November 22, 2007
Happy Linksgiving! It's the time of the year to give thanks. And to clean off your desktop of links. Like Mark Twain's passenjare, I pass them along to be rid of them:
- Gitmo SOP -- Standard Operating Procedures at Guantanamo Bay prison. While the DoD has been insisting it stay secret, and the ACLU has been trying to get it released, the document has leaked itself. [thx Schneier]
- Design Challenge: fit a calendar comfortably within a business card, with type my mom can read - this collection of solutions is amazing, though this one seems the most straightforward. [thx kottke]
- How much copyright infringement liability do you accrue each day? (In the neighborhood of $12 million per day, as it turns out.) Also: Good Copy Bad Copy - interesting-looking documentary on copyright.
- Household spending on food at home has decreased from 20% in 1929 to 9% in 1980 to 5.8% today. Meanwhile, the non-marketing fraction of all food expenditures (i.e. the cost as it leaves the farm) has fallen from 41% in 1950 to 20% today -- 80% of our food budget is just for getting it from farm to fridge. The combined effect is that the fraction of household income headed to farmers has dropped from 8% (1950) to 1.9% (2004). This comes almost entirely from enormous productivity gains by the ag industry... Since per-capita demand is relatively inelastic (not totally inelastic: note the growth in marketing expenditures and food-away-from-home), this has paradoxically shrunk the ag industry in GDP terms while it provides markedly better food at a fraction of the cost.
- Alert Scooter: Baseball Pitches, Illustrated (ooh, pretty).
- Kitlers! (Cats that look like НᎥtlеr). By Godwins Law I'm now done posting.
Ya, I mean the non-processed food -- the farm outputs, not the food industry's.
Most of us won't now put in our basket fruit that would've been premiere a few decades ago. Our supermarkets have enormous, unblemished produce that looks nothing like what traditional ag brings to market, as you've seen if you've shopped for produce outside the 1st world. It's my understanding that the gains in meat quality are as or more impressive. The variety is astonishing too -- here is a brief selection of things you can reasonably expect to find in a Whole Foods:
- Tomatillo, Pomegranate, Persimmon, Rhubarb, Fennel, Okra
- Boysenberries, Loganberries, Marionberries, Ollalieberry, Youngberries
- Breadfruit, Cherimoya, Guava, Lychee Nuts, Plantain, Passion Fruit, Star Fruit, Sapodilla, Sugar Apple, Tamarind
- Arugula, Beet Greens, Bok Choy, Broccoli Rabe (aka Rapini), Collards, Dandelion Greens, Endive, Escarole, Kale, Mizuna, Mustard, Spinach, Turnip Greens, Swiss Chard
- Asian Turnip, Beet, Burdock, Celeriac or Celery Root, Daikon, Parsnip, Rutabaga, Salsify, Sunchokes, Turnip
And that's not counting different kinds of the same fruit. In-season you can get a dozen different kinds of apples at my local non-gourmet grocery store, and possibly double that figure at the gourmet one.
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wait a second, where's the leap to "markedly better food"? are you talking about fresher produce (lower travel times), or what we buy? Because I think most nutritionists, MDs, environmentalists, and health nuts would argue that the food we consume now is markedly worse (corn subsidies = find more uses for corn syrup, corn starch; why junk food is cheap, why obesity is up, etc.).
posted by ms cegenation at 12:09PM CST on November 29