Urban Food Chains

the links between diet and power

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A voice from the past

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Twenty five years ago Europe was in a state of flux. Many differing political agendas were being promoted in the belief that drafting the right regulations would somehow automatically unlock all the expectations with little or no further discussion or purpose.

If there was a single example to illustrate the processes involved, you will not be surprised to learn that I happen to think that competition is  sine qua non  for civilised society. Considering the central role of competition in a liberal economy, it is disturbing that at no point during the closing years of the 20th century was there a single EU-backed discussion or study of commercial planning permission for urban populations. At the time, there was just one voice to be heard in the darkness, challenging the naif notion that competition would somehow develop unhindered in a bed of thistles, that we would somehow recognise this state of innocence when it emerges from the shadows. The voice was that of French deputy Jean-Paul Charié. He presided over la commission de la production et les Echanges, publishing a parliamentary report into dysfunctional competition. At the time I was a production sub on a weekly trade title . Intrigued by the subject matter and knowing that this was a one-off opportunity, I phoned the French parliament and spoke to Chariés office. I was pleasantly surprised to get a phone call back from Charié in person, when he promised to post me a copy of the report to get the full story. Sadly, I never spoke to him again, since he died, but his published work casts a bright light on topics that thenceforth could  be debated in public with impunity. The evidence he collected on commercial malpractices came from all over Europe, painting a rather downbeat picture of how ethical standards in  retailing had declined while managing to appear outwardly presentable.

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fish jellyfish

What makes Scottish smoked salmon special?

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Environmental campaigners in Scotland have been spied on for years by private surveillance contractors. Many of them have been trained by former military staff, who are given a free hand to operate outside the law. They are collecting higly sensitive personal data in ways that would land a legitimate operator in jail very rapidly.

Farmed salmon is Scotland’s most lucrative food sector: it does not occupy such a widely coveted position without being controversial. Early fish farms in Norwegian fjords were used as a model for similar developments in Scotland. However, Norway’s deeper fjords have stronger currents that prevent uneaten food from accumulating beneath the caged fish. The Scottish experience, on the other hand, has seen abject failures, leading to financial crises in the sector.

Rather than lose face, salmon farming investors hired the surveillance skills of an Afghanistan veteran. The ex-soldier targeted former fly fishing guide Corin Smith and another campaigner, Don Stanford after the pair filmed appalling conditions of young farmed salmon. They were crawling with jellyfish larvae, called sea lice. These parasites affect both wild and farmed salmon alike: in the later chronic stages, the skins of the infested fish become red  and blotchy, making them unsaleable for many end uses. A reliable way of shifting sea lice infested fish is to turn it into smoked salmon and look the other way when the bins go out. Instead of resolving the technical issues which dogged the irretrievably blighted fish farms, the investors paid huge sums of money over many years for surveillance operatives to dig out any personal information on the environmentalists, who were campaigning in the public interest. It is ironic that Scotland’s biggest food export earner should have a skeleton like that in its cupboard.

 

fish jellyfish seafood

Of jellyfish and drifters (and coral)

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For years now we have made doomsday predictions of what would happen when the earth started to heat up in earnest. Covering two thirds of the globe’s surface, the oceans are an obvious places to start looking for the intense and complex lifestyles of people like the Baujau, who have built a way of life in pockets of sheltered coastline. The groups live by the sea in the Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia. Perched atop marginal menisci of tidal sand, their houses are in constant need of repair. The fisher folk  take in huge lungfuls of air and freedive down to the reef, 20 metres below. Dives to 12 or 15 metres are common, compared to 5 metres for an active swimmer. A BBC team filmed them in action in 2020, ensuring that their way of life would be preserved for posterity. Women dive as routinely as the men, who will catch 15 kg or more in a morning’s fishing. One of the strongest freedivers filmed by the BBC used to be out at sea by 4 in the morning, and back on the shore around midday, with catches of about 15 kg. Having evolved bigger spleens, the Bajau divers can hold their breath for longer. Fisher woman Ima Baineng explains that the Bajau inherited their knowledge of fishing and the underwater world around them from their ancestors. She started diving at the age of four and went to sea with her father regularly from a very young age. “The corals are where the fish breed and if they suffer any damage, there won’t be any fish left,” she says.

 

The Bajau are completely committed to preserving the sea, which is hardly surprising since it keeps them fed. If, or when, life in the oceans fades away,  the Bajau will be the first group to feel the consequences. For now, there has not yet been a complete breakdown in the fishing, but there are growing numbers of damaged reefs and the Bajau lack technology to meet the potential threats head on. They are are politically active across the region: “From our ancestors to our great grandchildren we protect the coral,” says Mandor M Tembang. The Bajau efforts to preserve coral should be adopted as a standard for international conservation projects, argues Coral Reef Ambassador Muh Yakub, making the point that while Bajau coral management practice still works and is sustainable, there are good reasons for it to be supported.

Tuna are fearsome hunters and eat whatever the ocean currents bring.  In previous years, the composition of plankton around the world has been relatively stable. As the sea warms up, the effects on the food supply become clearer. The ocean can carry more nutrients, if the opportunity arises. Riding the wave are species that were once considered as lunch. Turning briefly to tuna, they were once major predators, preventing coastlines getting piled high with trailer loads of beached jellyfish. Now look closely at a fish that has been raised in a fish farm — and preferably with a microscope or a magnifying glass. You’ll need a reference picture too, just confirm that you know what you’re looking at. 

Start off on Wikimedia Commons to get an idea of what is available. Enter sea lice salmon in the search box and sit back, popcorn at the ready. I have just tried this: blink and you’ll miss it! To save time,  here’s a screengrab, showing three infested fish. In the top lefthand corner is a salmon (photographed in 2013); top centre an Atlantic farmed salmon and on the lefthand side again, an image of a brown trout retrieved from the publication of a book in 1910. Another sea lice picture, from the same publication occupies the top right hand corner, a 2020 diagram from Bergen University is centre left, while the 2010 picture of Loch Eilt was part of a photographic survey of the UK. How I came to snag a 1921 book cover on growing roses is a total mystery.

Now I’m not convinced that this even a drop in the ocean of general knowledge and I would say that there is an elephant in the room, getting in the way of some fairly basic facts that are uncomfortable for some folk.

Let’s start with sea lice, otherwise known as jellyfish larva. They used to have much lower survival rates in previous centuries, needing to embed themselves in the skin of an active fish soon after hatching. In the open waters of the world’s oceans, sea lice are way down the food chain, scattered far and wide. But a fish farm is an oasis of opportunity for countless creatures, even such a  random life form as a jellyfish. Hold that thought for a moment and ask yourself “Does a jellyfish ever decide anything?” No sooner have we posed the question than we have a ready answer: no way. It’s quicker than asking a jellyfish, for sure. They are simply not great communicators and it’s not personal: it’s a species thing.

Back at the fish farm, arrivng sea lice are greeted by the sight of more fish flanks than they could ever hope to get their teeth into. Beneath some of the fish cages there are piles of uneaten feedstock, that literally slipped through the net, not to mention wild fish cleaning up on the leftovers from above. By the time all this has been redistributed, another batch of tiny sea lice have hitched rides on both wild and captive fish. Life goes on.

There is something of a paradox in the way that creatures which are totally incapable of navigating in any sense of the word, should end up in such well-adapted feeding stations. The correlation between the extensive growth of fish farming and the resulting scourge for wild and captive populations is too well established to be talked down. Around the world, as well as exemplary sites, there are locations where ocean drifters have been carried to the kind of habitats that once upon a time, a species could only dream about. In the meantime, reputable fish processors reassure their customers that their hands are clean. Only top grade fish enter their premises and none but the finest salmon is handled on their lines.

Alongside the growth in fish farming has been the development of a mass market for smoked salmon. Conveniently for some fish farmers, it is possible to recover some marketable product even if the skin is less than perfect. Not that anyone would ever do such thing, you understand.

Drifters and evolution

Earlier in this blog I touched very briefly on the domestication of species that we now regard as part of the family, so to speak. The timespan for this process is counted in millennia, hundreds of generations. Is evolution a process that can be directed or driven? Or is it a developmental drift? Is this even a topic worth investigating? Share your thoughts in a comment and give me a break from folk with cryptic email addresses and obscure sales messages.

More follows later if there is a demand for it…

animal products fruit royal-commission

Disjointed thinking on prices.

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Responding to Linlithgow’s insistence on the need for market data to be available on a regular basis, a senior MAF official, Mr RJ Thomson, submitted a more detailed version of the government’s reservations over broadcasting raw price data without a standardised format or structure. Thomson told the commission that MAF was working on a “comparative index” that would somehow make sense of wholesale and retail price movements. It couldn’t be done in the 1920s and I’m not convinced we could do it in 2025. Take the example of a pig producer with slaughter weight bacon pig to sell in 1925. The creature is sold to a curer, who kills the animal and splits it into two sides of bacon. So far we have two mirror image halves of the same animal. One side of bacon goes to a Drury Lane emporium, the other to a Tyneside grocer on the east coast. The cuts that are taken off a London side of bacon, sold in a well-to-do part of London will earn more than the side of bacon shipped to Newcastle, even when the higher shipping costs are factored in. It is so predictable, but illogical, and index numbers won’t explain it.

It is not difficult to spot a flaw in M AF’s argument: the cumulative effect of the changes made at each stage are not counted as part of the process.  Is this the only structural flaw?

 

 

royal-commission UK economy

What price data?

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The biggest challenge that faces  traders of all descriptions in arriving at a reliable price structure is the speed at which food products can change. Some animal products undergo a series of changes from farmgate to end user, others barely change at all. Some foods deteriorate very fast, while others are stable; add to this processes such as grading and the scope for differentiation can spiral out of control.   For a comparison to be usable, the items need a number of similarities, bearing in mind that not all users will have the same interests. At the risk of keeping alive a business myth, there were some retailers who chose to take a cut in their margins rather than push up prices. Some individual members of of the Linlithgow committee would have been very well informed about specific markets and sector, but less inclined perhaps to share.

The stability and predictability of sectors such as cereal crops, milling and baking followed a pattern of incremental development. The step from wholesale  trade to retailing, however, marks a sea change, reflecting the finer detail in retail distribution and home delivery costs. Investing in automotive resources ran deep in the bedrock of the economy of the day and was not going to be neither quick nor cheap.

The constant chivvying for market data was neither focussed for the most part nor available in the sort of unambiguous form that would have helped lay readers to learn more about the free market edifice. For instance, try explaining day-to-day shifts in retail pricing, arising from wholesale price changes that operate on a different basis. Even the denominations of coinage had an impact in the pricing of the retail world.

The ministry dug its heels in and refused to make a rod for its own back. The public should not be left to be baboozled by the high power antics of economists. How could such experts in their individual fields be left to explain the rise in mutton prices was a consequence of higher wool prices? After all, sheep are not killed for their wool.

raw

Bear necessities

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Spare a thought for Tex, a grizzly bear with form for breaking, entering and… eating. It should come as no surprise that between fishing trips, Tex likes urban environments. Something to do with easy pickings and creature comforts, no doubt. Apparently, the Canadian state has teams of animal experts who monitor delinquent grizzlies, inter alia. Some weeks ago, Tex took a high-risk three-mile swim to Texada island off the coast of British Colombia: this 30-mile long sliver of land is also home to a human population of around 1,200 people. This particular bear has been forcibly relocated on a number of occasions, but the grizzly’s navigational abilities always triumphed. As is often the case, the conclusive options are difficult: cull the bear before human lives are lost; cull the bear after human lives are lost; the hardest one to adopt is to do nothing, even though it is the most logical to succeed in bringing about trust the long term.

 

 

insects

Marketing insects takes more than buzz words

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It is easy to make a case for raising insects as a food crop, the farming industry done this sort of thing all the time for some pretty unsavoury byproducts. However, it is hard to persuade western consumers that it could be cool to include insects in their daily diet. In parts of the world where insects are on the menu, the trade is a local business, more local loop than long haul. Ironically, increasingly affluent countries such as China are pushing up their meat consumption and cutting back on traditional specialities.

Writing in Sustainable Production and Consumption 49, Dustin Crummett notes a lack of food industry research into plant or insect products that might challenge meat in the weekly shop. The head of the insect institute, Crummett draws on philosophy and religion for a lot of his work: but his disappointment is unmistakeable.

His frustration arises from the difficulty of making one meal ingredient replace another. His argument is simple: lower resource ingredients mean less costly food. However, the additional habitat requirements and changing user profile can add costs that were once disregarded by economists. Counting a price calculation differently does not necessarily mean something costs less, it just costs differently.

Europe haulage horse lorry

Comparing muscles to motors

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Urban Food Chains has chipped away at a series of posts on the introduction of heavy machine guns which carried out a mechanised cull of thousands of working horses and pack animals. Intentionally or otherwise, the result was to clear the way for commercial motors of different sorts on British roads. Rule of thumb loading practices for draft animal at the time would have been about 20% bodyweight. Given that the working life of a horse can be up to 20 years and you have to spend four years feeding and training them before putting them to work, there was no point in sending fit young horses to battlefields to die within weeks of arrival having realised only 0.00520833 recurring of their potential work capacity (one month, a notional average) had they lived to work for 16 years, or close on 200 months.

 

Motor manufacturers, including foreign groups which set up assembly lines in the UK (notably Ford; General Motors; Chrysler) , throttled back their car production and turned over their car lines to two and three ton lorry chassises for subsequent adaptations / personnel carriers. Their component stocks were low specificity (eg alternators to a basic spec, multiple mount options).

 

There was nothing particularly complicated about a WW1 pick up truck, like most new products there was a lot of workshop time to anticipate. There were  20 or so manufacturers supplying the market, including high end folk like Thorneycroft (half tracks and road/rail hybrids). The core manufacturers turned out just over 20,0000 vehicles during the war, when entry level commercial motors were 500 pounds a go. That gave the makers a combined order book of around 10 million pounds over the four years of hostilities.

By the time the postwar economy had settled down, engines had improved in power and reliability and manufacturing margins had recovered. The world’s horse population was about 8 million less than at the turn of the century, and the conversion of agricultural businesses to new technologies was gathering pace.

Two related nuggets: when I moved to Crawley, one of my neighbours  once worked as a spy for the British government  while posted to the Afrika corps. His favourite anecdote was that the Ford lorries supplied to military buyers all used the same drive shaft construction. This meant that US army stationed in Europe; ae well as the relatively small number sold to Hitler’s army as well as the British army were interchangeable.  Final item: Hitler couldn’t fully fund diesel powered troops on the eastern front, so he sent horse units with troops riding in a sort of sidecar. You can see them from time to time in Pathé news footage of the day.

pre-history

New use for survey data

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Archaeologists have been able to identify and confirm the existence of historic remains buried in Mexican rainforest from existing geological survey data. Postgraduate researcher Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university discovered a Mayan settlement roughly the size of Edinburgh when he applied archaeological analytical techniques to an environmental study carried out a few years ago.

Using a combination of laser pulses and radar technology, known as “lidar”, experts can reveal buildings and other structures buried in otherwise impenetrable jungle. In his investigation, Auld-Thomas identified a reservoir and buildings that may have accommodated thirty to fifty thousand citizens at the peak of its era, believed to be between 750 and 850 AD. For now the site is known as Valeriana, after a nearby lagoon off the Yucatan peninsula.

The discovery of a site on the scale of Calakmul poses more questions than it answers. The extent of Mayan settlements combined with their inaccessibility, coupled with a lack of accessible contemporary records makes them a mystery to modern researchers.

domestication horse

‘Just watch my lips’

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Researchers have discovered that horses have a more extensive repertoire of facial expressions than previously thought. There are even some signals that are aimed at other species, such as ear movements. Visit the University of Portsmouth for more details. The project covered a wider range of situations than previously attempted, going beyond human-generated contexts. Some of the horses’ facial repertoire echo similar expressions recorded ith primates.