badvertising
The Corn Refiners Association is sick and tired of people expressing uncertainty about the dubious heath benefits of high fructose corn syrup, so they're running some commercials featuring aggressively annoying people getting schooled on the "facts" about our most omnipresent sweetener. All we managed to glean from the commercials is that not consuming high fructose corn syrup makes you
rude. In the first one, one mom walks up to another (who is pouring some sort of pink liquid from a jug) and says, "Wow, you don't care what the kids eat, huh?" What a jerk.
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pricing
Think you're paying too much for food now? You're going to pay more in 2008 according to
Reuters.
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irony
Ethanol is billed as the answer to America's addiction to foreign oil, but the immense demand for the corn, from which ethanol is made, is also raising prices in supermarkets and restaurants across the nation. The demand to transform corn into ethanol has already doubled the average price for a bushel of corn from $2 to $4.
The corn price increases flow like gravy down the food chain, to grocery stores and menus. The cost of rounded cubed steak at local Harris Teeters is up from $4.59 last year to $5.29 this year, according to TheGroceryGame.com, which tracks prices. The Palm restaurant chain recently raised prices as much as $2 for a New York strip. And so on.
Michael Pollan best summarized our little-known reliance on corn in
The Omnivore's Dilemma:
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food
Michael Pollan, author of
The Omnivore's Dilemma, has an article in the NYT today about the relationship between the farm bill and the production of cheap, unhealthy food. From the NYT:
Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?
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steak
We were making steak today when it occurred to us that we don't know a whole lot about it. Then, while poking around Slate, we stumbled upon a shopping article about steak. Is it all about the marbling? Or grass-fed vs grain? What's the best steak?
Before you walk into your neighborhood butcher and say, "Three rib-eye Angus steaks, please, pastured in the Rocky Mountain foothills, finished on barley, but with a hint of oats, and dry-aged for 28—no, make that 29—days," keep in mind that as a consumer, such choice does not exist. That said, if you scour specialty butcher shops or Google "steak," you'll discover other options, including naturally raised, grain-fed, and grass-fed beef. Which leaves carnivores with the question: Which steak tastes the best?
The Slate writer held a taste test and decided on grass-fed beef at $21.50 per lbs, not the most expensive variety tested. "Never have I witnessed a piece of meat so move grown men (and women)." Check it out.
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food
I like the Chicken McNugget. Hey, it's not chicken or anything, but my sole interest in the McNugget is as a flavor carrier of McDonald's brand sweet and sour sauce. I love that stuff. It is for that sauce — looking oh-so-remarkably like the output of a mewling newborn — that I can never bring myself to order any similar gobble-sized chicken parts from Burger King or the like. Their "chicken tenders" (in case you never noticed, a creative marketing euphemism for "chicken genitalia") may taste better than the McNugget, but that pink, orange-flecked sweet and sour sauce is an abomination.
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Consumerist
Adjust your metaphors. Chicken feed is now expensive. Pilgrim's Pride, the world's largest chicken processor is laying off 1,100 people due to the rising cost of corn. [CNNMoney]
