One of my wife’s friends from work recently was in Brussels and brough her back chocolate from Mary Chocolatier. If you have taste buds and if you are in Brussels, you owe it to yourself to go to Mary’s. The chocolate was the best I’ve ever had.
By the way, if you want to order a box of chocolate online, it will only cost you 100 Euros.
I’m only three months slow posting this. Here’s a great picture of a German Christmas market from my friends Sina and Nate. We really could learn from the Germans–all holidays would benefit with the grilling of lots of meat.
I don’t understand the promoters of ethanol. They seem to fail to understand a very simple proposition–if you take over 1/5 of the U.S. corn crop, and use it for fuel instead of corn, then the price of corn and its substitutes rises. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
There are multiple reasons that food prices are rising around the food, but ethanol is one of the big drivers. According to the NY Times:
Milk is up 17 percent, as are dried beans, peas and lentils. Cheese is up 15 percent, rice and pasta 13 percent, and bread 12 percent.
No food product has gone up as much as eggs, jumping 25 percent since February 2007 and 62 percent in the last two years.
What do things things have in common–corn. Cows and chickens eat a lot of corn. Beans, peas, lentils, rice, and wheat can be planted in some areas where corn is now planted and so high prices for corn is crowding out these products. Not all of this increase can be attributable to the government mandates to use ethanol, but ethanol is an important factor.
All this makes life more difficult for the poor who are just struggling to have enough money to buy food. In Indonesia some people have died from starvation and people are protesting because of high food prices.
I can’t believe the promoters of ethanol can’t see beyond their own pocketbook long enough to see that they are making life difficult for the poor. The WSJ held a conference on energy last week and one of the panels discussed ethanol:
Mr. Khosla [a venture capitalist] also sniped at Big Oil for fueling the criticism that corn ethanol is responsible for rising food prices. “The API started issuing press releases about food. Suddenly they got interested in the welfare of poor Africans.”
“We have never said anything about ethanol being responsible for food prices,” Mr. Cavaney replied. It was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in recent Congressional testimony who linked a 4.5% increase in food prices to rising worldwide demand and the amount of corn going to ethanol.
I wish Red Caveney would told Mr. Khosla and others ethanol promoters that they should care about the poor instead trying get governments to make people buy more of their products.
More and more people are understanding the harm that government mandates for ethanol causes. The NY Times is concerned about the biofuel mandate and at the WSJ energy conference only 21 percent of the attendees (mostly business people) thought that ethanol would play a significant part of solving the nation’s energy problem. Also AMD continues to take heat for their biofuel efforts about the world and that makes me happy because I’m no fan of ADM.
From Flickr, originally uploaded by sudergal.
The evilest company in the world is not Microsoft, McDonald’s, ExxonMobil, or Wal-Mart. The evilest company is the world, hands down, is Archer Daniels Midland.
The reason for this is simple, for pure greed ADM’s lobbying has led to a worldwide run-up in the price of staple grains. This means that it will be harder for the world’s poor to get food.
ADM has lobbied hard for years because they don’t want to compete in a free marketplace. Instead they want the government to protect their place in the world. They started with sugar tariffs. The point of the tariff was to keep Third World farmer’s sugar-cane out of the US. By keep sugar imports out of the US, ADM could sell more high-fructose corn syrup.
A few years ago, ADM had a brilliant plan–promote ethanol as a domestic, CO2-friendly fuel and then lobby for a tariff on imported ethanol. ADM went to its friends in the White House and on Capitol Hill and pushed for, and got, a 54 cents per gallon tariff on imported ethanol.
But ADM’s greed was far from sated by a measly 54 cents per gallon tariff on imported ethanol, so they pushed for an ethanol mandate. In President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union, he called for a 35 billion gallons a year ethanol mandate. Nevermind that in 2006, we used 20% of the US corn crop to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol. President Bush and his friends at ADM wanted to septuple that.
ADM lobbied for President Bush’s plan and again their efforts paid off. At the end of last year, Congress sent Bush an ethanol mandate requiring Americans to us 36 billion gallons of ethanol a year.
That would all be fine and good if ethanol were a magic fluid that came out of the ground. Instead, using current technologies, we usually take corn and turn it into ethanol. Turning food into fuel is increasing demand and driving up the price of staple grains around the world. The Times in the UK is reporting that “The rush towards biofuels is theatening world food production and the lives of billions of people.” EU Business is reporting that “The UN agency in charge of alleviating world hunger” is warning “that the fast-growing use of biofuels is driving up food prices for the world’s poor.” The World Food Program is having a difficult time because its operating costs are up 40% since June 2007.
Who’s to blame for all of this–the promoters of the ethanol mandate. But because AMD is the country’s largest ethanol producer, and because they have long been a welfare queen, and because their actions are leading to suffering all over world, this makes ADM the evilest company in the world.
P.S. Did I mention that some of ADM’s Execs were found guilty of price fixing?
P.P.S. Did I mention that ethanol prodution leads to more CO2 emissions that using gasoline?
Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, has written some quick advice for deciding what to eat.
I try to distill this cultural wisdom into a series of eating algorithms–mental tools for navigating the food landscape and eating well. Instead of talking about how to get your antioxidants or probiotics, my rules of thumb go more like this:
- Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
- Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
- Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
- Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
- Avoid food products that make health claims.
- Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
- Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
- Pay more, eat less.
- Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
- Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.
There are more, but this should give you some idea of how I approach the question of what and how to eat.
That sounds like good advice.
I keep finding websites that allow you to enter enter the ingredients you have on hand and the website spits out recipes using those ingredients. Here’s the list I have found so far:
Ever since we saw the movie Ratatouille during the summer I’ve been wanting to make ratatouille. So in honor of the Super Bowl we made this ratatouille recipe. It was great.
How great was it? So great that I’m sure our making and eating of ratatouille help power the Giants to victory over the forces of darkness. This makes ratatouille the greatest Super Bowl food of all time.
Tonight searched for the best way to cook hot dogs. I found what looks to be a good technique at The Paupered Chef. Check it out here.
A couple weeks ago I posted a link to Cooking by Numbers–a website that allows you to enter in the food you have in your pantry or refrigerator and it pulls up recipes. Here’s another similar website–SuperCook. With SuperCook you enter what you have in your refrigerator into a search engine and it pulls up recipes.
Next month my wife is going on a two-week trip to Azerbaijan and somewhere else exotic for work. When she does, I’m going to try out this website–cooking by numbers. You tell the website what’s in your fridge and cupboard and the website gives you recipe options.