Tag Archives: food and ag

This Glimpse Into Mexican Fruit and Vegetable Farms Is Heartbreaking

by ThaddeuDobbie Posted on December 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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The ongoing LA Times investigation of conditions on the Mexican farms that grow much of our produce (latest installment here) got me digging around for more information. That’s how I how I found the above short documentary, Paying the Price: Migrant Workers in the Toxic Fields of Sinaloa, by the Mexico-based Tlachinollan Human Rights Center, a MacArthur-funded group that “defends the rights of the indigenous and poor people living in the mountain and Costa Chica regions of Guerrero, Mexico.”

Paying the Price traces the movements of a group of workers from a tiny village called Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero, north to a large produce farm in the ag-heavy state of Sinaloa, which churns out huge amounts of food for export to the US. (Ayotzinapa recently gained infamy after 43 students from a rural teachers college based there were kidnapped and probably massacred, under circumstances that are shaking the foundations of the Mexican state.)

The film—about 36 minutes long, subtitled in English—is extraordinary, because it includes in-depth interviews from a variety of players on a big farm that grows vegetables for the US and Canadian markets: everyone from the farm owner to several workers to the labor contractors that bring them together. The farm owner claims the workers get a good a good deal; the workers complain bitterly of pay so low that they leave the several-month stint of hard labor with little to show. Two highlights:

• Starting about at the 18-minute mark, there’s a detailed and sensitive exploration of child labor. The LA Times piece reported that child labor has been “largely eradicated” at the mega-farms that directly supply huge US retailers like Walmart, but that it’s still common on mid-sized farms, some of whose produce “makes its way to the US through middlemen.” That’s the case with the operation depicted in this video. The farm owner basically throws his hands up on the topic, claiming that the workers insist on having their children toil in the fields. By the end of the section, though, you realize that people wouldn’t choose to commit their children to hours of hard labor if they weren’t living in poverty and desperately trying to earn enough to survive.

• Starting about 25:50, there’s a chilling section on pesticide use. We see crop dusters roaring over fields amid chemical clouds; men whose faces are covered in in little more than rags operating backpack sprayers; women complaining that nearly all the children in the camps are sick, some of it possibly linked linked to pesticide exposure, and that medical services are woefully inadequate; and worker advocates claiming that regulation of pesticide use is weak and enforcement nearly nonexistent.

In all, Paying the Price is essential viewing for anyone who wants to know what life is like for the people who grow our food.

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This Glimpse Into Mexican Fruit and Vegetable Farms Is Heartbreaking

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How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

by CandaceAnthon Posted on December 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ask an agribusiness exec about sustainable agriculture, and you’ll likely get an earful about something called “precision agriculture.” What is it? According to Yara, the fertilizer giant, it’s technology that “enables farmers to add the specific nutrients needed for their crop, in exactly the right amount, at the right time.”

That is to say, instead of using intuition and experience to decide how much fertilizer or pesticides to apply, farmers rely on sensors, satellite data, and the Internet of Things to make such choices. In addition to selling farmers agrichemicals, Yara also sells a “knowledge platform, supported by tools for precision farming,” including “an online service providing advice on the physical mixing characteristics of Yara’s foliar products with agrochemicals.”

Yara isn’t the only industry titan to move into the information-peddling business. Genetically modified seed/pesticide giant Monsanto envisions itself transforming into an information-technology company within a decade, as a company honcho recently told my colleague Tim McDonnell. A year ago, Monsanto dropped nearly $1 billion on Climate Corp., which “turns a wide range of information into valuable insights and recommendations for farmers,” as Monsanto put it at the time.

But will Big Ag’s turn to Big Data deliver on the environmental promises made in the press releases and executive interviews? McDonnell lays out the environmental case succinctly:

The payoff for growers can be huge: Monsanto estimates that farmers typically make 40 key choices in the course of a growing season—what seed to plant, when to plant it, and so on. For each decision, there’s an opportunity to save money on “inputs”: water, fuel, seeds, custom chemical treatments, etc. Those savings can come with a parallel environmental benefit (less pollution from fertilizer and insecticides).

These are real gains. No one who has seen fertilizer-fed algae blooms in Lake Erie—or had their municipal tap water declared toxic because of them—can deny that the Midwest’s massive corn farms need to use fertilizer more efficiently. Des Moines, Iowa, surrounded by millions of acres of intensively fertilized farmland, routinely has to spend taxpayer cash to filter its municipal drinking water of nitrates from farm runoff. Nitrates are linked with cancer and “blue-baby syndrome,” which can suffocate infants.

But as Quentin Hardy suggested in a recent New York Times piece, Big Data on the farm can also steamroll an extremely effective conservation practice: crop diversification, which can slash the need for fertilizer and herbicide, as a landmark 2012 Iowa State University study showed. Big Data, Hardy argued, gives farms incentive to both get bigger and plant fewer varieties of crops.

His argument is twofold. First, the precision ag tools being peddled by the agribusiness giants are quite pricey:

Equipment makers like John Deere and AGCO, for example, have covered their planters, tractors and harvesters with sensors, computers and communications equipment. A combine equipped to harvest a few crops cost perhaps $65,000 in 2000; now it goes for as much as $500,000 because of the added information technology.

When a farmer invests that much in a technology, there’s an “incentive to grow single crops to maximize the effectiveness of technology by growing them at the largest possible scale,” Hardy writes. “Farmers with diverse crops and livestock would need many different systems,” and that would require yet more investment in information technology.

Hardy finds evidence that the shift to information technology is already accelerating a decades-long trend of ever-larger Midwestern farms focusing more and more on churning out just two crops: corn and soy. “It’s not that smaller farms are less productive, but the big ones can afford these technology investments,” a US Department of Agriculture economist tells him.

One farmer Hardy talked to owns a family farm in Iowa that grew from 700 acres in the 1970s to 20,000 acres today. “We’ve got sensors on the combine, GPS data from satellites, cellular modems on self-driving tractors, apps for irrigation on iPhones,” the farmer tells Hardy.

The recent plunge in corn and soy prices might only exacerbate the trend. All that gear and information allows the farm to operate at a high level of efficiency and at a vast scale, making it more likely to eke out a profit than smaller operations in a time of lowball crop prices. As a result, over the next few years of expected low crop prices, the farmer with 20,000 acres in Iowa expects his farm to expand at the expense of “farmers who don’t embrace technology,” he tells Hardy.

But economies of scale and efficiency don’t automatically translate to less use of toxic chemicals and pollution. Big Data may help monocrop farmers use less fertilizer and pesticides per acre harvested than they had been before, but if they drive out more diversified and less chemical-intensive operations, the result might not be as clear-cut as the agribusiness companies suggest.

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How Monsanto’s Big Data Push Hurts Small Farms

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Brazil’s Dietary Guidelines Are So Much Better Than the USDA’s

by Aaron Duff Posted on November 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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As anyone who has read Marion Nestle’s Food Politics or Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food knows, the US Department of Agriculture’s attempts to issue dietary advice have always been haunted by industry influence and a reductionist vision of nutrition science. The department finally ditched its silly pyramids a few years ago, but its guidelines remain vague and arbitrary (for example, how does dairy merit inclusion as one of five food groups?).

In Brazil, a hotbed of sound progressive nutritional thinking, the Ministry of Health has proven that governmental dietary advice need not be delivered in timid, industry-palatable bureaucratese. Check out its plain-spoken, unimpeachable, and down-right industry-hostile new guidelines (hat tip Marion Nestle):

1. Make natural or minimally processed foods the basis of your diet
2. Use oils, fats, salt, and sugar in small amounts when seasoning and cooking natural or minimally processed foods and to create culinary preparations
3. Limit consumption of processed foods
4. Avoid consumption of ultra-processed products
5. Eat regularly and carefully in appropriate environments and, whenever possible, in company
6. Shop in places that offer a variety of natural or minimally processed foods
7. Develop, exercise and share culinary skills
8. Plan your time to make food and eating important in your life
9. Out of home, prefer places that serve freshly made meals
10. Be wary of food advertising and marketing

Meanwhile, over on Civil Eats, the dissident nutritionist Andy Bellatti places Brazil’s new approach on a fascinating list of five food-policy ideas the US could learn from Latin American nations.

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Brazil’s Dietary Guidelines Are So Much Better Than the USDA’s

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The Race to Save the World’s Chocolate

by QuinnHeavener Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Blame climate change. Or pestilence. Or China’s Westernizing taste in candy. Blame, perhaps, Ebola.

Regardless, the world is running out of chocolate. In 2013, the world consumed about 70,000 metric tons more cocoa than it produced. And now, Mars, Inc. and Barry Callebaut—two of the world’s biggest manufacturers of chocolate goods—are warning that by 2020, that consumption-over-production number could increase to 1 million metric tons (a fourteen-fold bump). “Chocolate deficits, whereby farmers produce less cocoa than the world eats, are becoming the norm,” The Washington Post reported. We are in the midst of what may be “the longest streak of consecutive chocolate deficits in more than 50 years” and analysts say it’s only going to get worse.

What will that mean for the average chocoholic? Chocolate could not only become more expensive; confectioners could also start extending their chocolate supplies by combining cacao with other ingredients like vegetable fat and flavor chemicals.

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The Race to Save the World’s Chocolate

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

by VRBSanorabni Posted on October 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is an excerpt from Mother Jones contributing writer Ted Genoways’ new book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food.

On September 15, 2008, Lynn Becker got the phone call every hog farmer fears.

For months on end, pork producers across the Midwest had been struggling against record-low prices per head, but Becker had taken steps to protect his family’s farm against contractions of the market. He had signed a producer agreement with Hormel Foods, maybe the one company with a recession-proof demand for pork, and he had planted enough of his own corn to sustain his herd for the next year, insulating his operation from skyrocketing feed prices. With another Minnesota winter already in the air, Becker was out walking his fields one last time before starting the harvest. “When I got in and checked the answering machine,” he told me later, “there was a message from Matt Prescott with PETA.” Becker was soft-spoken but bristled with nervous energy. His jitters, together with his work-honed physique and fair hair, made him seem much younger than forty. But he insisted that the four years since receiving the call from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had aged him by more than a decade. “They had ‘damning evidence,'” he said haltingly. “Undercover. Of animal abuse. On a farm that we own.”

Becker described his hog operation outside Fairmont, Minnesota, a little more than an hour due west of Austin on Interstate 90, as a “good old-fashioned, American family farm”—and it might appear that way at first. Everything about the old homestead suggests its age, from the weathered, brick-red Dutch Gambrel barn emblazoned with the name, lb pork, to the simple farmhouse that Becker’s grandfather built in the 1940s—the house where all big decisions are still made on Sundays around the dinner table. But in truth, Becker was already a major supplier, providing more than fifty thousand pigs to Hormel each year, and he was making a bid to double that number by bringing the whole supply chain, from seed to slaughter, under his control. He owned 1,500 acres of prime farmland, where he raised corn and soybeans, which he put up in a colossal grain bin and ground at his own feed mill and then trucked to more than a dozen sites in Minnesota and Iowa to feed to thousands of pregnant sows in his breeding barns and tens of thousands of weaned piglets at separate finishing facilities. The company was sprawling and complex, employing dozens of full-time and part-time workers, and it was only getting bigger. Still, Becker insists that he always personally monitored every phase of his business. And as the voice message claiming animal abuse started to sink in, his shock and disbelief quickly turned to indignation.

“Wait a second,” he remembered thinking. “Not on any farm I own.”

Then it dawned on him. The farm in question wasn’t LB Pork or even his breeding facility, Camalot, about ten miles away outside the town of Welcome. The farm that PETA had investigated was a large barn complex, housing some six thousand sows and tens of thousands of newborn piglets, that Becker had acquired less than a month before in Iowa, an operation he had purchased from Natural Pork Production II and renamed MowMar Farms but had only ever seen a few times. Becker phoned his day-to-day management company, Suidae Health & Production, based in Algona, Iowa, and asked them to reach out to Prescott and see if they could get their hands on this “damning evidence”; maybe the video they claimed to have in their possession had all been shot before the facility was under his ownership.

Everything You Didn’t Want to Know About Hormel, Bacon, and Amputated Limbs:

Meanwhile, Becker worked his connections. He was the president of the Minnesota Pork Board, and his wife, Julie, had been the Minnesota Pork Promoter of the Year in 2007. In fact, she was, at that very moment, on Capitol Hill with the Minnesota Pork Producers Association, the lobbying arm of the Pork Board, meeting with members of Congress. Becker called his wife so she could alert her fellow lobbyists. Then he placed another call to Cindy Cunningham, the assistant vice president for communications at the National Pork Board in Des Moines, Iowa.

Soon Becker heard back that PETA wanted to meet with him one-on-one and then stage a joint press conference. Everyone advised against it. Instead, with the assistance of Himle Horner, a public relations firm in the Twin Cities, he decided to issue a written statement, and Cunningham mobilized several agribusiness organizations to help answer press inquiries. But nothing could have prepared them for the onslaught of negative attention. The next day, when the Associated Press released the video online along with a wire report describing its contents, the story became worldwide news almost instantly. The video’s camerawork was shaky and low-definition, captured with recorders hidden in the hat brims of undercover workers, but it had been cut together into a concise and harrowing five minutes.

In one shot, a supervisor was shown beating a sow relentlessly on the back. In another, workers turned electric prods on a crippled sow and kicked pregnant sows repeatedly in the belly. A close-up showed a distressed sow knocked out, her face royal blue from the Prima Tech marking dye sprayed into her nostrils by a worker who said he was trying “to get her high.” In one of the most disturbing sequences, a worker demonstrated the method for euthanizing underweight piglets: taking them by the hind legs and smashing their skulls against the concrete floor. Fellow workers whooped and laughed as he tossed the bloodied and twitching bodies into a giant bin. The AP story revealed that PETA had already met with Tom Heater, the sheriff of Greene County, Iowa, and he had agreed to open a criminal investigation.


Gagged by Big Ag


You Won’t Believe What Pork Producers Do to Pregnant Pigs


Has Your State Outlawed Blowing the Whistle on Factory Farm Abuses?


Timeline: Big Ag’s Campaign to Shut Up Its Critics


The Cruelest Show on Earth

That night, Becker played the PETA video again and again on his iPad. He told me he felt numb as he watched his inbox fill with more than a thousand angry emails. He was starting to see what an ordeal the release of this video was going to be. But worse, he feared that Hormel would terminate its production contract with him—the contract he had used to secure a loan of more than $1 million to mortgage the breed barns in Iowa, with his family’s homestead in Minnesota as collateral. If Hormel decided that Becker had become a liability, he and his family could lose everything.

A couple of miles north of Bayard, Iowa, at the crossroads of two wide gravel tracks, there are three enormous sow barns: the site of Lynn Becker’s MowMar Farms. It’s now operated under the name Fair Creek, though you’d never know it; there are no company signs, no indication at all of what’s going on inside. The barns gleam white in the sun and seem, by all appearances, to be well ventilated, well supplied with water from giant external holding tanks, and generally well turned-out, right down to their square corners and tightly tacked aluminum siding. Gary Weihs (pronounced WISE), the site’s original developer, saw to it that the facility was clean, inconspicuous, and odor-free. It took him two years of disputes and disagreements to get a permit recommendation from the board of supervisors for Greene County, so he wanted to be sure there were no complaints once the facility was built.

After spending years working with large corporations like Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, and Monsanto in operational management, Weihs had decided to return to his native Iowa. He planned to combine the experience he had gained growing up on his father’s hog farm outside of Harlan with the statistical analysis of three decades of corn pricing and hog yields he had performed to complete his MBA at Harvard Business School. “We flat price everything,” Weihs told the National Hog Farmer, “so that we make a little bit per head and base our profits on quantity.” Under the name Natural Pork Production II (NPPII), he lined up investors and, when he had the start-up money in place, began building facilities, about one per year. The three-barn complex in Bayard was the fifth unit—a 6,000-sow farrow-to-wean operation, where returns would be generated for investors by selling roughly 130,000 weaned pigs each year to finishing operations at $36 apiece. All told, NPPII facilities were supplying about fifteen different hog farmers with close to 800,000 weaned pigs, for gross annual earnings of nearly $29 million—but all while carrying precarious overheard, including roughly $5 million in construction costs per site and millions more invested in the breeding sows housed inside.

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"Hurt That Bitch": What Undercover Investigators Saw Inside a Factory Farm

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How Monsanto Crashed SXSW—and Brought the Drama to My Panel

by KDXRickeygvwipk Posted on October 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Let’s face it: While panels at conferences can be fun, interesting, even provocative, rarely do they provide drama, intrigue, or surprise. On Wednesday at South by Southwest Eco in Austin, my colleague Kiera Butler and I sat on a panel that counts as a genuine exception. And it had nothing to do with our own oratorical skills or those of our excellent co-panelists, author and agriculture researcher Raj Patel and Texas A&M cotton breeder Jane Dever.

So here’s what happened: Our session, entitled, “GMOs Real Talk: The Hype, the Hope, the Science,” proceeded as you might expect. I thought we had a pretty robust discussion of the potential and pitfalls of biotechnology in contributing to global food security going forward. Then, at the very end of the hour, during the Q&A session, a SXSW Eco staffer took the mic and dropped a bombshell: She alleged that the GMO seed/pesticide giant Monsanto had sponsored several earlier panels—paying the travel expenses of the participants—without disclosing it to the organizers.

The standing-room-only crowd—which had greeted our biotech-skeptical discussion warmly—erupted in guffaws and gasps. Soon after, Monsanto online-engagement specialist Janice Person bravely took the mic. The room took on the electric charge of a public confrontation in the mythical Old West: the accused party straining to calm a pitchfork-bearing mob. She assured the highly skeptical room that the company had no intention to mislead the organizers and just wanted to participate in the discussion. And thus our panel ended, in glorious chaos. Later, Person expanded her thoughts into this blog post and told me via email that “we regret if there was a misunderstanding,” and “it was certainly not something we tried to hide.”

But I, too, was surprised. While we were preparing our SXSW Eco panel, we had a participant drop out late in the process. I wanted to find a replacement who would cogently defend the industry—I like to be on panels with the frisson of controversy, the energy of open debate. If I had known the Eco conference would be chockfull of Monsanto people, I would have tried to snag one to join us on stage. But when I glanced over the program, the “Farming to Feed 9 Billion” certainly didn’t catch my eye. Moderated by Tim McDonald, former director of community at Huffington Post, it featured three farmers, none of whom listed any Monsanto affiliation.

In a later email, McDonald described for me how the panel came to be: “A friend of mine…who works for Monsanto asked me if I would be interested” in pitching an SXSW Eco panel, he wrote. “I told her if they would cover my travel and work on getting the panelists, I would be happy to organize and moderate the panel.”

As it happens, I attended that panel, which took place Monday. At the start, the moderator, McDonald, announced that Monsanto had paid for his and the other panelists travel expenses, but promised an open dialogue all the same. I somehow missed his saying that, but I did note on Twitter that several Monsanto-affiliated folks were enthusiastically live-tweeting the discussion, which I frankly found rather vague and diffuse. Apparently, McDonald’s disclosure from the stage was the first indication of Monsanto’s involvement that the conference’s organizers got. And judging from the SXSW Eco staffer’s announcement at our panel, they were none too pleased with the lack of transparency. (I’ve reached out to SXSW Eco for comment; I’ll update when I hear back.)

In the end, Monsanto’s SXSW Eco kerfuffle takes its place in the annals of awkward corporate PR maneuvers, alongside the company’s ill-starred attempt to pay experts to participate in an “an exciting video series” on the “topics of food, food chains and sustainability” as part of sponsored content for the publisher Condé Nast.

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How Monsanto Crashed SXSW—and Brought the Drama to My Panel

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The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

by ArnoldoCornell Posted on September 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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What can you tell about a restaurant from its menu? A lot more than what’s cooking. That’s what linguist Dan Jurafsky reveals in his new book, The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu.

Dan Jurafsky Photo by Kingmond Young

Jurafsky, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, looked at hundreds of examples of food language—from menus to marketing materials to restaurant reviews. Along the way, he uncovered some fascinating patterns. For example: In naming foods, he explains, marketers often appeal to the associations that we already have with certain sounds. Crackers and other crispy foods tend to have names with short, front-of-the-mouth vowels (Ritz, Cheez-Its, Triscuits) while rich and heavy foods have longer vowels that we form in the back of our mouth (Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge). He also describes the shared linguistic heritage of some of the most common food words. Take salad, sauce, slaw, and salsa: All come from the Latin word sal, meaning “salted.”

But it’s Jurafsky’s menu analysis that really stands out. Where most of us see simply a list of dishes, Jurafsky identifies subtle indicators of the image that a restaurant is trying to project—and which customers it wants to lure in. I asked Jurafsky to examine the menus of Taco Bell and its new upscale spinoff, US Taco Co., whose first location just opened in Southern California.

We started with Taco Bell’s breakfast menu. Of course, everyone knows that the Tex-Mex fast food chain isn’t exactly fine dining, but Jurafsky pointed to some hidden hallmarks of down-market eateries’ menus.

The first thing that Jurafsky noticed about Taco Bell’s menu was its size: There are dozens, if not hundreds of items. “The very, very fancy restaurants, many of them have no menu at all,” says Jurafsky. “The waiter tells you what you’re going to eat, kind of. If you want, they’ll email you a menu if you really want it.”

Next, Jurafsky picked up on descriptors. “So there’s all of those adjectives and participles,” he says. “Fluffy.” “Seasoned.” That’s one thing that’s common on cheaper restaurant menus—as if the restaurant feels the need to try and convince its diners of the quality of the food. A fancier restaurant, he explains, would take it as a given that the diner expects the eggs to be fluffy and the pico de gallo to be freshly prepared.

“Notice the word ‘flavorful,’” says Jurafsky. “The cheapest restaurants use these vague, positive adjectives. Delicious. Tasty. Scrumptious. Wonderful. Again, more expensive restaurants take all that as a given.”

“The description specifies ‘real cheddar cheese.’ Just like all the other adjectives, ‘real’ tells you that they think customers are assuming that the cheese is not real, so they have to tell you that it is.” Also, note that the word “jalapeño” is missing its tilde—the little squiggle over the “n” that signifies a “nye” pronunciation in Spanish words. Jurafsky isn’t sure whether the missing “ñ” is linguistically meaningful, but keep it in mind, because it will become important when we look at US Taco Co.’s menu.

The words “double portion” and “lots” are also typical on the menus of cheap restaurants,” says Jurafsky. “They want you to know you’re getting enough food for your money.”

Next, we turned to US Taco Co.:

“This is a hipster menu,” says Jurafsky. “This isn’t a linguistics thing, but there’s a Day of the Dead skull on top and the desserts are served in mason jars. I mean, how hipster can you get?”

Let’s take a closer look at some of the menu items:

“What the really upscale restaurants these days are doing is just listing their ingredients. They don’t say “and” or “with.” It’s just a list. They’re also using non-standard capitalization, everything lower case or everything upper case, for example. Here they’re making everything upper case. On the Taco Bell menu, they used standard capitalization.”

Also, in “Wanna Get Lei’d” there’s a reference to sex. Jurafsky explains that we often use sex metaphors to talk about fancy food, while for cheaper food, the metaphor of choice is often drugs. “The wings are addictive, or the chocolate must have crack,” he says. “There’s something about inexpensive foods that make us feel guilty. Talking about it in terms of drugs lets us put the responsibility on the food, not on ourselves.”

“There are more unusual Spanish words on this menu,” says Jurafsky. Taco Bell has “burrito” and “taco.” Everyone knows those. But “here we have ‘molcajete’ and ‘cotija.’ Every item has at least one Spanish word. And there’s the “ñ” in jalapeño! For Taco Bell, there might be tension between English and Spanish. In a hipster place, it’s okay to be authentic.”

Of course, says Jurafsky, language trends are always evolving. What we consider hipster menu language now is not the same as it was a few decades ago. In his book, Jurafsky notes that for most of the last century, trendy restaurants used French words to signify their status (think au jus, a la mode, and sur le plat). To the modern ear, these sound pretentious. Today’s fashionable restaurant menus have replaced French phrases with “carefully selected obscure food words and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables,” he writes. That is, “if they offer you a menu at all.”

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The Creepy Language Tricks Taco Bell Uses to Fool People Into Eating There

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IHOP Has Cut Back Its Menu By 30 Items

by Adolph7467 Posted on September 18, 2014

Mother Jones

Here’s an interesting factoid: in 2008 we apparently reached Peak Menu. That year, the average menu contained 99.7 items. Then the housing bubble burst, we entered the Great Recession, and menus began to shrink. Today’s menus feature a paltry 92.6 items.

Why is this? Cost is one reason: it’s cheaper to support a smaller menu. But Roberto Ferdman writes that there’s more to it:

The biggest impetus for all the menu shrinking going on is likely tied to a change in the country’s food culture: Americans are becoming a bit more refined in their tastes.

“Historically, the size of menus grew significantly because there wasn’t the food culture there is today,” said Maeve Webster, a senior director at Datassential. “People weren’t nearly as focused on the food, or willing to go out of their way to eat specific foods.”

For that reason, as well as the fact that there were fewer restaurants then, there used to be a greater incentive for restaurants to serve as many food options as possible. That way, a customer could would choose a particular restaurant because it was near or convenient, rather than for a specific food craving (which probably wasn’t all that outlandish anyway). But now, given the increasing demand for quality over quantity, a growing appetite for exotic foods and a willingness to seek out specialized cuisines, Americans are more likely to judge a restaurant if its offerings aren’t specific enough.

“The rise of food culture, where consumers are both interested and willing to go to a restaurant that has the best Banh Mi sandwich, or the best burger, or the best trendy item of the moment, means that operators can now create much more focused menus,” said Webster. “It also means that the larger the menu, the more consumers might worry all those things aren’t going to be all that good.”

Hmmm. Let me say, based on precisely no evidence, that I find this unlikely. Have American tastes really gotten more refined since 2008? Color me skeptical. And even if American palates are more discriminating, are we seriously suggesting that this has affected the menu length at IHOP, Tony Roma’s, and Olive Garden—the three examples cited in the article? I hope this isn’t just my inner elitist showing, but I don’t normally associate those fine establishments with a “growing appetite for exotic foods and a willingness to seek out specialized cuisines.”

So, anyway, put me down firmly in the cost-cutting camp. Long menus got too expensive to support, and when the Great Recession hit, casual dining chains needed to cut costs. They did this by lopping off dishes that were either expensive to prep or not very popular or both. Occam’s Razor, my friends, Occam’s Razor.

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IHOP Has Cut Back Its Menu By 30 Items

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Texas Official Is Freaking Out About School "Meatless Monday"

by AngelikWakelin Posted on September 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A top Texas official denounced school districts that have scaled back on serving meat one day a week, accusing them of succumbing to a “carefully orchestrated campaign” to force Americans to become vegetarians.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples last week criticized districts that have adopted “meatless Monday” policies in an op-ed in the Austin American-Statesman. He specifically attacked Dripping Springs Independent School District, near Austin.

“Restricting children’s meal choice to not include meat is irresponsible and has no place in our schools,” Staples wrote. “This activist movement called ‘Meatless Monday’ is a carefully orchestrated campaign that seeks to eliminate meat from Americans’ diets seven days a week—starting with Mondays.”

The Dripping Springs district adopted meatless Monday to encourage healthy eating that is environmentally conscious, a local CBS affiliate reported. Industrial meat production is resource-intensive and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions.

“Are we having a war on meat in Dripping Springs? Definitely not,” John Crowley, head of nutrition services for the school district, told the CBS affiliate. “We’re trying to think outside the box, and we serve a lot of Texas beef on our menus. We’ve had requests for more vegetarian options, and I thought, ‘Why don’t I give it a try and see how it’s received by kids?'”

Dripping Springs students are still allowed to bring meat lunches on Mondays. Last week, a district elementary school served options that included cheese pizza, black bean burritos, and vegetarian chili, reported KVUE-TV.

“In no way are kids going deficient in protein by not having actual meat, fish or poultry products served today,” Crowley told the station. “We hope that we’re meeting the parents’ and the kids’ needs and serving things that they like and things that are healthy.”

Staples, however, wrote that he sees meatless Mondays as a way for activists “to mandate their lifestyles on others.”

Staples, who has received more than $100,000 in campaign contributions from beef producers and ranchers over the past few years, has lashed out against meatless Mondays in the past, according to the Austin-American Statesman. Staples branded as “treasonous” a U.S. Department of Agriculture suggestion in 2012 that its employees go green by participating in meatless Monday.

Bryan Black, director of communications for the Texas Department of Agriculture, said campaign contributions are unrelated to Staples’ position on meat-eating.

“He’s focused on this issue because children need the freedom to eat meat,” Black told The Huffington Post. “I think it would be important to go back and look at all his contributions. He’s received millions of dollars from Texans across our state. In this last election he received more than $3 million, so to try to pinpoint that he’s doing this simply for farmers and ranchers who gave him money is untrue.”

School districts around the country have embraced meatless Monday in recent years. In 2009, a Baltimore district became the first in the country to adopt the initiative, according to Education Week. A district in Houston also participates.

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Texas Official Is Freaking Out About School "Meatless Monday"

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Quote of the Day: Salt Your Pasta Water, Capiche?

by AdolphClarkson Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Starboard Value LP, a private investment firm critical of Olive Garden’s current management:

If you Google “How to cook pasta”, the first step of Pasta 101 is to salt the water. How does the largest Italian dining concept in the world not salt the water for pasta?

Quite so. On the other hand, Starboard refers to Olive Garden as an “Italian dining concept,” which is a strike against them. So I guess I don’t know who to root for in this monumental battle for control of low-quality quasi-Italian food.

Continued here – 

Quote of the Day: Salt Your Pasta Water, Capiche?

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