Recent Reading

A nice article on the inspiring work of Jonny Hunter and his Madison, Wisconsin-based Underground Foods. Among many other things, they make a very fine summer sausage. 

How our slate cheese boards are made: images.

Singles Day, November 11, is China's Cyber Monday. Alibaba, China's biggest online retailer found out bra size could indicate spending power. Correlation? Causation? Who cares. Data marketing is weird. 

Recent reading on meat

The lack of small, local slaughterhouses is often cited as one of the obstacles getting in the way of you and me buying affordable meat from small, local farmers. There's a bill being proposed to change slaughterhouse oversight rules in a way that would make it easier for them to get off the ground. The article quotes from some people we work with like Will Harris and Greg Gunthorp.

One argument against raising animals for meat is that it redirects calories to animals that we could otherwise eat. Except...

"...most of the feed that livestock eat is not edible by humans. Globally, just 18 percent of animal feed is made up of grains or other crops that people might otherwise eat. The rest is crop residues, grass, and waste from milling grain and other food processing. And so, despite the inefficiency of converting calories to meat, animals are able to give humans access to energy that they wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise."

Many more interesting points in the article Can meat ever be environmentally friendly?