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The business of food.
The Doughnut That Dare Not Speak Its Name
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Friday, November 6, 2009 - 1:23pm
It's a bad sign when the product you're selling is so awful that you can't bring yourself to name it.
Chicago Tribune reporter Monica Eng asked Kimberly Schwabenbauer, dietitian and marketing manager of Super Bakery, about the doughnuts her company sells to the Chicago Public Schools for its breakfast program. Schwabenbauer "made it clear that she doesn't like to use the d-word when referring to her company's product: a round, sweet, cakey pastry with a hole in the middle."
When she absolutely had to say 'doughnut,'" Eng wrote, "she prefaced it with 'quote unquote.' "
Now, quote-unquote doughnuts are not in themselves awful. In fact, at their best, they are wonderful things, though they should be consumed with extreme discretion. These particular quote-unquote doughnuts, though, are being sold as a breakfast staple to public-school students in Chicago. Parents, however, might not know about the centrality of doughnuts to their kids' most important meal of the day. School menus identify them by their brand name, MVP Breakfast.
"City school officials did not respond to questions about why they use such an unrecognizable term on the menu," Eng wrote in her examination of the sugary meals served in the CPS's meal program, which by her account seems to be woefully mismanaged, and not only because of the "nutritionally fortified" doughnuts. Also on the menu (and always available): Pop-Tarts, syrup-drenched waffles, and sugary cereals like Froot Loops.
Until this year, Super Bakery wasn't so frightened of calling a doughnut a doughnut. Before it became MVP Breakfast, the product was called Super Donut.
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EmailMore States Raise Beer's Strength
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Friday, November 6, 2009 - 11:46am
State laws boosting the maximum allowance of alcohol in beer are becoming a trend. Alabama and West Virginia have raised the cap to 13.9 percent from 6 percent, according to USA Today. Mississippi and Iowa are considering similar measures.
It's not totally clear what's behind the trend, but it seems to have particular momentum in the Southern states.
The average alcohol content of beer is 4.65 percent. A 14 percent level is nowhere near the 40 percent that is typical of many types of hard liquor. On the other hand, imagine filling up a pint glass with Jack Daniels and chugging it down. (OK, some of us don't have to imagine it.) Wine contains an average 11.45 percent alcohol.
There are plenty of critics of the trend, of course. David Rosenbloom, president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse told USA Today that the higher the alcohol volume, "the faster you get drunk and the longer you stay drunk."
Which is true, all other things being equal. But are all other things equal? The big brewers probably won't boost the alcohol content of their major brands (since it would alter the taste, and also possibly draw loud criticism). Such laws mostly affect craft brewers, by allowing them much more freedom on the kinds of beers they can produce. For instance, they can add more malt, which generally yields more alcohol.
Drinkers of craft brews, in very general terms, aren't out to get as wasted as they can, as drinkers of Bud or Miller High Life often are. And anyway, given all the high-alcohol hooch out there, if somebody wants to get drunk fast, they have many better options than relatively expensive craft brews.
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Kellogg Drops Immunity Claim
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Thursday, November 5, 2009 - 5:00pm
In case you missed the news, Kellogg (K) announced on Wednesday that it would "phase out" claims on boxes of Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies that the cereals boost children's immunity to disease.
"It's a cold environment for food marketers trying to make health claims," Advertising Age concluded, perhaps somewhat prematurely, given that plenty of foods still claim, for example, that they are low in fat while not mentioning how high in sugar or calories they are. Maybe better to say it's a cold environment for truly insane health claims like this one.
Kellogg is reacting not only to widespread media ridicule, but to threats both explicit and implicit from government officials. But the company says it's doing it "given the public attention to H1N1" (which is sort of beside the point).
To save face, Kellogg continues to insist that "science shows" that the addition of a few vitamins "helps boost a child's immunity." The company's statement, like the initial label claim, made no mention of bananas or carrots and how much better they are than Cocoa Krispies as vitamin-delivery vehicles.
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Why Eating Tainted Beef Is OK
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Wednesday, November 4, 2009 - 2:01pm
Did you know that ground beef that has tested positive for E. coli is allowed to be sold after it has been cooked and processed?
I didn’t, until just now, and though the idea squicks me out a little, it turns out that it really isn't a big deal. After all, processing removes a lot of stuff that can't and shouldn't be sold to the public—that, in part, is what processing is.
That didn't stop ABC News from presenting this information in a highly sensationalistic way, leaving out crucial details and trying to tie the practice to the most recent E. coli scare, though there is absolutely no connection between that outbreak and the practice of cooking tainted beef before sale.
Does the Agriculture Department rule allowing this practice increase the possibility of people getting sick from the once-tainted beef? ABC News doesn't say. It doesn't even address the question.
But it turns out that, almost certainly, the practice has never resulted in single case of illness.
The Chicago Tribune caused a bit of a stir in 2007 when it published an article about the "E. coli loophole." But that article at least addressed the details of the matter, and put it into its proper context. "Cooking the meat," the paper reported, "destroys the bacteria and makes it safe to eat." And: "There is no evidence that 'cook only' meat has directly sickened consumers."
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Be Patient, Food Activists (But Keep Pushing)
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 12:27pm
It is the job of activists to never be content, even when things are generally going their way. In that light, Paula Crossfield's critique of the Obama administration's food-policy initiatives seems reasonable enough.
People who were "hoping for deep improvements in our food system can point to only a few successes, while other policies that could lead to food insecurity are brewing in back rooms," she writes on her blog, Civil Eats.
Crossfield figured it was time for a one-year review, though it is a year tomorrow since Obama was elected. He took office only slightly more than nine months ago.
Is that really enough time to expect "deep improvements?" No. In fact, it would take two full Obama terms to even begin to transform the food system from one based on oil, monocultures, and industrial production into one based more on environmentally sound practices, crop diversity, and smaller, more local supply networks.
After ticking off the good and the bad—Obama's choices for various positions in the Agriculture Department and elsewhere that she either lauds or finds appalling (and she's pretty much correct in her assessments)—Crossfield notes all the great stuff Obama said during his campaign about transforming the food system, and how he has fallen short. And she concludes: "Maybe candidate Obama spoke out on food issues with the greatest of intentions, but didn’t realize the scale of the task at hand."
That might be true of many of us.
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Wegmans' Price War Against Itself
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Monday, November 2, 2009 - 12:51pm
Wegmans, the East Coast grocery chain that—like many grocers across the country—has been engaged in a price war with competitors, has taken a novel approach in a new ad campaign: comparing itself to itself.
A year ago this month, Wegmans announced that, despite its then-fast-rising costs, it would lower prices on many of its products. In Sunday newspaper inserts yesterday and on in-store signs, the 70-store chain notes that many of its prices have remained low and even dropped. And it put numbers to its claims, telling consumers how much various items cost then compared to now.
In some cases, the price drops have been dramatic. Wegmans' prices for pork and milk have fallen by 26 percent over the past year. Bread is down by 20 percent. Beef is 17 percent cheaper. Of course, it has gotten far easier to lower prices as commodity costs have fallen.
Wegmans is a private company—one of the biggest in the country—and so is less prone than its publicly traded competitors to price products with quarterly profits in mind. Above all, it wants to hold on to customers and retain market share. With this move, coming as it did just as the economy was imploding, even as costs were shooting up, the chain likely lost money. It claims that consumers have saved about $20 million.
It will be interesting to see what the chain might do if commodity and fuel costs soar again. We have to assume that if it raises prices in the future, it won't run similar comparison ads.
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