot more attention than the rapid normalization of 2023.”
That’s from a recent Krugman opinion answering the question Why Are Groceries So Expensive?. He makes several points, one being that greedflation is not an issue because “[I]f it were, we wouldn’t have seen egg prices come down as fast as they went up”. I think I understand his arguments, but are they reflected in the price of dishes that contain eggs? I would not expect so, for many of the reasons Krugman mentions, essentially the difference between the cost of the ingredients and the cost of the food containing them. I couldn’t find any empirical studies of how restaurants adjust prices on the way up versus on the way down. Enlighten me, please, if you know otherwise.
Don’t Shift Food Subsidies, Abolish Them
A long article in The Guardian introduced me to Earl Blumenauer, Democrat Congressional representative for Oregon. Apparently Blumenauer has been campaigning almost since he entered Congress for a root and branch reform of the US Farm Bill, which he summarises thus:
“We simply pay too much to the wrong people, to grow the wrong foods the wrong way, in the wrong places”.
The article has much of the background. About $63 billion of the Farm Bill is for subsidies, with 70% of the subsidies going to 10% of the farms, which are growing commodity crops that contribute little to a good, nutritious diet. Blumenauer wants to restrict subsidies to smaller farmers with a cap on the amount each could receive. He also wants to extend subsidies to fruit and vegetable growers and remove it from industrial feedlots and others.
All of which is, I submit, tinkering with a system to make it favour those you like rather than those you don’t. I am all in favour of that, of course, but I also wonder what else a far-sighted government might do with $63 billion. Free school meals for all? Write off student debt? Answers on a postcard, please.
More True Costs
I was very pleased to get an email this past week from Albert Han, a journalist with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Someone (and I am grateful to them too) had forwarded a copy of that week’s newsletter, which contained an article about the true cost experiment at Penny supermarkets in Germany. Albert told me that he had that very day uploaded his video about true cost pricing in The Netherlands.
It is definitely worth eight minutes of your time, especially because Albert asked one of the store owners what happened to the extra money that shoppers seemed willing to hand over. I was less than impressed by the answer. Subsidising your own farm operations seems to me to be a bit dodgy. Even if it does make their own produce cheaper than alternatives, how does it avoid the free-rider problem of people who come to the store for the cheaper produce and leave without paying the true cost mark-up for anything else?
Maybe Dutch shoppers are just a whole lot more altruistic.
Missing Movies
And speaking of little films, I’m ashamed to say I have only just discovered that the 10th Food Film Festival will unspool in Bergamo here in Italy from 23 to 27 August. If only I had had more notice, I might have been able to visit, and there are some films and events that I would have quite liked to see. My cunning plan for next year, should anyone from the Festival and the 30 organisations that support it be reading this, is that I’ll help them render the English version of the website a little more approachable. Although, maybe, they don’t want foreigners to visit.
Take care
p.s. Thanks to the Charles M. Schulz Museum for the image, used without permission.