Targeting Beer, But Favoring Vodka

Italian Banks May Accept Prosciutto as Collateral

A plan is floating in Rome to allow Italian banks to accept expensive wines and prosciutto as collateral from struggling vintners and ham producers. The idea builds upon a tradition of banks storing massive wheels of parmesan cheese as loan collateral while they age.

Chinese Restaurant Menu Economics

Recession Is a Boon for Cooking Schools

According to the Wall Street Journal, cooking courses have become a draw for recession victims who want to save money by cooking more at home.

Food, Inc.: Lifting the Veil on Industrial Food

We're living in a "lifting the veil" moment.

From getting a grip on how we arrived at this global financial crisis to revelations about the Bush administration's legal wrangling to allow waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay, not to mention calls for further investigations (and prosecutions), the veil is being lifted everywhere.

There's a lot of talk about "lifting the veil" in the new documentary film Food Inc. Here, the filmmakers want to reveal to the audience how industrial food makes it from the farm to your table and show audiences the stark difference between the idealized images of farming on food packing and the serious problems of modern industrial food production, ranging from ethical issues in the treatment of animals to fair labor practices, food safety crises, and the increasing health problems due to change in diets towards carbohydrates influenced by the business of food.

The Great Land Grab

The Economist reports that rich governments (like Saudi Arabia) that may have relied on buying food on the international market in the past are now buying up huge tracts of farmland in poor countries to grow food. Is it beneficial investment or a new form of imperialism?

ghost a·cres

ghost a·cres (noun): The amount of land needed by a nation to produce the equivalent amount of food it procures by trade and sea.

Closely related to the concept of "food miles," ghost acres was coined by scientist, geographer, and ecologist Georg Borgstrom in his 1965 book The Hungry Planet.

Anthropologist John H. Bodley explained the meaning of the term in his 2007 book Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems:

In 1965, food scientist Georg Borgstrom introduced the concept of ghost acres, referring to the fact that trade and fishing were ways of gaining extraterritorial acres. Ghost acres were calculated as the amount of land a given country would need to put in production to gain an equivalent amount of animal protein equivalent to its net food imports and fishery production. Ghost acres have also been called "phantom carrying capacity." According to this reckoning many nations had already far exceeded the carrying capacity of their farmlands -- at least given their culturally prescribed food patterns -- and had become precariously dependent on uncertain international markets and frail marine resources. At that time Borgstrom calculated that Japan's ghost acres exceeded its agricultural acreage by more than six times and the United Kingdom's effective acres were nearly tripled by ghost acres."

"The problem with subsisting on ghost acres," Bodley explained, "is that global fisheries are now heavily over-exploited and in danger of collapse. By 2003, seven of the top-ten species, constituting 30 percent of global wild fisheries, were considerd to be fully exploited and in danger of collapse."

Hat tip to The Ethicurean for bringing this interesting concept to our attention.

Wine, Cheese, and Stimulus

The French government is spending $2.1 million to sponsor "French Cocktail Hour" party kits, complete with sparkling wine, Comté, and a Carla Bruni CD (no joke), to boost sluggish exports. Apply for your own here.

Are Seeds a Sound Investment?

The Wall Street Journal asks, how much can your growing your own vegetable garden really save you.

The Pushcart Economy

As the economy crumbles, a number of jobless Americans have turned to starting their own hot dog stands.