What the Hell?!? Friday - "It's What's for Dinner" Edition

A different sort of Big Gulp

Alas, not eye of newt, but if you're up for bat wings and toad skins, you can get them both here in one swell foop.

Toads and bats seem to have a mutually destructive relationship.

I had no idea they were that human.

Goldfish

Goldfish

source

 

Tasty snack

 ~~~

Silverfish

 source

Not so much

Mish Mashes the McRib

The McRib returneth.  Be very afraid.

As much as I castigate Mish for his libertarian cum Austrian fantasies, he's not all wrong, all the time.

Here, he enlightens us on the McRib, which is in fact not made of ribs.

Quoting The Natural Society, Mish shares this information.  [Quotes excerpted and not in the order presented]

But what’s really inside the McRib specifically that makes it such a food abomination? Containing over 70 ingredients, the McRib is full of surprises — including ‘restructured meat’ technology that includes traditionally-discarded animal parts brought together to create a rib-like substance.
.   .   .  
Out of the 70 ingredients that make up the ‘pork’ sandwich, a little-known flour-bleaching agent known as azodicarbonamide lies among them.
.   .   .
 In Australia and Europe, the use of azodicarbonamide as a food additive is banned. In Singapore specifically, use of this substance in food can result in a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail.
.   .   .
Since McDonald’s knows you’d never eat a pig heart, tongue, or stomach on your plate, they decided instead to grind up these ingredients and put them into the form of a typical rib.
.   .   .  
So in other words, it’s not actually a rib. Instead, it’s a combination of unwanted animal scraps processed down in major facilities and ‘restructured’ into the form of a rib. Then, 70 additives, chemicals, fillers, and GMO ingredients later, you have a ‘meat’ product that tastes like ribs.

Azodicarbonamide. Yum!

Of course, this problem occurs because of unfettered capitalism, placing bottom line profits above any other considerations, including health and decency; and the obvious solution is more stringent regulation - maybe something along the lines of what they have in that capitalist paradise, Singapore.

I wonder what Mish would think about that.

Fowl and Fishy Inflation

It has been suggested that the rapid increase in the prices of fish, fowl, meat and eggs for about two years following October, 2009 was the result of QE causing inflation in these items.  From this Calculated Risk graph, we can get the QE date line.  QE was announced on Nov 25, 2008, and expanded in April 2009.  It ended in May, 2010.  QE II was hinted at in Sept, 2010, announced in Nov 2010, and ended in August 2011.

The timing correspondence is less than stellar, since the YoY increase in prices for those food items dropped like a rock from October, '08 though Oct. '09.  It then shot up to a 7 1/2 year high in May of 2011.

This can be seen in the red line of Graph 1, which also shows the CPI for all items except food and energy (CPILFESL) in blue.

 Graph 1 YoY Price increases for Selected Food Stuffs and All Items Less Food and Energy

To assume a cause and effect relationship, you have to account for a time lag of a year from the announcement and 6 months from the expansion of QE to the turn around in those price increases from the Oct '09 bottom.  Remember, through the first 11 months of QE, the YoY change in those prices dropped dramatically.  Between May and November, 2010, while no QE program was in effect, these prices had the steepest part of their rise.  After QE II ended in August, 2011, the YoY price increase remained high for those items until the end of the year, and then fell rapidly.

A longer view reveals that the increase in those food prices oscillates continuously around the All Items Less Food and Energy line.  The trough to trough period is irregular, averaging 3.52 years with a standard deviation of 0.45 year (5 measurements).   The trough to trough time from May, '06 to Oct., '09 was a very typical 3.4 years.  It is very hard to look at that graph and see anything unusual about the 2008-2012 region, other than the depth of the trough shortly after the Great Recession.

It appeared to me that the blue line of Graph 1 might be a crude approximation of a long average of the red line.  This turns out not quite to be the case, since the two lines are measuring different baskets of goods.  What we have is the YoY increase for these food items oscillating around its own mean. That sounds like a tautology, but let's look a little deeper.

Graph 2 shows the same data, along with some long averages of the food stuffs YoY price increase line.   These are the 5 Yr (light blue), 8 Yr (yellow), and 13 Yr (purple) moving averages, and the average for the whole data set, 2.9 (bright green).  I've also included an envelope one standard deviation (3.06) above (5.96) and below (-0.17) the mean in dark green.

Graph 2 YoY Price increases for Selected Food Stuffs with Avgs and All Items Less Food and Energy

This (sort of) resembles a control chart.  The +/- Std. Dev. envelope isn't a hard barrier, but does tend to turn the data path back toward the mean, unless something strange happens.  Frex, the big rise from late '02 to early '04 followed the Iraq invasion and resulting disruption in petroleum pricing.  The '09 trough was the result of the Great Recession.  These are explainable variations.

Note also that the moving average lines tended to run below the CPILFESL line prior to late 2002, and have tended to run above it since.  This is to be expected since these items are basically the top of the food chain and have several layers of fuel dependent contributors in their cost structure.  Recall that until 2002, fuel prices were low, and since then (except for the Great Recession) have increased steadily.

I'm quite sympathetic to the idea that QE has done very little to help ease the economic doldrums following the GR.  But I see no reason at all to believe that it has contributed to the pain and suffering of ordinary citizens at either the grocery store or the gas pump.

Farming

Marginally arable land, rural golf courses, and millions of acres in the federal Conservation Reserve Program are being farmed.  Farmers are tearing down fences and structures and uprooting trees,  to be able to get in a few more rows of planting.  This is immediate dangerous to land and water, and unsustainable over time.    Read about it here.

The force pushing more land into production is the rise in crop prices: in the past five years corn prices tripled and those for soybeans doubled because of swelling worldwide demand, including demand for ethanol production. At the same time yields have spiked because of genetically engineered crops and improvements in farming technology, which are also allowing farmers to grow in previously inhospitable areas.

I just read somewhere yesterday that 60% of the corn grown in the U.S. is a recently developed hybrid that is toxic to corn root worm.  The high use rate is due to the resistance this hybrid offers, without requiring the use of pesticides.  This is part of the reason for the high yields mentioned in the quote above.  The downside is that the root worm - quite predictably - is developing resistance, and re-invading the corn fields. I can't find where I read about it, but you can read about it here.

Maybe my reptile brain is taking over and I'm getting needlessly alarmist.  But I'm connecting these dots with a global warming dot. Unsustainable farming practices, failure of pest-resistant hybrids, and a changing global temperature pattern could combine to cause some sort of massive systemic failure.

What chance do you see for a major world-wide food crisis in 5, 10, or 20 years?

I think the chances are quite good that the outcome will be really bad.

Food Stamps

Mish provides a chart on food stamp usage.  Here's a screen shot.

The most recent recession, that allegedly ended in 2009, is like nothing in living memory, unless you're a keen minded octogenarian.  Mish's reader, Tim Wallace, provided the graph, and an extrapolated estimate that the number of people on food stamps will rise from the current 46 million to about 51 million by 2013.

Extrapolations are dicey, and a linear extrapolation of a clearly non-linear function doubly so.

However that turns out, this does indicate that we are living in strange days.

Wallace notes: "that food stamp usage sloped down throughout the Reagan presidency until it started back up in 1989, ahead of the recession that doomed Bush I, then continued for several more years."  That drop was from roughly 22 million in 1981 to 18 million in 1988 - about 570,000 per year.  Under Clinton - not mentioned in Mish's excerpt from Wallace's e-mail, usage dropped from roughly 27 million in 1994 to 17 million in 1999 - about 1.67 million per year.

I don't know if either of them was trying to make a political point, but I sure am.

The unknown here is how requirements to recieve food stamps might have changed over time.  Did anything happen on that front during the Reagan years?

Update:  In comments to this post, Jerry Critter does the leg work on the Reagan question.  I've lifted his comment up to here.

According to Wikipedia "[m]ajor legislation in 1981 and 1982 enacted cutbacks" and "[r]ecognition of the severe domestic hunger problem in the latter half of the 1980s led to incremental expansions of the FSP in 1985 and 1987".

So, Reagan reduced the program and then was forced to expand it again because of too many starving people. At least he recognized his mistakes and tried, even if it was half-hearted, to correct them. He also raised taxes after first cutting them, again recognizing a mistake.

Today's republicans just say "Screw you".

Update 2:  Here's a NYT article on the history of food stamp usage.   And here is an Aug 1, 1981 article on the Reagan budget cut that affected the program.

What The Hell?!? Friday, Pt 2. - "Something Fishy" Edition

Before dinner last night, I had my first martini in who-knows-how-long - maybe October. Then we had Gorton's battered fish fillets and pirogi for dinner. LOVED it! If anyone ever doubted that I come from good, solid peasant stock, you can now be disabused of that mistaken notion.

Anyway, it occurred to me that at least those battered fillets were finally able to get out of an abusive relationship.

I suppose they were cod-dependent.
.

Quote of the Day

"I would have become a Hare Krishna, but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why, because I'm Italian and I love meatballs."

Brilliance at this level could only come form the daughter of Bozo the Clown.

You really can't make this stuff up.



So, are we screwed, or what?

H/T to the LW.
.

Haiku Wednesday - Food

FOOD

Nourishment for the 

Body - what it means to you

Could be food for thought.

Mellow Yellow Monday

Family vacation,

Breakfast in the mountains.  I'll

Have a banana.

Haiku Wednesday - Chocolate

CHOCOLATE

I like it dark and rich

(Not like that weak milky stuff)

Coating blueberries

WTH?!? Friday, Pt 3 - In Which I Berate Adam Ozimek

Again.

Over at Modeled Behavior, he says this, regarding smoking, the use of salt and sugar, slippery slopes, and, by implication, serrano peppers and meat thermometers.

I left him this comment.

This is an epic – and you’ll have to convince me that it’s not willful, if you even care – failure to see the point.

1) Where does this slippery slope lead? To fewer instances of high blood pressure, ergo fewer heart attacks and strokes. Wow – that’s tragic!

2) Nobody is impinging on your freedom to use salt. Have they come for your salt shaker? Controlling the Na content of packaged products, in fact gives you MORE freedom to make your own sodium decisions, since the food stuff OVER THE CONTENT OF WHICH YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL will have a LOWER sodium content. Do the math, and add salt to taste.

3) Re smoking: Nobody has ever said you can’t smoke in the privacy of your own home, or in a variety of open air venues. Smoking bans give non-smokers the freedom to not be exposed to smokers’ effluents.

Remember the old argument that your freedom to swing your arms ends at some distance from my nose?

If that makes no sense to you, then consider that I move my bowels regularly, but I almost never do it in your office.

4) Slippery Slope arguments are inherently fallacious.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html

For shame.

Really.

Tsk, tsk.

Cheers!
JzB

Sandwich Generation

The Lovely Wife and I had dinner at my mother's house tonight, and my sister was the cook.  She made a Jig's Dinner of corned beef brisket, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots.  She also informed us that she could make a "kick-ass" Reuben, and that option was on the table as well.  We all opted for Ruebens, with the other items as sides.

The bread was a pumpernickel - rye marble (high in minerals, I assume) from Pepperidge Farm.  The Sour Kraut was Vlasic, with caraway seeds.  We eschewed  the Russian Dressing in favor of French's Spicy Brown Mustard.  Her secret (shared here with permission) to making a Reuben that hangs together is to place the Swiss Cheese between the meat and the kraut, where it acts like glue.

The built-up assembly is grilled, of course, so that the cheese can melt, the bread toast, and everything get warm and gooey.

Credit where it's due:  the result was a fine - in fact, I would say KICK-ASS - Reuben.

Well done. Sis!

What the Hell?!? Friday, Pt 2 -- Quote of the Day

Re: a McDonald's Happy meal allowed to age on a shelf for one year, and showing no signs of mold or decay.

well at least now we know what to stock up the bunker with when a nulcear war looms., and you get toys to play with during the fallout.
-- zgz

H/T to BT

What the Hell?!? Friday -- Of Boys and Hygiene

An off-line (well, on-line, actually?!?) conversation with Cate (you can call her Cate) of SWS fame got me thinking about my long-ago experience as a Webelos leader.  This started when my son was eight, and joined the Cub Scouts.  I helped coach softball, which is a hoot, 'cause I'm less athletic than the average trombonist.  But, I also became the Webelos leader, since the Pack needed one (and it's easy to talk me into things) with a meeting at my house on Wednesday evenings.  This went on for four years - my house infested with invaded by 11-year-old boys, until my son passed through Webelos, and we moved on to Boy Scouts.

As a result of this ordeal  experience, I know a lot about 11-year-old boys.  The path from cute little baby boy to grown man is long, twisting, and full of pot holes.  One of the deepest and muddiest of these is age 11.  A typical 11-year-old boy is only marginally human, and not at all civilized.   In the absence of diligent parental supervision, he will happily spend that entire year in a cave with a colony of toads, never brushing his teeth, combing his hair, taking a bath, or changing his socks.   I have a clear recollection from my own checkered youth of being sent to wash my hands before dinner one day.  They were literally covered in dirt on all sides.  I carefully washed the palms of my hands, since those are the parts you use to hold the bread and utensils.  I was really quite exasperated with my father when he sent me back with explicit instructions to wash all surfaces of both hands.

I genuinely didn't get it.

This 11-itis-hood is a wonderful, primal, enigmatically feral time of life, if you can avoid major infections.  But, alas, all good things must end.  For many boys, this primitive, idyllic quasi-nirvana pops with the suddenness of a lightning-strike, on the day that they discover GIRLS.  The transformation is a wonder to behold.

It goes more or less like this, usually some time between ages 12 and 30:

Tuesday evening: GIRLS discovered.  In this epiphany, they are revealed as something not yuckie and disgusting, to be avoided at all costs. Frex:
They smell good.
They look . . . interesting.
Their voices - what is it about their voices?
They're -- soft.   Well, probably, I imagine, don't ya think?
When did THEY change?

Wednesday morning (after a night of disturbing, incomprehensible dreams):
Bath taken, hair combed, teeth brushed, fresh underwear and socks donned.
Mirror looked into, for maybe the first time ever.

Several days later: Question pondered:
"Is it worth the trouble of shining my shoes?"
The first of many moral dilemmas.

The actual timing of this metamorphosis is deeply personal.  Possible spectrum runs from as early as eight (very rare) to never. (Unfortunately, not so rare.)

And, as Howard Hughes so capably demonstrated, considerable backsliding is possible at any later phase of life.  This may be why wives are important.

A note on Fate:
Early bloomers can become metrosexuals
Late bloomers can become math or science teachers.

Some are immune.  For the most part, they become chemists and/or engineers.

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Heffalump

This nice fresh tree part,

A trunk full of green goodness

And a snack later.

Folishness

Foley's Market, Lexington, MI.

We have Foley ancestors. Foley is not a rare Irish name, but it is not one of the top 30. Many Irish immigrants settled in the area near Lexington.

Courtyard Fountain

Outside Smackwater Jack's, Lexington, MI.

A great place for soup, sandwich and a beer.

Movie Blogging - Julie and Julia

Yesterday, my lovely wife and I saw this movie. She read the book a couple of years ago, before it was quite so popular, and I am reading it now. This movie evidently falls into the category of "chick-flick*" so I'm a bit conflicted about admitting how much I liked it, which was rather a lot. I'm also enjoying the book, but that is, so to speak, another story.

Deep Stupid #7

(Updated, 9/22)
Diane Fedele was President of the Chaffey Community Republican Women, Federated.* Their October, 1988 newsletter, in the height of the presidential campaign, included the image of food stamp "Obama Bucks" depicted below the fold. Blind to the stereotypes of fried chicken, ribs, and watermellon, "It was just food to me," stated the culturally tone deaf, irony-challenged Fedele.**