Extra Matter

Eight Degrees of assimilation Buying a brewer for the barrels not the beer

  2

Irish Distillers, itself owned by Pernod Ricard, recently bought Eight Degrees Brewing, a craft brewer in Ireland. That’s interesting for lots of reasons.

For a start, I’ve had a lot of enjoyment from the beers produced by Eight Degrees, which are delicious no matter what you’re listening to. They’re good beers, not fussy, and excellent drinking.

On the other hand, consolidation in the beer industry is proceeding apace, with big players swallowing craft brewers and putting out their own “craftwashed” beers at a premium, at least in the US. In many cases, the product has suffered, so there could be some cause for concern among Eight Degrees’ fans. To be honest, though, there isn’t much evidence of any concern.)

But … the reason given for the “multimillion-euro deal” is more interesting than a mere takeover.

The primary objective of the purchase of the brewer is to ensure a long-term beer supply to sustain the continued growth of Jameson Caskmates, a product introduced by Irish Distillers on a trial basis in 2014.

Caskmates, as I did not know, is a Jameson mark that ages whiskey in barrels first used by craft brewers. (I’m partial myself to a single malt aged in sherry barrels, but that’s by the by.) Caskmates is, apparently, very popular. And its previous supplier of used craft beer barrels, despite being owned by giant Molson-Coors, risked running out. By buying a much bigger but still craft brewer, the deal secures a supply of barrels in which Jameson can age their whiskey, which with luck means that Eight Degrees will have every incentive to produce tasty beer and plenty of used barrels.

I remain cautiously optimistic.

Extra Matter

Stores promote soda on SNAP days

  1
Soda display
Photo by Don Daskalo on Unsplash.

New Food Economy recently revealed that grocery stores push soda sales on the days that people receive their SNAP benefits, especially in low-income neighbourhoods. The news is based on an academic paper currently in press, and would be shocking indeed if it were not for a few things. ((Increases in Sugary Drink Marketing During Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Benefit Issuance in New York. I can’t afford to pay for access, nor do I feel I need to as New Food Economy has quite a detailed account, and I’m assuming that is accurate.)) In essence the study, by Alyssa Moran and her colleagues, shows that in three towns in New York state, stores were almost twice as likely to promote sugar-sweetened beverages on the days SNAP benefits were issued (the first 9 days of the month) compared to other days, and that the effect was greater (4 times more likely) in areas that had more SNAP recipients.

What’s wrong with that? Nothing, as far as it goes. But a couple of aspects of the study and the reporting worry me. For one, the data are from 2011; maybe things have already changed. I also wondered how common it was for states to distribute SNAP benefits in a big chunk at the beginning of the month. I already knew that each state has its own rules, and that when people get their benefits has an influence on crime. So I turned to the USDA’s Monthly Issuance Schedule for All States and Territories.

Skimming that, Alaska, Guam, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and the Virgin Islands all distribute benefits on a single day each month. Is the effect is even more pronounced in those places? A few places dole out benefits on a few days, but more spread out over the month. Is the effect weaker there?

And quite a few places disburse benefits across several days. ((Alabama (20), Delaware (22), Florida (29), Georgia (10 spread over 18 days), Illinois (12 over 20 days), Indiana (10 over 18 days), Kentucky (10 over 19 days), Maryland (20), Massachusetts (10 over 14 days), Michigan (10 over 18 days), Mississippi (18), Missouri (22), New Mexico (20), North Carolina (10 over 18 days), Ohio (10 over 18 days), Tennessee (20), Texas (10 over 15 days), Wisconsin (10 over 13 days). New York City spreads benefits over 13 days at the beginning of the month.)) Is it worthwhile for shopkeepers to give sugary drinks extra marketing attention over a longer period of time, or should they just do it all the time?

What I’m saying, I suppose, is that the study could be so much richer than it currently is, which might then add some illumination to the paper’s conclusion:

Increases in sugar-sweetened beverage marketing during issuance may exacerbate disparities in diet quality of households participating in SNAP. Policy changes, like extending SNAP benefit issuance, may mitigate these effects.

Maybe. Maybe.

And then there’s New Food Economy’s conclusion:

People using food stamps are encouraged to buy soda as soon as they’ve got money in their pockets.

I suspect they need no encouragement to do so. Why shouldn’t people treat themselves to a soda when they have a bit more to spend? The bigger issue is whether grocery stores should be promoting their profits at the expense of the government.

Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 079 More is more

  2
  1. OK, this is very worthwhile: Science magazine has a really good round-up of the latest research on What’s really behind ‘gluten sensitivity’?. (I’d have removed that final question mark, but what do I know.)
  2. So is this: Diet and cancer risk: the latest research evidence. Marion Nestle offers her very brief summary and, better yet, links to all the underlying evidence.
  3. It says here that it will take you almost 18 years to make Eggs Benedict from scratch. Recursive Recipes is a bit of fun and takes a bit of exploring to see what’s going on. You need to play with the slider under Time limit to see how things change.
  4. I haven’t quite worked out why you need apples for Eggs Benedict, and I was going to link to an article about apple breeding on Popular Science, but the GDPR-overkill has made me very wary. There has to be a better way. Maybe if you’re not in Europe the link will work for you. Please, let me know.
  5. In any case, if you plan to do things from scratch, you might want to study What Does a Seed Farmer Do?.
  6. That article tells me that “most modern-day farmers don’t have time for it, nor the know-how”. Very true, alas, and thankfully not a problem for the African farmers enslaved and sent to Suriname. My compadre Luigi found a super video showing how they transported their rice seeds with them.
  7. Claims to contain truffles are often bogus, and being expensive is often no guarantee that you’re getting what you’re paying for. Welcome, then, to research that can “clearly discriminate foods that contained synthetic truffle aroma or a mixture of synthetic and natural aromas, and … distinguish among products containing white truffle and those containing other species of the fungus.” Or, you know, just buy truffles, if you can.
Podcasts

Food as Power "We are suffering, in short, from a power famine as well as a food famine"

5

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 21:42 — 17.6MB)

Subscribe: Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS | More

Shortly after the end of World War 2 in Europe, one of the quintessential boffins who had worked on the war effort turned his attention to the most pressing problem of the peace: a shortage of coal and oil. But where others saw the problem as a lack of transport, Geoffrey Pyke, saw a much more fundamental problem; a lack of food. Food required transport, and there was no fuel to power the engines. Pyke came up with a solution. Use the chemical energy in food to fuel muscular engines.

This episode is an abbreviated version of a paper on Food as Power: An Alternative View, which I am presenting on 30 May 2018 at the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. The entire symposium is on Food and Power, so what’s alternative about my view? Pyke’s insight, that the production and transport of food requires muscular power, remains true today, and despite the very clear evidence and advice that Pyke offered in 1946, it also remains more or less ignored.

Muscles versus steam engines

A crucial part of Pyke’s argument is the greater efficiency of muscles compared to steam engines, and that slips by relatively quickly in the podcast. So, here’s the diagram that Pyke published in The Economist

Efficiencies of steam engine and human muscle compared. Apologies for quality; photographed on a monitor.

And here’s the detailed logic:

A pound of coal contains about 3150 calories, and if fed directly into a steam engine will produce about 175 calories of useful work. A pound of coal can also be used to refine sugar beets, in which case it will produce about a pound of sugar. The sugar contains about 1820 calories. Feed that to a man, and his muscles can turn it into about 365 calories of useful work. The man’s overall efficiency is about 11.5 percent, versus the steam engine’s 5.5 percent. Convert the coal into sugar, then, and you can get twice the useful work out of people than if you feed the coal to a steam engine.

Pyke argued that it would be “more economic, and politically necessary” to use what little coal there was to refine beet sugar than to power locomotives. And, as he sagely pointed out:

Half of the sugar–given the appropriate equipment– would be needed for the haulers taking the place of the steam engines, but the other half would be available to feed other workers such as coal miners, whose present output is so heavily reduced for want of food.

Muscles still do most of the work

Seventy years on, FAO estimates that muscles still provide 94 percent of the energy for global food production, about one-third animal muscle and two-thirds human muscle. One of the abiding problems is that women, who produce much of the food in sub-Saharan Africa, often have no choice but to use inefficient tools, designed for and bought by men. So metaphorical power also is relevant. But perhaps the saddest observation is that engineers have done masses of work to create tools and machines that make better use of the muscular power supplied by smallholder farmers and draught animals. These tools and machines have proved themselves in manifold trials on experimental stations, but they are ignored by the farmers for whom they were developed. The Colonial Office, in 1946, warned Pyke that it would be the people, not the equipment, that might pose a problem, and so it has proved. One report I read was rather plaintively subtitled “Perfected but rejected”.

Notes

  1. The 2018 Dublin Gastronomy Symposium on Food and Power takes place on 29 and 30 May 2018.
  2. My own paper Food As Power: an Alternative View is available for download, as are many of the other contributions.
  3. Music from Podington Bear.

huffduffer icon   Huffduff it

Extra Matter
0

Final preparations for Dublin Gastronomy Symposium #DGS2018 completed. Looking forward to meeting old friends and making new ones and, I hope, to recording some of the fabulous speakers for forthcoming episodes.