Is Fair Trade unfair?

I’ll let the Adam Smith Institute tell it how it is on how unfair Fair Trade may be and what the alternatives are. You can download a pdf of the report Unfair Trade.

“Unfair Trade argues that for all its good intentions, Fairtrade is not fair. Firstly, by guaranteeing certified farmers a minimum price for their goods, it can distort local markets leaving other farmers even worse off. Secondly, only about 10 percent of the premium paid by consumers actually makes it to the producer, which makes it an inefficient way of helping the poor. Most importantly, Fairtrade does little to aid economic development, focusing instead on sustaining farmers in their current state.”

Fairer than fair trade chocolate

One of the founders of Malagasy, a company from the north of England making chocolate in Madagasca, tells how it was established to help with poverty on the island. Like The Grenada Chocolate Company, the idea is to make chocolate locally rather than export a cheap commodity. It’s known as Equitrade.

Writing on The Guardian’s Word of Mouth Neil Kelsall says:

“…we wanted to make it all in the country of origin – in our case, in Madagascar, with the Malagasy people. Yes, the whole process – farming, fermentation, drying, roasting, winnowing, grinding, mixing, refining, conching, tempering, moulding, packaging, and transportation.

This is what is termed as “added value”. Compared to exporting farmed cash crops (in this case cocoa) it’s worth many times more for Madagascar. Why do we do it? Because we want to help the people trade their way out of poverty rather than accept charity. If they acquire the skills and equipment they can make quality products that we want to buy whilst satisfying the stakeholders.”

I’ve often wondered if the same could be done for coffee but am told it needs to be roasted locally. Why then is so much coffee imported to Australia from Italy?

Expensive wine tastes better cheap wine – official

Expensive wine does taste better than cheap and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. From Underexposed.
The only trouble with wine is the smoke and mirrors in the marketing. Is an expensive wine really that much better than a cheap wine? Surely the differences in the yields of grapes and production can’t make that much difference.
It seems the fact that we sometimes enjoy more what the marketers tell us to enjoy could be true as demonstrated by a study from Antonio Rangel, an associate professor of economics at Caltech.

“Rangel and his colleagues had 20 volunteers taste five wine samples which, they were told, were identified by their different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45, and $90 per bottle. While the subjects tasted and evaluated the wines, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.

The subjects consistently reported that they liked the taste of the $90 bottle better than the $5 one, and the $45 bottle better than the $35 one. Scans of their brains supported their subjective reports; a region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, or mOFC, showed higher activity when the subjects drank the wines they said were more pleasurable.

There was a catch to the experiment, however. Although the subjects had been told that they would taste five different, variously priced wines, they actually had sampled only three. Wines 1 and 2 were used twice, but labeled with two different prices. For example, wine 2 was presented as the $90 wine (its actual retail price) and also as the $10 wine. When the subjects were told the wine cost $90 a bottle, they loved it; at $10 a bottle, not so much. In a follow-up experiment, the subjects again tasted all five wine samples, but without any price information; this time, they rated the cheapest wine as their most preferred.”

As the Boston Globe reported the experiment was conducted inside a scanner:

“…the drinks were sipped via a network of plastic tubes – that allowed the scientists to see how the subjects’ brains responded to each wine. When subjects were told they were getting a more expensive wine, they observed more activity in a part of the brain known to be involved in our experience of pleasure.”

Via 1001 Dinners, 1001 Nights

One river three regions, pick Chinon now

The Loire is three regions for wine – Muscadet, Savennières and Chinon. Each expresses its own character from its distinctive terroir.
In Chinon the reds are made mostly from cabernet franc although since the turn of the century up to 25 per cent of a blend can be Cabernet Sauvignon.
According to Eric

Assimov in the New York Times:

“In a good year, the wines offer savory berry flavors, with herbal, earth and mineral tones that add a welcome complexity. Good acidity makes them lively and refreshing, and they can age and improve for 10 to 20 years.
In a great year, these wines are absolutely delicious, with spicy raspberry and cherry flavors. They show intensity and elegance while remaining fresh and vivacious.
And make no mistake: 2005 was a great year, as the wine panel confirmed in a recent tasting of 25 bottles of 2005 Chinon.”

Europe’s top food destination is?

San Sebastian. When I was recently asked to write about the top five food trips for 2008 San Sebastain was right up there. now the BBC food blog has joined the fray.

“This is the city with more Michelin stars per head of the population than anywhere else in Europe and a reputation for being obsessed with food…

Over the course of three days we hopped from bar to bar and in each one we had fantastic food, served quickly and with great pride…

All this grazing is amazingly good value, but if you start to yearn for a more leisurely pace of eating then many of the bars have restaurant tables but you will pay more.”

The Chinese and Jews

Christian icons are scary to non believers. Who wants to walk into an Italian restaurant and see a carving of some guy being crucified? It is not surprising that trad Italian restaurants can be kinds scary if you are not a Christian.
Arthur Schwartz, writing in EGullet says:

“That Jews have an affinity for Chinese food is no secret. The Jews know it. The Chinese know it. Everyone knows it. Until the dispersal of middle-class Jews to the New York suburbs was complete in the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese take-out shops opened on every corner of the city. It was said that you could tell how Jewish a neighborhood was by the number of Chinese restaurants.”

Eggs Benedict 2.0

They look different and the taste is more concentrated than usual. Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 doesn’t even use the whites in his new version of Eggs Benedict. As Frank Bruni of the New York Times says in The Shape of Eggs benedict to Come:

“On the finished plate a column of egg yolk and a muffin-encrusted cube of fudgy hollandaise prop up an ultrathin, ultracrispy chip of Canadian bacon.
“At once concise and comprehensive, it’s perhaps the tidiest Benedict the egg-loving world has ever known. It’s quite possibly the best, yielding more yolk, more hollandaise and a more pronounced juxtaposition of textures in each bite.”

Ramsay the guru and the C word

He is topping the ratings on Channel Nine. A few weeks ago it was the C word. Last week he said fuck 80 times in a show and 10 expletives in 45 minutes. This week The Age’s Jim Schembri says “celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay actually channels a very healthy philosophy through his various exposes of managerial incompetence.” His brutal approach makes failig restaurant owners see their need for change.
Ramsay reached cult management guru status in the UK. And his Channel 9 assault is bringing his hard-nosed foul mouthed philosophy to Australia. The thing people don’t realise is that behind all the F—ing he really knows what he is talking about. When he walked out of Aubergine in London in 1997 to open Gordon Ramsay at Royal Hospital Road his loyal staff followed.
As Bill Burford said in the New Yorker last year:

“Gordon Ramsay, the only chef in London honored with three stars by the Guide Michelin, is not a monster. Ramsay, who is also the host of three uniquely adversarial in-your-face television shows (“Hell’s Kitchen” in the United States; “The F Word” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” in the United Kingdom), is not the most abusive person running a restaurant. And although a British undercover documentary once captured him in mid-torrent, profanities flowing in a diatribe directed at a young intern, earning Ramsay the title of one of the country’s “most unbearable bosses,” the people who work for him show a tenacious, irrational-seeming loyalty verging on love. But he does get angry, helplessly and uncontrollably angry—not an earthly anger but something darker—and has trouble knowing how to stop.”

Empty shelves worst in Coles

All  big grocery retailers are failing to keep their shelves stocked with the basic staples according to a study by the Bailey Group. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Coles and Bi-Lo have always been the worst ofenders but that they are now joined by Woolworths and IGA.

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