Food Inflation

Mark and I used to watch 60 Minutes as a matter of religion for many, many years. I still have some images in my head from some of the reporting, none more graphic than this one:

A food market place in China that had cages containing cats, monkeys, dogs....stuff we would consider pet-like but in China is considered food.

Now, this image is more than 20 years old. The story, of course, was that it was difficult to feed x-billion of people of China on a daily basis. If memory serves, as GDP goes up, birth rates go down. Nevertheless, as we look at milk and fish and agrarian products, there is no question that the simple price elasticity of supply and demand for food stuffs will make it more and more expensive to eat. It already has.

(I also have an image of their doing an expose of a chicken processing plant. It happened to be while we were eating dinner--a dinner of chicken. We do not watch TV while we eat anymore!)

I suppose that rather than euthanize the hundreds of thousands of unwanted animals in this country, we could merely ship them over to China--or wherever else--as a tasty treat. When you are hungry, I suppose the notion of food changes. Mark and I were talking just the other day (yes, I know that this will sound morose) that if Macy were really hungry, would she attack and eat us. (This did happen in an Innuit village during the flu epidemic in the early part of this century. I think that the villagers had already died; and the animals, dependent on humans for food, were merely trying to survive. But that is different than attacking and eating).

We also asked the obverse question. If we were hungry, would we eat her? Of course, these are stupid questions to ask, because until you are in such a situation you really do not know what you are truly going to do. I'm hoping that neither we nor Macy ever have to make that choice.

Anthony Bordain who is a chef, writer and TV personality wrote a book called . I picked up the book after hearing his being interviewed by Terry Gross on "Fresh Air". It was a remarkable interview. He spoke about how intimate the act of cooking your best and offering it to the guests in your home was. Of course, food offerings are culturally dependent. So if you were in China, Fluffy or Buster might be on the menu. In Peru, they serve guinea pig--it is a delicacy.

His book, The Nasty Bits, is titled after what one views from the fresh kill of a seal by the Inuit. What struck me about the interview was his reverence for the ritual of offering food--no matter what it was. Moreover, he spoke about the graciousness on the part of the receiver for consuming this fare---no matter how dissonant it might be from one's own eating habits. In fact, he stated that it was the ultimate exercise of arrogance, the ultimate offense, to refuse to eat what one was offered. I've referenced this interview before on my blog. So forgive my repeating it. Like the visual image, this radio interview is an auditory memory that I hope that I will always have.

I was reminded of the interview (and the book which I bought based on the interview) by seeing a snippet on "No Reservations" (his TV show) day before yesterday. I've never seen his show previously. He happened to be in Peru eating.....guinea pig.