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You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Food-Related Open Thread

Food-Related Open Thread

by Anne Laurie|  May 22, 201510:25 pm| 26 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Food, Open Threads

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No Recipe Exchange this weekend (everybody hold a positive thought that TaMara finds her new home & a kitchen that doesn’t “repel” her very soon!), so here’s a couple food-related stories.

First, a minor consumer alert from the NYTimes:

With avian flu devastating a significant portion of the nation’s egg-laying hens, major food companies and restaurant chains are bracing for shortages and scouting the country to find alternative supply sources.

Roughly 87 percent of the birds stricken with the disease are laying hens, according to the Department of Agriculture, and many of the eggs they lay are turned into ingredients used by food businesses in things like scrambled egg patties and baked goods.

So while most food companies say they have enough eggs to meet their short-term needs, corporations like McDonald’s, Panera Bread, Unilever and General Mills are seeking other suppliers and substitute ingredients…

Post Holdings, which uses eggs in its products and sells processed eggs to others, recently said the flu crisis would slice about $20 million out of its cash flow — and that was before the Agriculture Department confirmed an outbreak among 1.7 million hens at another facility that supplies the company.

And on Thursday, Hampton Creek, a small business that makes plant-based egg substitutes, shipped tens of thousands of pounds of its Just Mix powdered egg substitute to General Mills, which uses egg products in things like its Betty Crocker Angel Food Cake Mix and a variety of refrigerated cookie doughs…

As of Thursday, the flu is forcing farmers to kill more than 38 million infected birds, 33 million of which are laying hens. Last year, laying hens produced 7.3 billion dozen eggs, about a third of which were broken and turned into various liquid egg products, which include yolks, whites and only albumin.

Those eggs are used by grocery chains, restaurants, food service companies and food manufacturers in a wide variety of products, including mayonnaise, ice cream, cookies, muffins, batter for breading and French toast…

So, no immediate shortage in your local grocery’s refrigerated section, but I’m wondering how the switch to ‘plant-based egg substitutes’ is going to affect people with food sensitivities who’ve developed a personal list of ‘safe’ processed food options?

Second, also from the NYTimes, sad but not unpredictable: “Giving the Poor Easy Access to Healthy Food Doesn’t Mean They’ll Buy It“:

In 2010, the Morrisania section of the Bronx was what is commonly called a food desert: The low-income neighborhood in New York’s least-healthy county had no nearby grocery store, and few places where its residents could easily buy fresh food.

That’s why it was the target of a city tax incentive program designed to bring healthy food into underserved neighborhoods. In 2011, a 17,000-square-foot supermarket opened, aided by city money that paid some 40 percent of the costs of its construction. The neighborhood welcomed the addition, and perceived access to healthy food improved. But the diets of the neighborhood’s residents did not…

The work adds to a growing body of evidence that merely fixing food deserts will not do nearly as much to improve the health of poor neighborhoods as policy makers had hoped. It seems intuitive that a lack of nearby healthy food can contribute to a poor diet. But merely adding a grocery store to a poor neighborhood, it appears, doesn’t make a very big difference. The cost of food — and people’s habits of shopping and eating — appear to be much more powerful than just convenience…

“When we put supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, people are buying the same food,” said Barry Popkin, a professor of Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, who participated in an Institute of Medicine review of food desert research in 2009. “They just get it cheaper.”

New York isn’t the only market where new stores have been built and studied. Research in Philadelphia showed similarly middling effects from the introduction of grocery stores into poor neighborhoods — as have studies of food desert-amelioration policies in England.

It’s possible that poverty itself explains a lot of the shopping variation. In general, fresher, healthier food is more expensive to buy than less healthy processed food. It also takes more time and resources to cook, and keeps for fewer days…

My emphasis. Let’s take the positive view: when your financial margins are that tight, getting your staple canned soup and ramen noodles cheaper is still a genuine benefit. But many of us can attest that the process of turning a bleeding chunk of animal carcass — or a basket of root vegetables & greens — into “dinner” is not a hardwired skill set!

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Reader Interactions

26Comments

  1. 1.

    skerry

    May 22, 2015 at 10:34 pm

    My daughter had a grant last year in NYC/Brooklyn that allowed her to teach young mothers (WIC recipients) how to shop for and prepare easy, affordable meals. It was only a one-year grant. The majority of these women had never been taught how to cook.

    The grant was not renewed.

  2. 2.

    jonas

    May 22, 2015 at 10:40 pm

    Think too of what you actually need in terms of equipment to cook varied and healthy meals from scratch: a stove, oven, pots, pans, storage containers, knives, utensils, a sink to wash everything up, etc. If you’re living in a motel room, or, sometimes, in your car, or a trailer, or renting an efficiency apartment, you may not have any of that stuff. But you usually have a microwave, so those 50-cent frozen burritos look a lot more convenient.

  3. 3.

    jonas

    May 22, 2015 at 11:02 pm

    @skerry: My mother was a social worker back in the 60s when poor families were given surplus government food instead of food stamps — cheese, butter, beans, rice, etc. It was, she recalls, really good food and some families ate pretty well off it, combining it with stuff they grew in their own gardens. She would visit other people’s homes to check on children or the elderly and often find the food in the trash because they didn’t know how to cook it. One guy apparently tried to eat dry beans and got sick, so he threw the whole bag away (like 5-10 lbs.) and said it was the worst stuff he’d ever eaten and insisted he was sticking to his usual diet of potato chips and booze.

  4. 4.

    Betty Cracker

    May 22, 2015 at 11:22 pm

    I’m sad about all the poor chickens lost to the flu. During the last outbreak, I read up on avian flu out of concern from my own little flock, but apparently a small backyard flock that doesn’t come into contact with wild waterfowl or domestic birds is pretty safe. Whew!

  5. 5.

    SteverinoCT

    May 22, 2015 at 11:27 pm

    I read an article where a formerly poor guy explained that “good” food just tastes different, and you like what you’re used to. I know that I will occasionally crave a good ol’ greasy slab of fried frozen cheap-burger, or my wife’s famous “Chef Boy-r-dee Ravioli” baked covered in mozzarella.

  6. 6.

    Aleta

    May 22, 2015 at 11:35 pm

    @Betty Cracker: Giant unhealthy farms, designed to maximize profits, collapse. Will there be assistance to the corporations to help with their losses? Would it be so tough to spend money instead on better conditions for the chickens ?

  7. 7.

    jl

    May 22, 2015 at 11:36 pm

    @Betty Cracker: Good luck to your chickens, BC. I will periodically ask for rustic pics of your coop as proof of life for your noble flock.

  8. 8.

    Punchy

    May 22, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    Bad times for the winged among us. First the bees, then Dean Potter, and now chickens. Remind me not to fly Southworst for a few months.

  9. 9.

    mai naem mobile

    May 22, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    I probably eat home cooked stuff 2/3rds of the time.and frozen stuff a third of the time. Cooking is time consuming and frankly a bitch to clean up after. I have an extended family member who eats off paper plates and uses plastic spoons and forks because clean up is easier. I don’t like prepping stuff and freezing it. I can totally understand somebody coming home from some physical job and not wanting to cook.

  10. 10.

    Betty Cracker

    May 23, 2015 at 12:05 am

    @jl: We’ve been lucky with our birds — three-plus years with no casualties (knock wood). Their only problems are of their own making (squabbling and feather-pulling), and they continue to lay enough eggs to keep our extended family and select friends well supplied.

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    May 23, 2015 at 12:07 am

    @Betty Cracker:
    Goodness, it’s been three years already? I remember when you were still planning to raise chickens.

  12. 12.

    Ruckus

    May 23, 2015 at 12:10 am

    @jonas:
    You can eat well without an oven. It is more difficult and can be a bit of a challenge depending on what you want to cook. I lived for 6 yrs with a hot plate, an electric grill and a microwave. Cooked some pretty good meals on them. But it took time, energy and having a reasonable knowledge of preparation.

  13. 13.

    srv

    May 23, 2015 at 12:11 am

    As of Thursday, the flu is forcing farmers to kill more than 38 million infected birds, 33 million of which are laying hens.

    WTF! Why doesn’t this post have a rotatating drudge siren? What is Obama doing? What do Hillary’s emails say? Is this an attack by ISIS? Who’s runing DoA, Brownie?

  14. 14.

    Betty Cracker

    May 23, 2015 at 12:15 am

    @Amir Khalid: I know! We were talking about them the other day and checked the time stamps on our photos to confirm their age. It was spring 2012 when we got the chicks. Time flies, even if the chickens don’t!

  15. 15.

    opiejeanne

    May 23, 2015 at 1:02 am

    @SteverinoCT: It’s true that if you’ve been eating junk food, the real stuff tastes a bit strange, not to mention all of that green stuff you don’t get with fast food like broccoli or peas or green beans. Those taste really strange if you’re not used to them.

    After you’ve been off of junk food for a few weeks though, it doesn’t taste as good you remember it did.

  16. 16.

    Suzanne

    May 23, 2015 at 1:03 am

    It’s also cultural. You like what you grow up eating, what your friends and family eat. And honestly, some people just really like burgers and fries and no amount of cheap kale will change their minds.

  17. 17.

    NotMax

    May 23, 2015 at 3:17 am

    The poors intrinsically know how to prepare T-bones and lobster.

    Just ask any Republican.

  18. 18.

    opiejeanne

    May 23, 2015 at 3:17 am

    @Suzanne: I have had a kale salad that was delicious, but I don’t know how it was made to not be tough. We grew it one year and even when it was young we had to chop it into salads in order to use it. I made kale chips and decided they were kind of “meh”.

    I love broccoli and peas and spinach and cabbage all sorts of other green veggies so I figure I get enough green roughage in my diet without the kale, but I’ll eat it gladly in a salad anyone else has made. I just do not have the knack for that.

  19. 19.

    NotMax

    May 23, 2015 at 3:23 am

    @opiejeanne

    Kale is one of the foods which improve being prepared in Ye Olde English manner.

    Boil the heck out of it until it surrenders.

  20. 20.

    satby

    May 23, 2015 at 6:54 am

    It is astounding to me how many people can’t really cook, or cook mostly cheap crap like hot dogs (And I love hot dogs, but that’s not “cooking” that’s reheating). My sons both are really good cooks and both ended up with lovely girls who never learned to cook from their parents, who also seldom cooked. At this point, it’s generational, some families haven’t been exposed to real cooking except for holidays like Thanksgiving, for a couple of generations.

  21. 21.

    wormtown

    May 23, 2015 at 9:03 am

    I have suspected that few people cook anymore. Seems like we are extreme about everything; hardly cook but have to have huge kitchens with crazy expensive appliances. I just moved to a condo, and had to buy new appliances. I bought the cheapest of everything. The salesman was a little disappointed and said I must not cook much. I told him I probably cook as much or more than anyone that comes in to the store. I just don’t need a $5000 stove to do it.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    May 23, 2015 at 9:25 am

    @satby: I think you’re right about it being generational. My mom and her mom only cooked when they could not pawn the chore off on someone else. I love cooking, but I had to learn how as an adult. My daughter seems to have picked up the genetic aversion to cooking.

  23. 23.

    Big ole hound

    May 23, 2015 at 9:28 am

    @wormtown: Right you are. Just had to replace some appliances after 17 years. We wanted a white microwave and dishwasher which were all special order, if available. Everything is “stainless steel” and has all kinds of bells and whistles and very costly. We just wanted plain old stuff that works for a long time.

  24. 24.

    opiejeanne

    May 23, 2015 at 12:12 pm

    @Betty Cracker: My mom cooked supper every night but she was an unsophisticated cook; shepherd’s pie, fried chicken, spaghetti that consisted of tomato sauce over noodles with meatballs, pot roast. We all thought it was good, and her pot roast beat the heck out of that of any my friends’ moms made, but garlic was for the eye-talians, until a neighbor made a standing rib roast and Mom discovered powdered garlic and the house smelled heavenly when we came home from school. (I never tasted pastrami until I was 17 and a friend at school shared a sandwich with me.) It was a revelation.
    Growing up, I stayed out of the kitchen as much as possible, to stay out of her way, but when I got married my dad gave us a cookbook and I began to teach myself. It was just a Betty Crocker picture cookbook but it had a really good marinara sauce that used fresh garlic and after recovering from my very first smell of raw garlic, I was in love with the stuff.

    Now, I am not a particularly sophisticated cook either, I have made my share of tuna noodle casserole, but I do cook at least 75% of our meals including lunch. I bake muffins from scratch. I made Mom’s pot roast last night and it was awesome. Homemade chicken salad sandwiches are great. I have a nice kitchen now and yes, I have a big range that I got on sale because it was the floor model. It’s red. How could I resist? It has fewer bells and whistles than my basic white range at our previous house, but it does have six burners and we use them all, especially the one that’s like a jet engine. The oven has a fan and it has a light. There are no timers or clocks, no place to plug in a thermometer probe and no place to read it anyway; I’m a little afraid of the broiler so I don’t use that very often. The first Thanksgiving in this house when the kitchen was still wobbly old cabinets we invited a bunch of friends and one of them wanted to make a goose, and that oven is so big that the traditional turkey sat side-by-side with his goose and it all came out great and the party was wonderful.

  25. 25.

    Starfish

    May 23, 2015 at 2:49 pm

    I look forward to the coming egg-pocalypse because one of the food sensitivities in our house is to eggs.

  26. 26.

    KJSBrooklyn

    May 23, 2015 at 9:01 pm

    I like to cook, but not every night, but living in NY, the temptation is constant to eat out and the quality out there is amazing. Of course this is only possible if you have money. My college age daughter cooks all the time too, so I guess some of the younger generation is still cooking.

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