Veal

Via Down to Earth, this post on a project for organic, humane veal shows some of the problems of these efforts in mass society:

So, ironically, even though the chefs love the flavor and the Azuluna story and that the flavor and texture is excellent regardless of the size, many of them will stop buying it or complain to the distributor that it lacks consistency in size. This is a problem for the high end cuts only - as the chefs are fearful of serving chops of differing sizes and charging the same price. The solution to this problem is to get more producers raising the veal and to expand the market into NYC. This would balance out the size problem, as cuts could be grouped by the distributors according to size. However, in order to recruit more producers, I need to promise them a market.

So, we consumers want consistency--no surprises, please. But that implies production practices and a scale of operation that's difficult to develop. In a way, we want what we had years and years ago, but destroyed because our preferences valued consistency, uniformity, etc.

(This subject rings a small bell for me--we sold our bull calves at about a week or 10 days. The old quip goes that the dairy is the most feminist place around.)

Eating Your Own Dog Food, Or Something

There's phenomena among the chattering classes, I believe on all sides of the political spectrum, of eating their own dogfood. That is, when they have an argument to make, their citations tend to be to the secondary, or tertiary, literature, not to primary source material. What it means is there's a tendency to talk in an echo chamber, to repeat the same urban myths, and to ignore facts or alternatives.

There's an example here:

"The last time food prices shot up, in the 1970s, the U.S. response was to put more land into agricultural production. This was the infamous "fencerow-to-fencerow" policy of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz that Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, has linked to the glut of corn -- and corn syrup -- that has so profoundly affected global diets. "

The whole piece discusses how North Korea was and is a canary warning the world of imminent catastrophe.

FSA's Problems with the New Farm Bill

Are implied in the discussion at the University of Illinois extension farmgate site.

Different members of Congress had different takes on the Average Crop Revenue Election Program, so the odds are that FSA will come up with an interpretation that someone disagrees with, and that someone may have enough clout to change the law on them. (I think it's true that a flood-caused spike in corn prices in 2008 makes the program more problematic in the long run, since it raises the likelihood of a fall in prices in the out years, and the revenue guarantee is based on history. In the old days for yields we used the "Olympic average", dropping high and low years which recognized that farming can be very variable. Something to consider.)

On Why We Need Health Insurance

See this post of Erin's.

Obviously, healthy ranchers in Montana don't need health insurance, right?

Improving Flow in the Oldest Profession

There's a piece in the Times today on something I'd never heard of--prostitution reviews. Apparently this guy has a website where Johns can rate their satisfaction with their prostitutes. Apparently it's just part of the impact of the Internet on the oldest profession--prostitutes are using it to connect with a higher class of customer (maybe even the former governor of NY).

Economists have written on the imbalances of information, as between the seller and buyer of a used car; here's another case where technology comes to the rescue of mismatched customers and buyers, improving the net happiness of the world. (I guess.)

Whose Property?

Shankar Vedantam in the Post wrote about property yesterday and Tyler Cowen and Ross Hanson links to it. Research seems to show that those people who decorate their cars with bumper stickers, regardless of the sentiment, are more aggressive drivers than those milquetoasts like me who have an unadorned car (almost put a Gore sticker on in 2000, but didn't) and who just fume inside when someone cuts me off or tailgates or whatever.

The researchers' explanation is people have difference senses of "property"--our sense of possession of our bedroom is "private", whereas walking down a city street is "public". So the theory is people who decorate their cars consider them to be private, or privatish, and take more offense when their property is impinged on. (Reminds me of a cartoon I saw yesterday, although I can't get the punch line right: it was someone in a sort of vehicle, explaining to the bystander it wasn't their new SUV, it was their new house.)

I was struck by the sense of property idea. One thing I've noticed, living in a townhouse cluster where one's yard extends about 3-6 feet from the house and the rest is common, my sense of property doesn't match my neighbors, or rather, it took a good while for me to adjust. In the country our farm was a bit isolated, so anyone appearing on one's land was sort of automatically an intruder, suspicious, perhaps a hunter, perhaps a city person, definitely someone whose business you'd want to know. (Didn't want hunters mistaking cows for deer or city folks scaring the cows and cutting their milk production.) This might fit with the imperialistic image of farmers, who don't want anything except the land next to theirs. And, of course, reinforced by the need for fences. Anyhow, it's a different sense of property than I see in Reston. There's no property markers evident.

I thought of that yesterday, but got interrupted from posting it. Then this morning I got reminded of how we are just animals, after all. Petting our older cat, whose mother was feral and who still retains a bit of edge, everything was fine until she decided to jump into her cardboard box and bulge over its sides and I continued to pet her. Wrong! For her, when she's in a box or a paper bag, that's her property and she defends it, even when the hand approaching the box or bag harbors only good intentions.

Bottom line: Cats own property too.

The Most Unfortunate Wording I've Noticed Today

"There’s a fairly decent chance that we’re going to have a famine in hundreds of places all over the world, and hunger growing everywhere - including here - all for no reason whatsoever. "

Decent? decent? Please. (Note--while I read the blog I often don't agree with the author.)

Oh for the Days of Old--Destroyed FSA Office

The flooding has hit an FSA office in Bartholomew County, IN, according to this piece.

Reminds me of old times, coordinating with our Kansas City IT people on restoring files. (Not that we had more than 3 or 4 over 12 years or so, and not that I did much of any significance--it was mostly the IT types ("automation coordinator" was the title then) in the state office with help from KC. But it's the old, run to the pumps, instinct to help when disaster strikes.

(Given the changes in the IT environment and the unclear description in the piece, I can't even guess whether the office is in good or bad shape. I'd hope FSA isn't distracted from preparing for physical disasters by the emphasis on security of data from terrorists and hackers.)

Fly Boys and Cargo Humpers

Max Boot has an interesting op-ed in the NYTimes this morning. He notes the new AF chief of staff is neither a bomber pilot, in the mold of Hap Arnold and Curtis LeMay, or a fighter pilot, in the mold of the last 30 odd years, but a cargo man. He observes the differences it makes in how the Air Force works and runs, and what it buys (like two new fighter jets), mentioning the problems with pilotless drones and the A-10 Warthog (close support).

There were/are similar problems in the Navy--between the brown shoes and the black shoes--one set is the carrier types (who long ago vanquished the big gun battleship people) and the other is the submariners (Admiral Rickover's engineering heirs, like ex-President Jimmy Carter and Agweb's John Phipps).

"Culture" makes all the difference, whether it's in a big bureaucracy or a family setting--the Post has a piece on how hopeless engineers are in helping their kids do homework.

Technology and the Library of Congress Reading Room

For someone bookish living in the DC area I hate to admit my last visit to the Library of Congress reading room was 35 years ago (while researching CRT-based word processors, if you can believe it). It seems that the Internet, or our decline as a civilization, one or the other and take your choice, has resulted in a decline of readers actually physically using the reading room. See this piece from AHA.

It goes on to discuss other topics--how historians start their research (from the mountaintop, not from the path) and the dreaded "link rot"

(Every innovation has its downside, and link rot is one of the Web's)