Neuroses about food additives are far more likely to kill us than the scary-sounding chemicals themselves. Here’s a Daily Maverick column from last week (somewhat lighter and less controversial than its predecessor) in praise of MSG: That finger-licking, lip-smacking taste.

You can’t help but laugh at the hypocritical fathead. The prime minister of the UK, Gordon Brown, blames the people for wasting too much food, and says this is what causes high food prices. The solution? Buy less food, and throw less away.

Britons will today be urged to make saving food as important as saving energy, with the publication of a government report which reveals that more than 4m tonnes of food are wasted each year at a cost of hundreds of pounds per household.

Note that Brown didn’t bother to place his claim of food waste in context. Each year, he says, 4 million tonnes of food go to waste. In a well-worn classic of prevarication — using statistics to lie — there’s no denominator. Four million tonnes of how much food goes to waste? Is it a lot, or a little? One percent? Five percent? Ten percent? If it really is a lot, I fail to see why people won’t notice rising food prices and discover: “Hey, neat, I can buy just legs of lamb, instead of buying the whole thing and throwing the rest away!”

How does the UK government know all this anyway? Do the English fill out annual food returns? Are waste dumps carefully analysed for suspicious substances that may once have been food? Do Britons pay taxes to employ people to audit the garbage? And what does Brown propose doing about it? Get people to buy food in smaller quantities, so packaging and distribution costs — not to mention plastic waste — go up instead?

Typical of a government official to blame the citizens for things that are none of the government’s business, are out of their control, are the errors of government, or all of the above.

After all, Britain’s government offers tax incentives for users of biofuel, which is here.) The bureaucrats admit this, but by yesterday had only agreed to “amend, not abandon”, its misguided state intervention to give biofuel an advantage over cheaper alternative energy.

Nevermind that most of the rest of the rise in food prices is a function of higher oil prices, since producers rely heavily on fuel in both the production and transport of food, and that the higher oil price is largely a function of the weak dollar, inflationary monetary policy worldwide, and high demand from large emerging markets.

No, it’s because you don’t eat your greens, young man! Does big brother have to make you finish your food? It sure sounds like it, with all that talk of “global plans” to find “global solutions” to “global problems”.

But wait, it gets better. On his first day at the summit in Japan, Gordon Brown and his wife enjoyed course after course after course of the most lavish food imaginable. To wit:

The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”.

The banquet was accompanied by five different wines from around the world including champagne, a French Bourgogne and sake.

To complete the irony, heads of state from Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal weren’t invited. “I say, old chap, nice caviar. Be a waste to feed it to the darkies. They might get used to it and drive the price up, what what?”

No wonder nobody likes him.

There’s a ton of hype over the crisis in food prices. Apparently, food is too expensive. One would think this constitutes a “price signal”, but no, whenever something is too expensive or too cheap, NGO activists, special-interest lobbyists and populist media argue that “government must do something”. This is untrue as often as it is true that “government must stop doing something”.

In this case, it could probably stop slashing and burning our food.

I argued some of the reasons for food inflation in a previous post, and noted in particular that biofuel subsidies are perverse incentives, and eliminating them is the first answer to the misguided, knee-jerk question about what government can do. (The second is to drop all other tariffs, levies and subsidies, first on agriculture, and then on fuel, which constitutes a major input cost for producers.)

South Africa has a national biofuels strategy that is barely out of its diapers, complete with taxpayer-funded subsidies, imminent fuel-composition mandates and government-owned shares in private companies. (The company I have in mind, in which the government took a 25% stake in 2005, has been too busy spending taxpayer money to bother constructing a website.) So that first answer will probably be the last to be considered by the motley crew of interventionists, statists, socialists and marxists that populate our government. Reflection, review and self-criticism aren’t among their strong points.

Let’s see how the rich US is faring with biofuel. Two Washington Post writers today write of what they call ethanol’s failed promise (via Blue Crab Boulevard, which also has news of, wait for it, food shortages and panic hoarding, right there in the rich ol’ US of A). Neither of the writers lack in green credentials, and in fact, they cite environmental concerns and energy use before noting the impact on food supply:

These “food-to-fuel” mandates [i.e. ethanol subsidies and fuel composition laws] were meant to move America toward energy independence and mitigate global climate change. But the evidence irrefutably demonstrates that this policy is not delivering on either goal. In fact, it is causing environmental harm and contributing to a growing global food crisis…..

[…] It is now abundantly clear that food-to-fuel mandates are leading to increased environmental damage. First, producing ethanol requires huge amounts of energy — most of which comes from coal. Second, the production process creates a number of hazardous byproducts, and some production facilities are reportedly dumping these in local water sources. Third, food-to-fuel mandates are helping drive up the price of agricultural staples, leading to significant changes in land use with major environmental harm.

If the United States can’t afford ethanol subsidies, why on earth is South Africa hell-bent on burning its food stocks for fuel? When the biofuels strategy was first adopted, maize prices were low, and a surplus was being produced. Biofuel, said the government, would “soak up” that surplus. I’m no expert on the state of our agricultural markets or on prices of specific farm produce, but elementary economics suggests that if a surplus causes low prices, but farmers are not induced by the price mechanism to switch to different, more profitable crops, because they can sell their surplus to the government’s pet biofuels makers instead, this might explain why the supply of food is now under pressure.

Not to mention this business of “requiring huge amounts of energy”. My electricity will probably be cut two hours from now, for four hours. This can happen two or three times a week. What for? To produce ethanol? So we can run our cars on biofuel while the poor go hungry? So we can bash SUV owners for driving environmentally-friendly food-guzzlers?

Meanwhile, the UN too is dithering, waffling about how the Green Revolution that has halved world hunger since the 1960s was actually a failure, and we should all switch to organic farming. Yeah, that’ll help. Let the poor eat boutique honey. Douglas Southgate, of the Free Market Foundation, has a more elaborate take on its latest sustainable agriculture report (the link might only work for a week). And South Africa’s policy makers simply swallow what the green lobby and the UN wonks feed us.

Sometimes, the depth of insanity among government bureaucrats, whether American, South African, or global, is truly amazing. Slash and burn, guys. Go ahead. Good intentions never fed anyone, but then, hunger victims don’t vote.

Every economist, expert and commentator I’ve seen seems to be flummoxed (and mildly panicked) about food inflation. The question on everyone’s lips is, “What can be done about high food prices?” The answer to that is fairly simple. I asked Thomas Carlyle’s parrot to explain.

Price is a wonderful number. It contains a lot of information, and alerts both producers and consumers to a variety of facts. Examine each of these signals, and you’ll have a fairly good idea whether a perceived problem really is a problem, and if so, what public policy prescription might help.

The first point to make is that the solution to high prices is high prices.

Read the rest of this entry »

Be afraid, be very afraid. If you’ve been eating pork sausages, ham, polony or bacon, you’re going to die.

Okay, you’re going to die anyway, but a new study says you should rather die without eating smoked, processed, cured, salted, or preserved meat. Or any red meat whatsoever. To make it easier to remember, simply add this to the list of things you shouldn’t consume much, if any, of: alcohol, tobacco, white bread, toasted brown bread, milk, butter and margarine (or margarine and butter, depending on who you consult), salt, pepper, anything that makes food taste better or last longer, fried food, potatoes, tomatoes, cheese, canned food, carbonated soft drinks, sweetened anything, spicy food, chocolate, coffee, tea… In fact, just assume you can’t eat something, unless otherwise specified by government, or an agency of the medical or parma pharmaceutical industries.

According to details published in the LA Times, for example,

Once an individual reaches the 18-ounce [~500g] weekly limit for red meat, every additional 1.7 ounces [~50g] consumed a day increases cancer risk by 15%, the report said. Every 1.7 ounces of processed meat consumed a day increases cancer risk by 21%, it added.

So if you eat a kilo of red or processed meat a week, your cancer risk is at least 150%, possibly 210%. Be terrified.

On the ham and bacon issue, it would seems the Jews and Muslims, who listened to God, got it right. To the Christians, Peter explained that in a dream he was presented with a great feast on a picnic blanket (think Wal-Mart, Tesco, Spar), “wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air.” When he refused to eat it because it was “common or unclean”, God told him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”

The grammar is tortured, but the meaning is clear. Peter might have appeared to be a sandal-shod communist on acid, but he clearly was a PR for the global corporate retail oligopoly, trying to make a good little consumer out of you.

You thought you could get away with eating carrots and nuts? Wrong. The European Union has just set the safe limit of beta-carotene and selenium intake to the equivalent of two carrots and two brazil nuts, according to an article published by a group that claims to tell you what doctors don’t, and is devoted to pushing pills.

Which makes it clear that this whole food health scare thing is a propaganda effort by Big Pharma. Its profit margins on dietary “supplements” (read: “substitutes”) are around 40%, according to the most recent market study by the US Food and Drug Administration. The study is eight years old, so who knows how big it is these days? I’ll bet the FDA is in cahoots with the Big Pharma pill pushers, which is why it stopped publishing research on the subject. Perhaps maybe the pill pushers just threatened to stop paying tax, which would put half of the civil service out of work.

The pill pusher’s poison plot is hoping to make us realise that food is bad for you, and the only way to live is to consume only vitamin pills. Of course, they need the EU and other governments to publish laws that limit the permitted quantities of active ingredients, to keep the costs down and profits up.

On the other hand, I’m a heretic and an apostate. I reckon living increases your risk of death to near 100%, so you might as well eat steak and drink beer. Besides, if I die under suspicious circumstances, it’s not like officials will investigate the pill pushers or government agents. They’ll just blame it on my lifestyle.

Lifestyle. There’s another bad thing. Causes death too, you know.

Pity the farmer in a bureaucratic state who spends his every waking hour stepping in steaming piles of regulation and law. Joel Salatin is just such a man. He writes:

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

I should note that I disagree with four out of every five words on the web site that hosts this piece. In fact, the only words I won’t quibble with are “are” and “and”.

The site, mindfully.org, is a eco-leftists fever swamp, though it seems to have been abandoned now. It defends, for example, a precautionary principle that logically precludes its own application. It also notes with glee that Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was found guilty of “scientific dishonesty” by the Orwellian-sounding “Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty”. It fails to note that a superior authority cleared Lømborg, directing a scathing rebuke at the Committee about the lack of evidence it presented, its failure to even refer to Lømborg’s own text to establish the facts in the case, its use solely of published criticisms by others of Lømborg’s work, and its use of “condescending and emotional” language. It fails to note other studies which similarly found that the criticism of Lømborg was largely unsubstantiated and constituted an abuse of authority on the part of the Danish commission. A review in the Journal of Information Ethics found: “The inevitable overall impression of the debate is, not that Lomborg has deliberately been twisting arguments, but many of his opponents have. This is somewhat more than embarrassing.”¹ This indicates a deliberate bias on the part of mindfully.org. Some of the other material on the site borders on tinfoil-hat paranoia, and might present a problem for the authors if the men in white coats were to come across it.

With that disclaimer, do read the farmer’s lament. It offers a disturbing insight into what happens — even to citizens like Salatin who in principle fully agree — when governments use law and regulation to enforce on a powerless population its own politically-correct notions about food, health and living.

1. For more details, see A Critical Consideration… by Arthur Rörsch (inexplicably in Microsoft Word format) and When Scientists Politicize Science by Roger A. Pielke Jr. (in PDF). [↩]