[You vil eat the bugs peasant, you vil suffer and LIKE IT~cr]
Economic Chaos Is GOOD?!
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano: The New York Times seems bent on updating Gordon Gekko’s phrase from the 1987 film Wall Street: Chaos, for lack of a better word, is GOOD.
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Culture & lifestyle journalist Annaliese Griffin writing in the New York Times: “Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat…We could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.”
“Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change — yet…A 2021 study in Nature found that animal products produce greenhouse gases at twice the rate of foods from plants. We should be paying attention to every ton of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere — the same way shoppers are watching the cost of every addition to their grocery carts.” …
“Inflation resulting from the cost of fuel and feed, coupled with supply chain slowdowns, may make meat substitutes more affordable relative to traditional, factory-farmed meats. … Historically, cost has been a powerful force that has changed Americans’ diets.”
By: Marc Morano
the @nytimes forgot that dying of starvation also reduces your carbon footprint. https://t.co/V8qiKRkJOh
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 5, 2022
Culture & lifestyle journalist Annaliese Griffin writing in the New York Times:
Annaliese Griffin NYT Excerpt: If the current rate of food inflation holds and Americans don’t change their meat consumption habits, they will spend roughly $20 billion more on meat, poultry, fish and eggs over the next year than they did in 2020. … Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat. While hunger and food insecurity are a very real problem in the United States and globally, middle- and upper-class Americans still have more choices at the grocery store than perhaps any food shoppers in history. Climate change has motivated some to eat less resource-intensive meat and more vegetables, grains and legumes, but this movement has not reached the scale necessary to bring needed change — yet.
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A 2021 study in Nature found that animal products produce greenhouse gases at twice the rate of foods from plants. We should be paying attention to every ton of carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere — the same way shoppers are watching the cost of every addition to their grocery carts. …
One recent survey of 3,500 consumers found that while environmental concerns and animal rights would not persuade many shoppers to purchase meat substitutes more often, lower prices could.
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Inflation resulting from the cost of fuel and feed, coupled with supply chain slowdowns, may make meat substitutes more affordable relative to traditional, factory-farmed meats. … Historically, cost has been a powerful force that has changed Americans’ diets. Yes, people in most cultures tend to eat more meat as they grow richer. But tighter budgets have also driven reductions in meat consumption.
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In 1917, months after the country entered World War I, Congress passed the Lever Food and Fuel Control Act, which granted the government sweeping power over the food supply. Helen Zoe Veit, a professor of history at Michigan State University, quotes a contemporary critic who called it the “most radical” bill ever enacted by Congress in her book “Modern Food, Moral Food.” The Lever Act allowed the government to requisition food and prevent hoarding. It also created the Food Administration, headed by Herbert Hoover, more than a decade away from his presidency, who asked Americans to commit to one wheatless and one meatless meal each day, plus a wheatless Monday, a meatless Tuesday and a porkless Saturday (the pleasant alliteration of “Meatless Monday” evidently hadn’t occurred to him).
The Lever Act came at a time when the cost of living, including food prices, had risen significantly, by about a third from 1897 to 1916. Americans might have balked at Hoover’s top-down management — he was sometimes called the “food dictator” — but they were, by and large, swayed to join the cause, not least because they were already well versed in practicing the art of thrift when it came to food. Dr. Veit points to recipe books from the era that promoted egg-free cakes and meatless casseroles as a way to save money. There was “huge cultural buy-in to the idea that collectively, we could make small sacrifices — which is how people saw giving up meat — and we’d make the sacrifices in the name of a greater good and get something done,” Dr. Veit told me.
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There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles. Still, the answer isn’t either-or; it’s both-and. Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.
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Annaliese Griffin (@annalieseg) is a journalist who covers culture, lifestyle and health.
The mask has now fully slipped. These people do not care about the planet. What they want is for us to have less and be poorer.
Yep. That is what they have been after since forever. Power and control over the masses is the goal of all of the so-called environmental/climate change/etc. organizations. A means to an end is all the hyperbole is about. Nothing less.
The rabid believers in the various cults are nothing more than useless idiots. Who will be dealt with by the leaders should they attain their utopian fantasies. Research what happens to these folks via historical perspective of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, etc. Not pretty.
The scenes of the people of Shanghai being locked in their apartment buildings without food is what they want here. Our “elites” are morally depraved.
400 million guns and a healthy disrespect for authoritarianism say that’s not going to happen here.
Their words and actions say, “Eat shit and die already.”
There are faster ways ask Putin 🙂
LdB: And there are slower ways- vote democrat.
From John Dutton of the Yellowstone Ranch to an animal rights activist:
“You ever plow a field to plant the quinoa or sorghum or whatever the heck it is you eat. You kill everything on the ground and under it. You kill every snake, every frog, every mouse, mole, vole, worm, quail. “You kill them all. So, I guess the only real question is: how cute does an animal have to be before you care if it dies to feed you?”
Well, “organic farmers” tend to flood the land twice or three times a year as a form of “natural” pesticide. Same effect…
Does that mean that vegans and vegetarians kill more wildlife than us omnivores who let animals graze unploughed pastures?
I always considered Quorn the food of the devil
Quorne(corn) is one of the least healthy foods. Its biggest virtue is that it provides a large amount of starch to fill the appetite. Likely a diet heavy on corn will cause health problems. I mean, can you survive for quite awhile but it does not really nourish the body for full energy and health.
Authoritarian countries often use it and similar foods to keep large fraction of the population from rebelling.
Quorn is not corn. It is a fungus mixed with a binder.
I think Quinoa is of the devil because it is very bitter and requires too much work to process it into edible grain. This is why I feed it to the chickens.. they love it.
As you can see the existential nature of the argument about humans killing creatures growing food is the key to why the discussion is an absurd waste of time. The existential always boils down to, ‘ who is more righteous;’: the revolutionary who is propelling the grand historic dialectic, the animal rights vegan, the climate changing Vegan, the megalomaniacal guy who says he is liberating a democratic country, the gun toting radical libertarian anarchist, Bill Gates who is the financial father of radical environmentalism or Elon Musk the guy who makes ultra expensive electric cars and keeps promising the grand Telos of our age, THE NEXT GEN BATTERY? Why do we consume and interact with this none sense. Once you get into pissing match about who is more righteous you’ve lost. It’s time for all to take the bull by the horn and side step the craziness and get to work solving real problems at home, and in our local community. To side set this is giving all the power to the centralizers and controllers. And political action absolutely necessary, good and right…go for it..
I would not be able to have a productive garden on an acre of land without 4 working cats eating the mice, vole and rats. So because of the cats, when I till the land I am killing very few cute little mammals. Frogs and toads don’t stick around to be tilled. But the tilling and the garden provides and excellent habitat for toads. My garden is full of toad and frogs. The ground birds don’t tick around for tilling either but they love the garden. Finally, the snakes don’t stick around either. I have not killed a snake tilling land in 22 years. This cannot be said for all those people living in suburbia running lawn mowers over their lawns. When I did commercial farming I produced extensive tonnage of produce on one acre with a no negative impact on land or habitat. We loves animals and we love eating them and our produce.
This is the issue with radical animal rights, environmentalists, climate changers, Marxists, radical libertarian anarchists, Megalomaniacs, central planners etc. The focus is solely on the existential and true telos is lost. A matrix of false or minor theological issues becomes established as ultimate wasting human resources and disturbing the peace. They use the existential to lift themselves up over others leaving the masses with out a clear and truthful telos. The balance is out of whack and the lose of balance between the existential and teleological is dangerous. If everything is on a existential dialectical trajectory then the world is in a world of hurt….there will be no peace and real problems will not get solved on a macro level and people will lose sight f the individual solutions in themselves, their families and local communities.
‘Asking’. The progressive word for ‘compel’.
Or we could just put everybody in jail …
Perhaps the Covid lockdowns were practice for the upcoming climate lockdowns?
ROFL never thought of that
Studies show the dramatic brain development that took place over several million years would have been biologically impossible with a vegan, plant-based diet. It’s not surprising that continuing to eat high quality, pasture raised meat can enhance brain function throughout the course of your life.
Worse, Deficiencies in the micronutrients found in meat have been linked with brain-related disorders, including low IQ, autism, depression and dementia.
Even Worse, SOY is also now known to cause disorders in a significant portion of the population, Or, is that the aim of the push to a vegetarian diet.
One might suspect there is a biological component of diet related to susceptibility to propaganda. In any case, there sure is a great amount of fructose consumption which, at the very least, contributes to insulin resistance.
There is also increasing evidence that a diet high in soy depresses testosterone production in Men. This would explain the prevalence of effeminate men in the “Progressive” and Green movements.
I am a meat lover and have no use for all this silliness about resource management and prices of commodities in the context of climate change. Yet I think you are over stating the case against Veganism. I was raised vegan in the 1960’s. I don’t like veganism and don’t see it as morally, ethically or gastronomically superior to being an omnivore. Plant based diets are totally fine for humans but it requires the utmost care and is very expensive. The expense of it can be dealt with by buying soy beans in bulk and fermenting your own Tempeh and miso etc. Fermentation of Soy beans alleviates all of the health concerns of soy because it breaks down the dense protein in soy into it’s constituent amino acids. Furthermore. beans are wonderful food and when paired with grains provide the complete panel of amino acids. Micronutrients can be sourced in other ways other than meat or dairy products. Quinoa which I grow for my chickens is very high in complete protein. I actually hate eating it myself. While it is true that the micronutrients in meat are more bioavailable than in plant based food, this does not mean that plant based food through fermentation and other processes cannot make plant based micronutrients more available…as both meat and plants have the same by weight amount of micro-nutrients. So, to be a healthy vegan, you either need to be willing to spend a ton more money on your diet or be a bit of a mad scientist at home. I grew up helping my parents process soy beans and ferment them and press then into blocks of fermented tofu and tempeh. We fermented just about everything that came out of the garden. Lot’s of smelly stuff in the kitchen. My only motivation to grow soy beans now and ferment them would be to save money on my food bill so I could afford to buy more pasture raised pork, mutton and beef. Instead, I just help by taking venison off the hands of people who love to hunt but hate venison. My wife wants to raise sheep for fur and meat and rabbits for fur and meat but there are so many hours in a day.
Look at the World map of IQ by Country, AND World map of Natural death per capita by country, (that is harder to find with all of the covid BS thus, here is one link. https://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=26 Think about the diet of these countries. Think about what happens if The New Order outlaws meat, globally. The global banks are already preventing use of inexpensive energy in the poor countries in an effort to force Renewable Energy.
I did not see the IQ sort option, but I did look at the death rates the former soviet states were the worst… a testimony of the heritage of great evil of Maxism and it’s existential- dialectical focus. They moved their people off land and out of their gardens. The idea of the New Order outlawing meat is absurd. No one needs to outlaw meat if they can control markets and brain wash the people not to eat meat. The central planners are convinced that they with the deep machine learning AI can unfold whatever is needed to shape the masses into whatever they want them to be over time. There is no need for grand fiat and it’s counter reaction. Colonization of people has moved from the category of the legal-political to the psychic/behavioral/existential category. The greatest symptom or sign that meat is going away is when the masses no longer have access to land. And that the masses no longer have the will, knowledge or desire to produce food for themselves. The greatest silent revolution of the past 80 years is the grand migration from living on land producing food to urban/suburbanization. This trend has accelerated globally as people are disenfranchised of land by policy and regulation into hyper-consumeristic urban centers. This silent revolution is complex and their maybe no one bad guy to blame…blame it on the hypermodernity and the television and the rise of radical consumerism which has been and will continue to be the impetus of globalism. Hyper-consumerism requires consumers and worker who are completely dependent on they payroll system and the centralized markets they that are dependent of for life. It’s not too late. We still have a choice. Political action will likely not help us because of the constant existential harangue in the media. Only a thoughtful personal choice of lifestyle for oneself will make the difference. Having land and growing at least a little of our own food and partnering with others in your local community will be empowering.
Solzhenitsyn- To do evil, a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.
Self-righteous militant Greenie & vegan “do-gooders” are dangerous everyone cuz they
want to force their religious ideas & methods upon everyone else. This is historically true of
all groups who have done the same thing in the past. Self-deception is quite easy!
As for lifestyle choices, to each their own as long as they’re footing the bill & not violating
my rights. Having more types of beans & grains now greatly improved vegan nutrition.
BTW, I got to help clean out a bin with rotting soybeans. It smelled much, much worse than
manure- as bad as a rotting dead animal. It made me want to puke!
Hey Old Man Winter,
Now you know what my childhood was like fermenting soy beans with my vegan Hindu parents….early new agers and very effective radical animal right activists of the 1960’s in the D.C area. I was kicked out of the house at 17 after hunting squirrels and eating them joyfully. What was worse for my Mom where the Big Mac’s…the ultimate evil.
It seems that the discourse in American has moved away from solving real problems to who is more righteous? If you stir up a united people with questions about who is more righteous at every level….1) vegans, 2) Fish Vegetarian, 3) Omnivores, 4) Racist, 5) Woke, 6) Trumpery, 7) Open boarders, 8) Nazi, 9) Marxist, 10) radical environmentalist, 10) consumer, etc. then chaos ensues with unnecessary and nasty division. I worry that the religious nature of the existential question about who is more righteous is being leveraged as a smoke screen by the grand re-setters, the central planners…. by megalomaniacs to seek to disenfranchise us from any real problem solving.
A journalist who covers culture, lifestyle, and health no doubt has expertise in climate science, too. We’ll, at least as much expertise as most other climate commentators.
Poor Annaliese. Has she ever visited any slums? No of course not. Silly, ill educated, boring.
Mr. Lion: Slums?! My guess is she has never been to a suburb, she has no need to smell the unwashed middle class. She can tell people how to live from Manhattan or the Hamptons.
Climate Crusader Commies
‘To Drive Welcome Change for The Planet’
The change welcomed by the progressives that the NYT represents is the fall of the Western governments and from the smoldering ashes the formation of the One World Government / New World Order.
If anything is missing, it must be that we don’t celebrate LGBQT+ enough.
In the short term, it may seem like that.
For why not in the longer term, I do love the ‘Recycling’ example
We’re told recycle recycle recycle. Everyone to go scratching about on rubbish dumps and re-use what you find and – don’t throw things away.
Yesssss, BUT. it needed people somewhere in the system to be buying New Stuff and Throwing It Away – in order that there was/is anything on the rubbish dump to be recycled ##
The case of cars in Cuba is simply beautiful for the greenies and the NYT – old crates from the 40’s and 50’s still rolling around.
Yet there the greens are, endlessly making existing cars redundant with new strictures/regulations and now saying to bin them all and get a new electric
Just where do you start…
## It is why there is Global Greening©
Peasant farmers on the edge of expanding deserts have realised that A Better Life is to be had digging up landfill sites around big cities than is to be had digging dirt and eating corn on highly eroded soil.
And when they leave their farms, the invasive and inedible weeds move in and NASA sees Global Greening
While said national agency of squirrel spotters imagines that CO2 did it.
And are simultaneously horrified that folks should move 100’s miles to live on a rubbish dump.
Then the NYT tells us all that that’s what we should do.
Welcome to Planet Dumb
Bizarre, the little foot soldiers advocating all this propaganda to get rid of meat and such, they never think it will affect them directly, that they will be able to afford better. I want to be there when they are subject to the ramifications of their own policies and see how they like it.
How about an Op-Ed regarding starvation being good to fight America’s obesity epidemic?
What bubble do these people inhabit? They clearly don’t care about people.
This reminds me of Jimmah Cahtah’s sweater-wearing haranguing of the American public to do with less because our best days were behind us, and we had better learn our place.
Jimmah Cahtah of course got wiped out in the 1980 landslide election of Ronald Reagan. We Americans don’t appreciate it when those who claim to be our betters tell us to fuhgeddaboutit when it comes striving for a better life
Carter was never this bad. I believe he cared about people, he was just unable to see how to do things differently.
Carter was not an effective president and I was happy to vote for Reagan in 1980. Carter kept moving further left as the years went by.
He literally said what I said he said. In a “fireside chat” directed to the American people. He told us Americans we had to accept too-high energy prices, and turn down the thermostat, wear a sweater like him, and bear our suffering accordingly.
Carter also acted it out in his policies. He was the most feckless President in history. The American people had had more than enough of his fecklessness and preaching to do with less when November 1980 came around.
Still better than FJB.
I meant to say Carter was never as bad as the NYT editorial writer. Duane’s comment is spot-on.
I meant to say Carter was never as bad as the NYT editorial writer. Duane’s comment is spot-on.
OK, that’s better
Right out of the Gates/WEF playbook. He wants to force us to eat patented fake meat along with shots that dysregulate our innate immune systems. He’s expanding his monopolistic influence into eugenics.
So much taking for granted with this journalist, I say add some leeches and see how she feels in an hour, maybe she might smile a bit after her levels begin to drop. She needs a daily dose of Watts to bring her back to where the truth lives. If you want to live a certain way go ahead but stop trying to make us join you on this depopulation quest to save the planet
Nothing quite as religious as a reformed drunk.
The only quick way to change a habit is price/tax it out of reach.
Next up is the end of cheap[ish] flights.
end of cheap(ish) flights
Isn’t going to happen soon. You’ve no doubt seen the chaos at UK airports over the last week when a combination of airline’s and airport’s inability to recruit staff lost during the pandemic, when they were effectively shut down, led to the cancellation of hundreds of flights and thousands of people unable to go on their holidays.
No politician is going to want a repeat of that laid at their front door
(except perhaps if their was another pandemic 🙂 )
Good thing that they all stayed home and enjoyed the Platinum Jubilee.
Inflation as a tool of our Socialists government in a nutshell. High gas prices to force people toward electric cars which most people cannot afford and our weak electric grids would not be able to sustain, putting millions in the cattle , poultry, and hog businesses out of business all in the name of the unsustainable and highly dangerous Green New Deal.
If you get “forced” into an electric car just join the folks who have bought multi-kilowatt portable generators. Not quite as convenient or cheap as a powerline hookup, but more fun.
But but but Philo. The generators run on gasoline. C’mon man! CLIMATE CHANGE!!
Doesn’t matter what they run on. The little people will be banned from obtaining or using them.
Ah, good ‘ol Step 6:
1) there is no threat of inflation due to the government borrowing then “spending” a trillion dollars
2) there is no inflation, like we said
3) there is <i>some </i>inflation, but not everywhere, and its not bad, so point 1 stands, please ignore point 2
4) there is some inflation in some <i>minor </i>areas such as fuel, housing and food, but its manageable
5) its only for a short time, just like two weeks to flatten the COVID curve, remember then?
6) inflation is actually good, Stephen Colbert says so, and who would know better than a celebrity millionaire?
7) the government has a plan for inflation if it ever really becomes a for real problem for real people
8) you’ll <b>love </b>wage and price controls…
9) its corporate greed that somehow didn’t exist two years ago, just started overnight
10) did we mention the inflation that <u>isn’t </u>happening, but would be <b>great</b>, is Putin’s fault?
11) overturning Roe will damage the economy
Inflation good, recession better, full-blown 30’s-style depression best. Hey, I know, how about a Make People Poor Again (MPPA) campaign? That’s the ticket!
GAWD, here we go again.
Another one of our moral and intellectual superiors so fast to tell us we need to be poor and to be happy eating bugs. It just seems like they cannot help themselves.
This has been said before and can be said again:
If the elites really believed any of this “Climate Change” rot, they would be part of a full-throated roar for (gasp!) nuclear energy. wake me up when that happens.
The mega-yachts for the elites:
Often 300 feet or even longer. Any idea how big that really is? Think, the length of a football field, goal line to goal line. As long as a 100 yd. rifle range. Never a word is said about those monstrosities. But you are supposed to eat bugs and like it.
A little vocabulary lesson, today.
Annaliese is a “spitter”. That’s someone who believes they are the Smartest Person In The Room (SPITR) pronounced ‘spitter’.
I’ve come to learn that I’m a reasonably bright fellow, but the smartest person in the room depends on the room. I’m usually in the wrong room.
For example, out on a farm, the smartest would be the farmer who knows how to use the land to feed the family and have some extra to sell. Far too many with multiple degrees, IQs in the stratosphere, and even some of that rare common sense would be the smartest person in the room, but not really. They are nowhere near as smart as that farmer in that room at that time.
That’s not to say that a smart person can’t learn to farm, just that they shouldn’t be running farms until they get up to speed and show they can do it. Who’s the smartest person in the room when it comes to farm policy? Not some wonk from a college economics department, but the farmers in the room.
Many others here have pointed out before that just because you are smart and capable in one area, that doesn’t qualify you in all areas.
But we get people like Annaliese, who appear to me to think that, because they are smart (or like the scarecrow in Oz, have a piece of paper so they must be smart) their thoughts and opinions must be right. And there you have another spitter.
With luck, a spitter may just be a boor. Unfortunately, far too many spitters think that plainly, absolutely, everyone must do what they say because they are the SPITR.
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For the record:
a) I come here to WUWT precisely because I am most certainly not the smartest person in the room. Depending on the topic, the smartest in the room for that topic is usually apparent and we are lucky to have two or three or more, regardless of topic. I have all respect for our really smart ones that weigh in.
2) I use SPITR or ‘spitter’ for those who have the annoying and dangerous idea that everyone must do as they say, by force if necessary, just because they believe they are the SPITR.
Yes, Justin Trousseau is often described as “dangerous” because he’s an idiot who thinks he’s a genius.
(ps H.R. – at first I thought your comment was going to be about “SPLITTERS!”, you know – the PFJ or the PJF or the JPF 🙂 )
Oh, Justin is definitely a spitter with a healthy dose of Dunning-Kruger, all wrapped up with an enormous narcissistic bow.
How could he be abything else – no education of substance, no experience, no challenges in his life other than how to apply blackface and how to cry on camera.
“The Room” is always smarter than the SPITR.
“Far too many with multiple degrees. . .”, very good, but the technical terminology is “more degrees than a thermometer”.
HR,
Good comments.
to add to them, there are many demonstrations from life that show we are not all smartest. Example, I wanted to play the piano, but could not master the hand movements. Wanted to be a good golfer, could not play good drives, lacked innate coordination. Happily, many other things to do.
After mixing wth thousands of scientists, I formed a view that some had innate capability to do well, while others who tried very hard did not master the science at all adequately.
No reason this innate capability factor does not apply to journalism. Geoff S
It’s hard to know what is the most appropriate quote, “let them eat cake” or “you will eat nothing and you will be happy”
Everywhere are central planners pulling reset strings to control the choices of the masses using whatever tools that have at their disposal. What happened to our vote and and the influence of our dollars? The blame shift is always on the consumer while leveraged markets and collusion are lining pockets to the point where funding this sort of propaganda is more than an affordable smokescreen. All this means, is that more people need to produce at least some of their own food because the the global market place is neither free nor fair.
Until the past 10 years or so, when one commodity went too high in price, one could shift their choices to lessor trendy and in demand commodities and still have a completely well balanced and enjoyable diet. When every on was drinking fancy Vodka, I drank wonderful and cheap Australian Tawny port. When everyone was smoking expensive cigars I was smoking three Nuns Pipe tobacco. When steak was high, I ate more beans and center cut chuck roast braised in home made raspberry wine. When eggs and butter were high, I ate more buckwheat groats, corn grits and rolled oats. But now everything is high. Check the price of eggs, grains, pinto beans, basmati rice lately. Even kippered Herring is high. How is it possible for everything to be so high at the same time and so suddenly….and globally? Supply chain non-sense. Who is hoarding the commodities? Cartel hoarding instigates much misinformation and blame shifting but ultimately, it crumbles….evening with AI and deep machine learning modeling.. people adapt in surprising ways. In 1974 the misinformation was that the earth’s oil supply was running out! Twenty two years later gasoline at the pump was cheaper than it was in 1972 in inflation adjusted dollars. The greatest predictor of oil price is who is president and the status of the balance between our relationship with Saudi Arabia and Iran; not supply and demand.
There is one simple way for all these commodities to rise in price together – make a critical input that is common to all more expensive. In the current scenario that input is energy. As energy costs go through the roof every commodity that requires energy (which is all) will become more expensive. A similar effect could happen if there was a shock to the labour market that raised labour costs.
Thanks, Andy, make sense that prices of oil at least explains the sudden recent uptick in food prices across the board as we have seen in the past several months. The inflation of food prices is startling and noteworthy because everyone is feeling the pain now. Yet even before the pandemic prices of dried beans and oats have risen sharply since 2008 until 2016. and began to rise again sharply months before the pandemic was announced. The price of oats has gone up a factor of 4 between 2008 and 2014. What used to be the cheap food alternatives to price surges in meat, have seen massive inflation over the past 25 years.
Respectfully, you missed one. Devalue the currency via inflation by increasing the money supply (i.e. government printing and distributing more money). You don’t impact just one critical input but, instead, ALL inputs.
The original point was, since raising meat is a resource (commodities) intensive enterprise, resources have become scare and will become scarcer, then people should transition to a plant based diet. My counter point is this: meat alternative commodities have experienced greater inflation than meat over the past 20 years. I believe as many do in this post that meat is at least equivalent in value to it’s alternative in part due to that massive inflation those alternative have seen in the past 20 years and the intrinsically high nutritional value of meat.
But more importantly are the false presuppositions of the call to a plant based diet.
Ok let’s round out all the factors for food inflation, shortage on one foundational input (oil) due to political conflict and war, Sudden extreme surges of the supply of money into the economy, reducing he value of the currency, Sharp reduction in worker productivity, Centrally controlled commodities markets vs local markets. Market leverage, hoarding, collusion and the effort to cartel food commodities, (China/Russia).
This is stuff that promotes conspiracy theories. Gates and other elites are slowly buying up farmland. Why? Food processing plants are burning down at an alarming rate. Why? Now we’re being told we eat the wrong kind and too much food. And they wonder why we want to keep our guns.
It’s time for people to save their money to buy land. If you can afford to buy it, borrow it. Partner with the land owner. Don’t waste it on guns. As we have seen is the rise of big tech. The real power is in dependency not guns. Dependency has it’s goal in the colonization of people one at a time into a central market place, activities, distraction, loss of skill and knowledge, centralization of good and services… information and a loss of a sense of internal and external control…. a loss of seeing a big picture and coming up with big solutions for oneself. The way to limit the colonizing power of the central planners, is to find ways to be less dependent on the them. It’s time to build knowledge, skill and know how in growing some of your own food or grazing animals. Food and land coops work on a wide scale from nano to macro. Meat rabbits are awesome in the garage if you can grow most of their forage…. or have land to forage them. Just growing your own lettuce will feel empowering. Also leveraging local markets rather than Amazon….. Church clothing giveaways, flea markets, yard sale, Trash picking, trading, borrowing…partnering. For years I traded loads of beautiful Fortex String beans and Spanish Roja garlic and Rutabagas for awesome free range chicken and rabbit. Our road side stand every year paid for USDA prime Rib roasts at Christmas, and a freezer full of local grass fed beef from cattleman in our church. The resource of human desire, will, know how, hard work growing produce, saving seed, producing fertilizer from raising Chickens and hillside grass. I know that local farm markets are a gentry activity due to the tiny aspect of the market….but it could rapidly expand quickly and the supply chain would feel the pain.
Contempt for the hoi polloi is a requirement at the New York Times.