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237 comments on DrumBeat: April 3, 2008
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237 comments on DrumBeat: April 3, 2008
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Food & energy boys and girls. . . food & energy
The first paragraph of this article is priceless--basically a perfect description of the Export Land Model (ELM), except that it applies to food: FELM.
IMO, we are headed at hyperspeed to an emerging bilateral trade system where food exporters trade with energy exporters. Not a good time to be both a net food importer and a net energy importer, or for that matter, a net food consumer and a net energy consumer. Have I mentioned ELP in the last 30 minutes?
Rice Jumps to Record, Corn Near High as Demand Outpaces Supply
2008-04-03 07:31 (New York)
By Glenys Sim
You beat me on that one ;-). Note the 33 countries in danger of unrest and the potential problems of midwest flooding delaying planting - what happens if we have another flood year, like 1993?
Sharon
If you have a link, you might post it. I don't get links from my Wall Street source. BTW, I don't know if you saw the following article about a CSA operation just outside Dallas:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN...
Also, I quoted you at a Casey Research symposium. I described the Brother In Law On the Couch (BOC) Syndrome, as potentially "The most serious problem we face." I described BOC as an excellent reason to own a small organic garden/farm. You can put the in-laws and unemployed college graduates to work on the farm when they move in with you.
Here you go, found the article on http://news.google.com , entering "rice jumps" in the search field
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=acnqou1542Qs&refer=home
The article cites a 3% annual increase in grain demand, and an expected 3.5% decrease in rice exports. Why does this scenario seem so familiar?
Actually both observations come from the article you posted that I was going to - they are quoted in your link ;-).
I'm currently writing an article about the Land Export Food Model, so the quoting will be mutual ;-).
Sharon
Here's a link to that story:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aBeY9Sy_lkBA
The way the Corp of Engineers has mismanaged the Mississippi floodplain the past century, massive floods are inevitable. Mark Twain himself warned about how stupid it is to try to "control" the mighty Mississip. What needs to be done is to rip the levees out & let the big ole river act like a river's supposed to. Farm the flood plain but don't live there. If people are stupid enuf to "develop" the floodplain, they shouldn't expect any taxpayer funded bailout when the river whacks them for their stupidity. Furthermore, the same mismanagement that has ruined the Mississippi floodplain has also ruined the delta buffer zone that once protected NOLA from hurricanes. Anyone dumb enuf to live in NOLA following Katrina deserves what they get when a cat 5 or 6 makes a direct hit one of these years.
The point is that if that section of the country faces flooding and therefore and inability to produce substantial amounts of crops, everyone in the US suffers, and therefore everyone in the world suffers (as food supply drops and therefore food prices skyrocket). It's not a case of "Us vs. Them," or "thats what you get for living there," its a case of, "we all need that area to grow our food."
Allowing the river to periodically inundate its floodplain would renew the fertility of the alluvial soils. This would increase agricultural productivity in the North American Midwest, while reducing the amount of artificial fertilizer required. It would also allow the Mississippi to renew its delta, protecting the Gulf coastal plain from storm surges during hurricanes. Channelizing the Mississip only allows the precious topsoil that erodes due to agroindustrial stupidity to reach deep water. Eroded topsoil should be redeposited over the floodplain and in the delta, where it would do some good.
Oh don't get me wrong, restoring the natural flooding cycle of the floodplain would be hugely beneficial to long term crop production from the area.
What the thread has been referring to is a summer where flooding ruins crop production for that year and how devastating that would be to our food supplies. It only takes 1 winter for people without food to starve.
Okay, gotcha. But even in '93 farmers managed to grow a crop on the floodplain. Taking out the levees & allowing snowmelt to renew the floodplain might preclude winter wheat and delay working the fields some years, but it wouldn't eliminate an entire growing season's crop. The occasional short-term detriment to agriculture would be enormously offset by the long-term benefit.
Your ignorance of hydrology, economics, culture, public law and value is astounding !
For he knew the price of everything and the value of nothing
Alan
A rise in food prices is a good thing because it will curb the obesity epidemic. We should use more corn and sugar for ethanol so food prices rise and people eat less.
An even better idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Poor people are more prone to obesity than well-off people. Obesity has very little to do with how much you eat and very much to do with what you eat. Rising food prices effectively makes people poorer, which is far more likely to lead to an increase in obesity than a decrease, except of course for those who actually starve.
This is not exactly true. While it is true that the poor who eat a lot of cheap fatty foods have a tendency to be obese it is absolutely not true that obesity has little to do with how much you eat. The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa. And you don't necessarily need to be starving not to be obese. Just burning slightly more calories every day than you consume will make you skinny. I grew up in poor rural Alabama. I knew a few really poor people who were obese but far, far more who were not obese. And our diet consisted mostly of cornbread, beans and taters with a little meat on Sunday.
Ron Patterson
This is simply untrue. Go ask the Inuit or the Masai who eat native diets. Or ask the Pima Indians once they went off a natural diet and started to eat the white man's food.
It is refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, that causes obesity.
Obesity is a disease of civilization. What is unique to civilized diets is refined carbohydrates, especially with excessive amounts of sugar. Many populations eat extraordinarily high concentrations of fat in their diet (the Inuit and Masai, for example), and obesity is virutally unknown among, until they change their diet to eat the food brought by "civilized" people.
People have been peddling the "fat makes you obese" snake oil for decades, and all it has done is to make Americans eat more carbohydrates and get fatter and fatter.
Doubly untrue! Obesity is caused by consuming more calories than you burn. Yes, it is that simple. Your body burns carbohydrates. They are oxidized in your blood and expelled via the lungs. You breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide and water vapor. Some of the water is expelled via the kidneys. The carbon in carbohydrates becomes carbon dioxide and the hydrogen in carbohydrates becomes water.
When you consume more calories than you burn your body stores them in the form of fat for later use. It doesn't matter whether those calories comes from Granola bars or seal blubber you will still get fat. A calorie is a unit of energy and must either be burned or stored. (Sometimes calories are excreted without either being burned of stored but that is another story.)
The so called "fat gene" that a lot of people have is a Darwinian adaptation. They are able to store fat in times of plenty and burn them in leaner times. But when most all times are times of plenty, they simply get obese. This is why many Native Americans, especially those that lived in the desert climes of the Southwest, have a strong tendency to become obese. They had a lot of very lean times in their past and only those who were able to store a lot of fat were the only ones who survived.
(Actually there is no such thing as a fat gene, it is a combination of several genes, but that is a thread for another day.)
Ron Patterson
In his book 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' Gary Taubes thoroughly refutes virtually every claim you make here. He does a comprehensive review and analysis of nutritional research since the late 19th century and finds that the current conventional wisdom of what constitutes a healthy diet is simply wrong. Also wrong are our notions about obesity and what causes it (for example, puncturing the 'thrifty gene' hypothesis).
Read the book. Learn something.
At a certain basic level, the "calories are calories, input>output = weight gain" argument is certainly true. However, it appears to be quite likely that something more complex than that is going on.
What causes people to eat what they do? What causes them to feel full and quit eating - or to keep on eating when they should have already eaten enough to feel full? What causes people to favor and eat more of some types of foods than others. Do some foods cause people to feel more energetic and to become more active, while others cause people to feel and act lethargic? Does the body metabolize all Kcals equally fast, or do the Kcals from some types of foods get metabolized faster than others? Does the combination of foods eaten make a difference?
These are all interesting questions, and I'm not at all sure that we've got the final answers for them yet. However, I suspect that they do touch upon what is really going on with the food consumption & weight gain issue.
Get real:
Carbs: 4 Kcal g^-1
Proteins: 4 Kcal g^-1
Ethanol: 7 Kcal g^-1
Lipids: 9 Kcal g^-1
You didn't buy into that Atkins nonsense, did you? He's dead you know.
He's probably right, see my comments below.
And by the way, Atkins died of a head injury, completely unrelated to his dietary habits.
Phineas Gage, MD
9 > 4 QED
And dead is dead.
It's looking more and more like Atkins was right. I'm with ET. Read Good Calories, Bad Calories. It's an amazing book.
I call the ideal diet "meat and leaves" which these days means you have to be either quite wealthy, or living so far out in the boonies/bush/bayou that you're gathering and catching your own food.
The "Paleolithic" diet is a good example, except a lot of Paleo enthusiasts go overboard and think it means all-raw and extremes like that.
9 is greater than 4. but when you eat 4 it stimulates your appetite and you eat even more. when you eat the 9 you feel sated and will in the end eat less. I you are so certain, how about citing some scientific studies to back up your position as I have done below. I can provide references to hundreds of other research articles from medical journals, dietetician journals and basic science journals.
Phineas Gage, MD
A small amount of fat will satisfy your hunger, so eating fat may actually make you consume fewer calories. Eating carbohydrates, especially sugar, generates a surge in insulin production, which then lowers your blood sugar and makes you hungry again. So eating sweets can actually result in "binge eating", in an effort to get your blood sugar back up and keep it there. (Low blood sugar produces hunger).
I grew up in poor rural Alabama. I knew a few really poor people who were obese but far, far more who were not obese.
Ron, when I was recently in India, I certainly didn't see too many fat people - and saw a heck of a lot of people. Many of them were bone-thin.
That's the difference between first-world poor and third-world poor. If the people you saw were averaging $1 a day in current $, then they were making the equivalent of about a dime per day in Depression $. That just wasn't enough to survive back then. To help nail down the difference, can anyone recall what the original national minimum wage was?
Sorry, my math was off; it was 5 cents per day in Depression $.
I grew up when and where there was a mix of first-world poor and third-world, or Depression, type poor. We were the 2nd type. But we had neighbors and friends who were poor but not nearly as poor as us, still considered poor though, who could afford enough food to get quite fat.
In general though in the 1970s there were just not as many fat people as now, and a degree of thinness I considered "normal" in myself, looking at old photos now, looks medically malnourished.
The more fatty foods you eat the more obese you become and vise versa.
Hi Ron. I see a lot of new research suggesting processed carbohydrates may be the biggest culprit in the poor/obese problem...in the US. I don't see many fat poor people we I travel abroad.
My battle is with local cuisine.
Last night lightly fried calamari (best calamari I have ever had !) followed by roast ducks in plum sauce and pumpkin seeds :-)
Superb !
Best Hopes for BMI < 27
Alan
I did walk 7 blocks to restaurant, friend took streetcar.
Thank You! Why do discussions of obesity always devolve into a shouting match over eating, with no one discussing the lack of exercise? I have no reason to believe that food prices are going to reduce obesity problems, but if people have to get off their butts and walk/bike again for all or part of their transportation, I predict obesity problems will go away.
Taubes found there wasn't much evidence that exercise helped with obesity. There may be other good reasons to exercise, of course.
Such as the beauty of the walk. I went up on Prytania and came back on St. Charles.
The last of the azalea blooms are left, but others are flowering.
Best Hopes for Daily Beauty in One's Life,
Alan
More Photos at
http://www.asergeev.com/pictures/archives/compress/2005/441/06.htm
Of course, Taubes is a very good journalist - not a researcher, so "found" may not be the best word to use. His "favorite" study, as he indicates in the New York Magazine article he wrote based on his book, found that at least for non-athletic men being trained for running a marathon, the men did indeed lose body fat, though there was no body composition change for the women. I assume that study didn't look at overweight people, or he would have indicated that.
I'll have to read his book at some point to see if he makes more of a case there. Between this article and his article in Science, he seems to conclude that the problem is carbohydrates.
I think "found" is a pretty good word to use. He may not have done the research, but he looked at it with fresh eyes, and saw things that would be obvious to anyone - if not for "confirmation bias."
The example he starts the book with is of William Banting, who did try exercise to lose weight, but found that his appetite increased to make up for the calories expended.
And you see professional athletes struggling with their weight all the time. You'd think if exercise was the solution, a pro athlete wouldn't have to worry about weight.
What about the Danish study that he points out and that I mentioned above?
Many professional athletes are required as part of their sport to maintain unusually low body fat for performance reasons. Professional cyclists maintain low body fat levels because body fat is extra weight that slows you down with no benefit. Same for swimmers and runners. In sports where body fat is not an issue, like sumo wrestling, they don't worry about it.
Also,
at Eurekalert.org.
Are you sure Taubes hasn't cherry-picked a little to make his case?
Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know. His interest is not in nutrition per se, but in science, and how it goes wrong. When it comes to human health, it's very difficult to do the kind of scientific studies needed to tease apart correlation and causation. Studies are often contradictory, and even scientists who should know better end up just ignoring the ones that don't support the results they expect to get.
For example, in the study you quote...isn't it possible that cause and effect are reversed? Maybe overweight children are more likely to be sedentary, rather than lack of exercise causing them to be overweight.
Similarly, studies have shown that people who have lost a lot of weight are more likely to keep it off if they exercise...but it's possible that exercising regularly is linked with more dedication to maintaining the weight loss, rather than being beneficial in and of itself.
""Actually, the main argument Taubes makes is that we just don't know.""
Actually, we do know, but don't want to.
Take hominids that evolved to live on whatever it scrounged from an African savanna, let it live with an uncertain food supply and many other dangers, allow it to breed freely to ensure that its poplation reaches carrying capacity quickly, as geologic time goes. Then, due to its 'intelligence,' it will eventually figure out a way to store information outside of its brain. Hominid-developed cultures can grow at exponential rates.
Some of these cultures allow members of a hominid species to eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Genetically controlled desires plus nutritional ignorance is a guarantee that 'bad' choices will be made. Throw in a sound and light box that entertains so well that the average TV viewer is burning as many calories awake or asleep for hours each day (Sitting and doing nothing burns more calories). Add a concentrated energy source or two that is easily harvested, so machines can do most of the work.
That is one massive gorilla to overlook.
I don't think it's as simple as that.
Obesity among Americans exploded in the '80s...right about when eating less fat and more carbs became conventional wisdom. There was no corresponding drop in activity levels. TV had been invented decades before. While there were some bells and whistles added - Atari, cable, more use of remote controls - it wasn't nearly of the magnitude to explain the increase in obesity. Activity levels had been dropping slowly for decades, and continued to do so at a gradual rate. Obesity increased far out of proportion to that drop.
Say, the Hawaii library system has the Taubes book.... and I was able to order it with a few clicks to be shipped to my branch and held for me at no cost. One of the real guilty pleasures of this complex society. Oahu may soon be reduced to cannibalism (good calories?), but the online book-reserving system is darn good still.
I've come to have a high regard for your BS-detecting ability across multiple disciplines, L. Thanks for the book review.
Yes, the book has been out long enough that it should be readily available through libraries.
It really is thought-provoking. I was frankly astonished to find out how little real evidence there is for the current dietary recommendations.
And it seems that every day, there's more evidence that Taubes is right: there's something we're not getting about diet, fat, and heart disease. For example, this recent study that showed two popular cholesterol-lowering drubs, Vytorin and Zetia, don't work. They lowered the three risk factors they were supposed to: LDL, triglycerides and inflammation. But they did not improve heart disease. That says to me that there's something fundamental that we're missing.
Taubes points out that the evidence for lowering cholesterol is very poor. Studies have shown that it doesn't help when it comes to heart disease, and it seems to actually increase your risk of cancer. Statins do seem to be beneficial, but it's looking more and more like it's for other reasons than cholesterol.
Hi Alan,
The menu sounds great, particularly the duck in plum sauce.
About BMI, I found myself hitting 24 and thinking "No way", so in five weeks came down to under 22.5 and staying there.
As Leanan mentions down thread, it certainly feels like eating less is good for you.
We will probably all come down in the years to come, but the feeling of lean lightness is worth the effort now.
Any takers ?
Ciao,
FB
Roast ducks in plum sauce and pumpkin seeds!
You're killin' me Alan!
Bryant, of course you are correct. I should have said "The more food you eat the more obese you become and vise versa." It is total caloric intake that makes the difference, and whether you burn those calories of store them. It doesn't matter whether the calories are from fat or lean.
Ron Patterson
It's definitely true that a strict accounting of calories consumed versus calories burned will fully explain obesity. However, what types of food people consume does seem to have a powerful indirect effect by influencing metabolism and appetite. I think most of us have noticed that if we eat 500 calories of pop-tarts at 7 a.m., we feel starving again by 10 a.m., whereas if we consume 500 calories of bacon and eggs we don't feel hungry again for much longer. The reason for this is an active area of research. The Adkins diet people contended that sugar stimulate insulin and insulin somehow paradoxically stimulates appetite creating a feed-forward loop of sugar consumption -->increased appetite --> more sugar consumption... Certainly when diabetics are started on injected insulin, they almost always gain more weight. But insulin is probably not directly to blame. It seems that other factors are also released when carbohydrates are consumed and (at least in regards to appetite) insulin levels are a confounding variable.
Here are a few articles about this:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-01/jdc-jsu012507.php
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15767618
Phineas Gage, MD
Should've been 'nuff said. But nope, on this board 4 > 9 & the 2nd Law can be discounted in EROEI analysis cuz the "sun's free."
The 9 > 4 argument is a big reason for the low-fat diet recommendation. There was no proof it actually worked; it just "seemed to make sense."
And no one is saying 4 > 9. If diet is strictly controlled (if you're in a mental institution, say, or are so poor you can't afford much food), it doesn't matter what kind of calories you eat. A calorie is a calorie.
But if you're not - and most of us are not - then the kind of calories you eat can make a big difference.
Yes, 9 > 4. But it's carbs that cause overeating. People eat a whole bag of potato chips, or a whole carton of ice cream, or mountains of pasta. You rarely hear about someone eating a dozen boiled eggs at a sitting. Eggs are very high in protein and fat, and don't stimulate your appetite like sugar does. It's hard to eat more than a few. Not so with simple carbs like white rice, pasta, bread, candy, etc.
Hello Ron,
You say "It is total caloric intake that makes the difference"
Does it mean I can survive on e.g. .5kg sugar per day?
That would greatly simplify my diet:)
nothing but Pepsi and happy meals
Heaven
And three squares for about $11
Troll and Phineas, of course we need a lot more than calories to survive. Vitamins and minerals are a necessity, along with water, fiber and a host of other things. That was never the point. The point was, and is, a calorie is a unit of energy and unless that calorie is burned it will be stored by the body as fat. Obesity is simply stored unburnt calories. That is the point. That is the only point I was making!
And yes Troll, it is total caloric intake above what is burned by the body that causes obesity. Being poor does not cause obesity. Eating too many calories and spending too little of those calories causes obesity. That takes care of the "exercise" question that has been pointed out.
Ron Patterson
Hello Ron,
Your line "It is total caloric intake that makes the difference" sounds simplistic even when applied to much simpler notion of internal combustion engine.
When applied to human being, it brings to memory an anecdote about a physicist which says "Assume a spherical cow in a vacuum ...".
I assert that origination of those calories also makes a difference.
It would simplify your diet in another way. You would not need to do it for too long :) A rather horrible death would await you.
Ron is right. he is not talking about how healthy your diet is. For whatever reason (carbohydrates making you hungry quickly, etc.), if you consume more calories than you need, you will put on weight. Mere hunger does not cause obesity. Consumption of calories does. BTW. you can be thin and still be very unhealthy. India has 35 million diabetics.
As a person who is 38 years old, 1.80m tall and 64 kg (142 lbs), I can share with you how to stay lean (I have put on 8 kgs since I left high school)
a. Eat wholemeal (unrefined stuff) as much as possible
b. Eat lots of veggies, they provide bulk and fill your stomach
c. Eat fruit rather than drink fruit juice. Juices enter the blood stream quickly.
d. Walk wherever possible. Exercise 30mins a day.
e. Eat 5-6 small meals a day rather than 3 big ones. Smaller lot sizes help any inventory situation.
If you eat 100 calories more than you need every day (5-6 teaspoons of sugar), you would have put on 4 kgs a year (9 lbs). Do that for 3 years and you will see a visible difference. It is a quasistatic process and unless you weigh yourself every month, you can suddenly find yourself out of control (it happened to me in 2005 when I put on 12 kgs and I got most of it off by following what I recommended).
Srivathsa
Just a related observation from yesterday. I ran to the store real quick for lunch to grab an apple to go with some things I brought from home. I paid a $1.50 for an organic apple at Whole Foods. I could just as easily have gone to McDonalds and got two apple pies for .99 cents. The healthy apple was 50% more expensive for far less calories.
And whether Atkins was right or not, there is no way that anybody but a few rich bastards will be eating mostly-meat post peak. With overpopulaton and scarce energy we'll be hard put to feed everybody enough rice and beans to survive. If obesity is still a problem then (I doubt it, given that people will need to walk, and work physically harder) then the challenge is to figure out how to avoid obesity while still eating low on the food chain, not how we theoretically could have subsisted on pure meat.
There's increasing evidence that caloric restriction is good for you. Indeed, Taubes points to that effect as a possible explanation for why low-fat diets (in some places) appeared to be healthy. In Asia, while the studies were done, many people were chronically undernourished. The healthy thing was not eating much, not eating lots of carbs. There was correlation, since poor people don't eat a lot of meat or fat, but not causation.
It's still really early, especially as it applies to humans, but one of the theories about why caloric restriction prolongs life is that our bodies are making a choice between cell repair and reproduction. If we are well-fed, it seems like a good time to reproduce. We let cell repair go, and pour our energy into the hormones, etc., that allow reproduction. If we are underfed, it seems like a poor time to reproduce. Less energy goes into reproduction, and more goes into cell repair - so we'll still be alive to try again later.
I'm not going to get into the food fight up thread but I would like to mention that it is important for people to understand nutrition - especially if they plan on "growing their own" if it hits the fan.
Is it going to be corn, beans and squash? Cereal grains plus animal protein? Acorns, seeds from wild grasses and game? Or, what? I am really concerned that many people have not thought through what is involved in assuring an adequate diet that they can actually grow in their climate, soil conditions and water availability.
Todd
It depends on where one lives, of course. Where I live I can and do grow lots of corn, beans and squash, so much of the latter I usually give much of it away. Cereal grains are more problematic and I couldn't grow rice if I wanted to. Potatos are easy to grow, however, and gardeners should devote more space to them. I think they will end up being a staple for many ppl in the US. I currently eat virtually no meat (some turkey on T'giving or goose for Yule, some years) but rock squirrels, mt. rabbits & Gambel's quail are abundant on my property. I imagine that I will start harvesting them once I get good & hungry. Foraging for acorns, wild grass seed, etc., is labor intensive & few have the skills for finding, harvesting & processing them. Lacking those skills, I would guess that foraging for them would expend more calories than they would provide. Crayfish are common in the irrigation ditch, and mice, prairie dogs & pocket gophers are abundant. Left to my own devices I don't think I will starve. It's ravenous hordes of formerly obese refugees from the fast food nation raiding my larder that will be the worst problem, I imagine. I'm armed, but so will many of them be and there are more of them than there are of me & my family.
I live within an Old Order Mennonite community. There are no overweight children or men.
I'd like to hear more about this if you'd like to share more sometime (perhaps in a guest post?)...your thoughts on how people see things, do you talk about "peak oil"?, what strengths (and non) do you see WRT to your community and the possibility of the larger US economy faltering (or however one wishes to say it)...
But there are overweight women?
A few of the older women are overweight. I suspect having ten or more offspring is a major contributing factor. I will write up an epistle on the past as represented by the Old Order Mennonites and Amish morphing into our future. I guess I E-mail it to editors at theoildrum dot com?
Hi Roysyl,
Thanks. I'm not an editor, though I'd like to see it - so I'd say "Yes, please do mail it to them."
If you like you could also mail me a copy at aniyacafe (at) yahoo (dot) com.
You don't think cannibalism will become rife?
What a BS line that is.."Poor people are more prone to obesity than well-off people)....spend a little time out of the Political Cesspool of the U.S. and you will see things quite differently.
Obesity, much like Poverty, has almost nothing to do with money. Only those who rechew the Pablum spread by the PC, believe this crapola.
It's about Biology.
I hate to tell you this. but this is a cesspoolcentric problem. When we start exporting our highly processed corn food to Iraq you'll know we are serious about the war.
some support
Nutrition 'Science' Has Hijacked Our Meals -- and Our Health
maybe a podcast is better
I don't know how to make my link open to the right spot on the page. scroll down to the 6th podcast. The Pollan interview.
I'll remember this crapola when the food riots begin.
A rise in food prices is a good thing because it will curb the obesity epidemic.
Repeat after me: The US is not the world. But the policies in the US are impacting food prices around the world.
I do not agree with this.
As a disabled individual in California, I watch people all day long. Can't help it. I can do little else at the moment.
They drive their "Fuel efficient" cars that they purchased to save money, at well over the legal limit, despite rising fuel costs.
They smoke, despite the fact that they cost more and the health consequences are lethal.
They purchase things, despite the fact that they cannot afford them (most recent example is housing).
They sit on the couch when they arrive at home instead of going for a brisk 30 minute walk to help their heart.
Price seems to have little to do with getting fat.
It seems to be more of an emotional and irrational way of life for many people.
Traders who hoard Philippine rice face life imprisonment, government warns
Bankers hoarding and manipulating the cost of money, interest, are not prosecuted for anything, yet the guys trying to make a buck by driving up the price of rice are facing life in prison? Sounds fair.
Everyone understands hunger pangs. Not everyone understands commodities trading and all the financial bushwhacking you can do.
Food, energy, and one other fungible, highly mobile and adaptable commodity. Frederick Pohl saw it coming 30 years ago.
Reading Jem was what made me want to go into the oil business - into a dystopian near-future cyberpunk apocalypse. Yay!
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2369#comment-169942 ...is it bad etiquette to link yourself?