Recent reading

This is essentially how our strattu is made.

We buy meat like this.

Not like this.

Recent reading

Fast food "meat" is probably scarier than you think.

Many environmental footprint studies are flawed. This one appears to be pretty good. It shows the carbon footprint of a loaf of bread. You might be surprised at what's the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas. Hint: it's not transportation.

UPS taxed air and we cut back on shipping air. The same logic applies when you tax food — check out the eye-popping results of Philadelphia's soda tax.

Ibérico pig immigrants, coming to America.

Recent Reading, Food Visuals

A look at the scale of modern American farming.

What 2,000 calories looks like before you eat it.

Michael Pollan on labeling

 "I think we should have a lot more transparency about food, not less. I think we should label food if it contains pesticides, but nobody is talking about that. It's really peculiar that if you're not using pesticides, if you're organic, you have to pay to put a label on declaring you aren't using pesticides. It should be the other way around."

For my money Michael Pollan one of the most considered food thinkers of our time. His insights are profound but also realistic, sensible. This comes from a brief interview by New York Magazine's Grub Street about his new Netflix documentary Cooked, which I'm watching now. If you haven't read his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I highly recommend it. 

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?

The urban density math of snow plowing

I caught this piece today that said 25% of Detroit's streets were plowed a day after the city's biggest snowfall since 1974. Whether or not that's good or bad here's another way to look at it.

Detroit has 1,884 miles of residential side streets and about 700,000 residents. That means every resident has to pay for about 14 feet of plowing.

New York City has 6,000 miles of streets and 8.4 million people. Even though that measure includes all roads, not just residential side streets, the fact that there are so many more people means big per capita savings. Each New York City resident only has to pay for 4 feet of plowing—over a 70% savings.

It's just a reminder of the uphill battle depopulated cities like Detroit have. The people leave but the streets don't go away.

Detroit can't copy New York's density but they might want to borrow one of its tricks that can create savings. The Big Apple owns very few plow trucks. Instead they just mostly stick plows on garbage trucks, like in the picture above. 

One of the hidden problems for driverless cars

This evening in New York, NPR broadcast a live press conference on the commuter train crash that killed four people in the Bronx. The crash has been on the news constantly, it's occupied page one of the New York Times website every day for the past three days.

Meanwhile, in the same period of time, I'm sure dozens of people have been killed in automobile traffic accidents in the New York metro area and there's been virtually no news about them.

This happens all the time and it points to one of they key problems that driverless cars will have to overcome: people's reaction to transit death is much more extreme when the driver wasn't one of us—i.e. an unpaid amateur, driving themselves. 

It's not just the quantity of people who die in public transit crashes that make them news. It's the fact that none of the victims had control over their fate. It also doesn't matter how statistically better a bus or a train or a plane is. Traveling on a major airline is far safer than virtually any other mode of transit, including walking. But when people die on one everybody freaks out. 

Now imagine what will happen when no one is the driver. A driverless car can be ten million times better than a human-driven one at avoiding accidents. It will get in an accident, though, and someone will die. And when that happens, the repercussions—especially those for the law and insurance—will be tremendous. Let's hope that doesn't slow their arrival down too much, though. We've been waiting for them for a long, long time—the picture above, an unfulfilled promise from 1957.

It's Over

How long before we see "vintage" newspaper racks at antique shops and explain to our kids that for a hundred or more years we used to print yesterday's news on paper each morning and throw it in the trash before lunch?