Recent Reading on Poverty and Wealth in America

Tipped workers are more than twice as likely to live in poverty. 

Give everyone in America $11,395. A totally radical — yet possible — way to end poverty in America that will never happen.

How do you think wealth is distributed in America? Hint: it's not even close to being as fair as you think it is. (Caveat: the speaker sometimes uses the words "income" and "wealth" interchangeable but they're very different. Income is the money you make. It's a flow. Income comes in this year, and some of it leaves as expenses. Wealth is what you own. You can make a million dollars this year but have zero wealth. Conversely, a good saver — or a person who inherits wealth — can have little income but lots of wealth.)

Who are our oldest food makers?

Sam Edwards' ham house in Virginia peanut country.

I've been working on a spread for next spring's catalog about the oldest companies we work with. Some have been around for decades, some for centuries. We even have one that's a millennium old this year. It's been an interesting experience to think about them more deeply, bringing up lots of questions. Like, why are they still around? More importantly, how are they still around and making great food? How much did they have to change along the way? Who decided what to change and what not to change? How did they transition when their founder left the business? I ran across this article about why there are so many old companies in Japan that explains how traditional firms like Nintendo manage succession (these days it's often done by the owner adopting an adult into the family to run the business—a surprise to me).

Some of our venerable food makers and the year they got in business:

1014 Castello di Cacchiano olive oil in Tuscany

1731 Amarelli licorice in Cosenza

1880 Usinger liverwurst in Milwaukee Wisconsin 

1898 Rizzoli anchovies in Parma Italy

1900 Cope's corn in Rheems Pennsylvania

1900 Roi olive oil and sauces in Badalucco Italy

1903 Raye's mustard in Eastport Maine

1909 Broadbent cured meats in Kuttawa Kentucky

1925 Koeze peanut butter in Grand Rapids Michigan

1926 Martelli pasta in Lari Italy

1926 Edwards cured meats in Surry Virginia

1947 Benton's cured meats in Madisonville, Tennessee

 

Recent Reading on Wages and Resturant Tiplessness

This restaurant has a hybrid model with no tips: a fixed wage or a percent of the business, whichever is higher.

Do you tip baristas more if you pay by credit card?

"We're kind of taking the risk off the server and putting it back on the business." How going tipless changes the pay dynamics in a restaurant.

How many hours do you have to work to buy a beer? An admittedly flawed yet excellent comparison of minimum wage rates across countries.

Why aren't we as critical of design as we are of food?

"If you tasted some food that you didn’t think tasted right, you would assume that the food was wrong. But for some reason, it’s part of the human condition that if we struggle to use something, we assume that the problem resides with us.”

Jony Ive, Apple's chief designer
( iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch)

 

Recent reading (and watching).

Look how big chickens have gotten in the last sixty years.

A typical cow in the European Union gets a government subsidy of $2.20 a day which is more than the daily wage of 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.

Have you been eating sushi wrong (video)?

Jaques Pépin's omelet (video) totally changed how I cook eggs.