The Food Absolutist

The society promotes food absolutism as it is the profitable business, and what’s profitable may not always be value driven.
Interest rate cycles suggest that everyone living today will come to see today as a time of great opportunities and not a crisis. The Time the interest rates hit zero (near zero), the start of a century-long inflation. I have mentioned this prior that hyperinflation does not really mean Zimbabwean inflation, but it definitely means double digit interest rates as high as 20% in a few cases. We have lived through this historical time prior and we will live it again, mainly our children.
But what really concerns me with such a probable outlook is that how will the society feed itself? Food is at the heart of inflation. And if you thought the food was expensive today, you really need to brace up for what can happen to you daily bread and butter tomorrow.
Everything is connected in time. So whether it will be the food prices blamed for inflation or otherwise, the net result is that food will get expensive. What better time to discuss the future of food, but now when it has started to acquire a cult? Society is talking about food insecurity, a connection of taste with income, food inequality, food movement, food fashion etc. Credit based growth has brought us so far that we have started using food as a differentiator of class.
Well, extremity is human nature. We live from one extremity to another, in-between finding that momentary bliss we call balance. This balancing and unbalancing is how we create and destroy societies. The current extremity in eating habits within a community is small when compared to the divergence between global eating habits.
On one side, we have red peppers, raw oysters, spinach, mustard greens, and exotic fruits and on the other side we have rice, wheat, white sugar and potatoes. The more I understand the divergence between how the world eats, the more I realize how privileged I am and I was as a child to never miss fruits. I was taught to share as a child and I don’t remember missing a family dinner till well late in my teens. Shifting to Romania, a family farm house and a doting parent kept my food illusion alive. I was on another side of the food divide. This is why when my friend Ono returned from Kobe, seeing him craving for 3 euro sack (10 kilos) of apple, and witnessing his joy taking pictures to upload them back for his friends in Japan threw me in a chuckle. This innocent gesture motivated me to become the proud owner of few sacks of Jonathon Apples. We were doing food arbitrage, which had a seasonal and local flavor.
As Peter Diamond would put it, the search has a cost and even food arbitrage could become a reckless obsession. This is when food starts controlling the mind and it becomes more about taste than health, more about indulgence than a nutritional need. The very reason 17% of America is food insecure and 33% obese at the same time.
Markets may have been created for hedgers, but it’s the speculator extremity (imbalance) which gives it life. Speculators are about the mass market, about volume, about volatility. This is why it’s the inferior good that is exchange traded while the superior good is an off the shelf luxury. This also makes the future of food trickier. The time ahead will see inferior good quoted at a much higher premium compared to the superior goods. The analogy is similar to alternative energy and conventional energy. Alternative energy really grows and becomes efficient when crude remains above 50. So bio or natural foods or other superior foods could become mainstream as basic agro commodities (inferior food) reach a higher plateau.
Now one may say that can’t happen. Well, have we have not already seen things that we thought could never happen. Let’s assume it can. So what’s the way out? Diversify your food habits, be aware of substitutes, learn to overcome the addictive taste of white sugar, know that frugal eating is healthy, try as many local foods as you can, whether it’s nuts in India, plums in Romania or sushi in Japan. Be conscious that we eat to live and not otherwise.
When a single potato crop can ruin an economy and kill a million people in the great famine of 1845-49, it is somewhere linked with taste, pleasure, lack of diversification and inferior good. How a potato got Ireland on its knees might not find resonance with the countries recent debt crisis, but poor decision-making is at the heart of unmanageable risk. The cycle repeats with precision and society acts with imprecision and behaves as hapless as the previous generation 150 years back.
Solving the world’s hunger needs innovative thinking. The society promotes food absolutism as it is a profitable business, and what’s profitable may not always be value driven. Valueless drivers have a limited life. The food absolutist may die tomorrow as he fails to allocate his income on inferior goods while speculators ride on the food wave. How foolishly comfortable can you get knowing that 7% of the cocoa is owned by a hedge fund from London, who is hoarding the commodity to take it higher? Human beings will always be shortsighted and myopic. This is why potato economics is destined to bomb.