Let's start from your most recent bite of Peeled Snacks and go backwards.  We have to start before you eat the snack, because if we were to move forward from there you would be so swept up in the deliciousness of our treats that you wouldn't be able to pay attention to the conversation.  And trust me, this is a conversation worth paying attention to.

So you took your Peeled Snack out of a bag that's made from oil- it started as a leaf or a dinosaur or a sea-sponge and got squished and pulverized for a few eons until it was pumped from underneath some desert by a well-armed "company man".  That oil was then shipped, via OIL, to China or Brazil where it was squished into a bag, and then shipped to the US, where someone sold it to us.  They shipped it to us using, yes, oil.

Then there's the fruit.  Our peaches and almonds and some other fruit came from down the road from our factory, but a lot of it, a LOT of it, came from far, far away.  Apples, for instance, are no longer profitable to be harvested in the US (labor's too expensive), so they get grown across the ocean before being shipped to the US.  California apricots are different from Turkish apricots, and our customers prefer the former Ottoman variety, so those too come from FAR away, via oil.

Cashews CAN'T be grown in the US- it's illegal (they too easily can be made into hooch), so they get shipped in from abroad (Mexico or India).  Cracking through their tough shells require roasting, and ALL of this requires labor, labor, labor- that's a lot of cars driving a lot of miles across California's Central Valley, or through India's Western Ghats, or along National Highway 112. 

Okay, where did you buy your Peeled Snack?  At a supermarket?  At a gym?  Wherever you bought it, it wasn't born there.  It had to ship there, burning more oil, but unfortunately it RARELY shipped there from the factory where it was made.  It probably shipped from a distributor to whom WE shipped the snacks.  That's a lot more burnt squished dinosaurs there.

Okay, how did you get to that grocery store or gym?  I bet you didn't use a sail boat.  Chances are you drove at least part of the way, employing a re-constituted sea crustacean en route.

All this oil and then some goes into so simple a product as Peeled Snacks, the simplest, most straight-forward snack in the UNIVERSE.  That's a lot of black gold, and the impact upon the environment isn't calculated in any way into the price of the commodity.  Likewise, we try not to calculate it into our price to you- we usually front the cost of shipping, cushioning our consumers from the cruel cost of crude.

Every business in America is suffering from the cost of oil and our reliance upon it.  I don't know exactly what can be done to get past the expense, but if nothing's done about energy policy in the next couple of years, consumers like Peeled Snacks will inevitably pass the cost onto our consumers.... or go out of business.

Ugly business, that oil business. 

Posted by iankusc at 04:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I type, our senators are debating the fate of the next generation of Americans- they're debating how healthy they'll be, they're debating from where they'll get their energy, and they're debating just what form they'll take- the form of human beings, or the form of giant, swollen, fat-filled grapes.  The consequences of what are happening right now can be jokingly conveyed via extreme imagery.  But have no doubts- next to war funding, NOTHING in congress in the next 5 years will be more impacting.

At stake right now- subsidies for farmers producing cash crops; land zoning and usage practices; sponsorship of (thus far) frightfully inefficient ethanol factories; issuance of food stamps; and import/export policies.  But none of this, NONE of this, is as important as the COMMODITY TITLE!  The Commodity Title, in short, determines how commodities are measured in the marketplace, and therefore what makes for the best deals.

It's impact in the commodities market- sugar and corn subsidies get paid out per bushel without a cap.  A bushel is a LOT of corn, and it enters the marketplace at an unnaturally low price.  Were the subsidy to be capped, or the portions for the subsidy measured in smaller amounts, then worthless sugar wouldn't be the cheapest thing on the market.

It's impact in your home- the Commodity title determines FDA standards for measuring ingredients.  The FDA used to measure a "portion" as 250 calories, but 5 years ago the Food Bill, thanks to corporate meddling, made it so that every corporation could calculate it's own portion.  What's more, it established that the calculation of any ingredient in a portion less than .5 grams isn't a portion at all.

Let's take an Oreo cookie as an example.  I used my trusty right-hand-website, "The Daily Plate", which has all the nutritional info from, well, all the food in America, and lets you calculate the dietary impact of what you're eating.  It even factors in structured diets like the Atkins plan, and helps you make dietary decisions.  And it helps bloggers do research on why American food sucks. 

Okay, so I put in "Oreo Cookie" and get the nutritional info from the label, where a portion is listed as 1 cookie, 130 calories.  It also lists the saturated fat content as 0 grams.  Were the portion size to be the old standard of 250 calories (2 cookies), 0 grams of saturated fat would suddenly, magically transform into 1 gram of artery cloggin gunk.  And the Commodity Title allows for this mis-information.

The Daily Plate is in no way to blame for this tragedy- they're offering a free service that lets those of us concerned with what we put in our bodies make really informed decisions; they're trying to provide the best information possible to consumers that deserve the facts.  But the Farm Bill right now makes the best information available totally corruptable to meet the demands of big business, and most consumers are none the wiser.

And aren't likely to be any more the wiser anytime soon.  The Farm bill, which might have had some hope of opening up in the Senate, is basically dead thanks to failed leadership.  So we're all going to continue eating cheap, crappy sugar and thinking it's good for us, probably for another 5 years.  It makes me sick, it makes you sick, it makes EVERYBODY sick.  This is the worst think being ignored in America right now....

Besides, perhaps, the price of oil.  But that's another topic.... 

Posted by iankusc at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)