Sugar in America, or What can go wrong when you legislate localism.

Last week the difference between what America and the rest of the world pays for cane sugar hit a ten year high. America pays almost forty cents per pound. The rest of the world pays less than twenty cents.

The reason is America protects its ten thousand local cane sugar producers with legislated import restrictions. We can't buy the sugar that the rest of the world does. It's an old system, one we've had in one form or another since 1816. And, with such a long history, it's a textbook issue of how things can go strangely, bizarrely wrong when you legislate localism.

One bizarre effect has been on corn. Faced with high cane sugar prices engineers went to work to figure out how to reduce other foods to sugar. They found corn. It converts to sugar relatively easily, turning into corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup. However, it was still more expensive to harvest and convert it than to buy cane sugar.

Lucky us. Corn is subsidized by taxes. The subsidies lower the cost of corn by so much it makes business sense to replace cane sugar with corn syrup. Corn, it's useful to note, is usually grown with chemical fertilizers.

Now, in a bizarre turn of events, corn growers love high sugar prices, too. They support the import restrictions because it means there's more demand for corn.

The thing is, there's no need for us to be growing sugar cane.  It could even be bad for us to do so. There are very few places in America where the environment is suited to it. Ecologically speaking, it doesn't make much sense to grow something in an inhospitable environment. As James McWilliams wrote in his book Just Food, "An environmentally sound food system is one in which productive endeavors naturally gravitate to geographical locations where the impact on resources is minimized. In other words, producers prodce in the right places."

The Caribbean and Africa, however, are perfect environments to grow sugar cane.  That's  the right place to produce it. In fact they grow tons of it. They sell it to everyone else in the world. Except us. It's worth noting much of it is organic because poor farmers usually can't afford fertilizer.

So here's the final bizarre effect. Most of the places in the Caribbean and Africa that grow sugar cane are impoverished. They would love to do business with us and sell their natural, ecologically sound product. We don't let them. What we do instead is refuse their sugar but give them a significant amount of humanitarian and economic aid.

When you follow up these bizarre turns it may hurt your head. First we prohibit poor nations from selling us sugar. Then we use our taxes to subsidize corn growers for a substitute. Then we use more taxes to send aid to the poor nations.

How much more effective would it be to just let us do business with Africa directly, to not give handouts?

I wrote a previous post on sugar here.

Free Tickets, Italy in the Fall

The village of Castelvetro.

When I was setting up our 10th annual spring balsamic blowout sale I checked in with Roberta, one half the husband-and-wife partnership that make up La Vecchia Dispensa, our longtime source for balsamic vinegar. I usually hit her up for a wholesale discount that I then double or triple to pass along for the sale.

This year she came back with a better idea. She had some funding from the regional government. She would give us tickets to Italy with a stay in her village, Castelvetro, and tour of Vecchia Dispensa's acetaia (vinegar factory). She told me to figure out how to give them away.

So here's how. Two pairs go to winners of a video contest. One to a customer winner, one to an employee winner. (You' don't have to be a customer—anyone can enter.) Shoot any video you'd like, three minutes or less. Just make sure it has something to do with balsamic. The connection can be paper thin. We're looking for creativity and fun, not film or acting talent. It's due by March 31, 2010.

The prize, I must say, is pretty awesome. Two tickets to Bologna, Italy. You set the terms of your stay as long as its between September 1 and November 30 this year. Stay the whole time if you'd like. Go wherever you want. You just need to fly in and out of Bologna. 

Let me stop for a second and say, while it's nice to visit Italy any time of year, I'm particularly partial to fall. The food at harvest's end is great. There are wild mushrooms and game. The tourists have gone back to their holes. The temperatures are cooler but not icy. You can buy a couple sweaters and, guaranteed, you're a year ahead of the fashion cycle in the U.S.

OK, back to the prize. Roberta will give you a private tour of her acetaia and put you up in a swanky little hotel. You'll also visit a Parmigiano-Reggiano maker, incredible on its own right. After that you're on your own.

There are three minutes worth of more details on the contest here.

The videos from the current competition are here underneath Lois's video about the rules. 

With ten days left to go I think the contest is wide open. I can't wait to give this prize away.

Van Halen: Operations Experts

I'm reading Atul Gawande's latest book, The Checklist Manifesto. It's about how checklists have enabled incredibly complex tasks, like flying airplanes, and how they've improved results in other tasks, like surgery.

Checlists are essentially SOP's (Standard Operating Procedures). And they suffer the same flaw. It is easy to skip a step or mis-perform an action. If a mistake happens when you're following a checklist it can be very hard to catch.

Turns out  David Lee Roth had thought of that already — and figured out a solution.

When Van Halen was touring in the 1980's they had a massive checklist. It was over 100 pages long. They toured with a huge stage set, way bigger than most rock acts. The primary purpose of the checklist was to tell each stadium's contractor what to put where. Stage microphones here. Amplifiers there. The case of Aqua Net over there. Etc. Problem is, on such a tight rock and roll schedule, what with being drunk most of the time and carrying on, how could they tell if their instructions were followed?

Roth, the lead singer, would slip an item in the check list. Deep inside, buried among the tasks, somewhere on page 55 or so, would be Article 126: "There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation."

When he arrived at the show he'd check for the bowl of M&M's. If it had brown ones he'd demand the contractors review the entire checklist.

It's not a foolproof fix, of course. But as far as quick visual cues I think it's kind of brilliant. A trick worth borrowing.

It reminds me of the wise words of Homer Simpson. "Rock stars. Is there anything they don't know?"

Does buying local reduce fuel consumption? Redux

In November I wrote this post about how long distance shopping may use less fossil fuel than buying locally.  I created scenarios on the back of the proverbial envelope but I felt they were probably in the ballpark.

If you don't want to trust my half-assed calculation it turns out someone else with far more cred has done the math. They reached a similar result. A chap from Carnegie Mellon wrote a paper on the topic in the Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. No, I'm not a subscriber. He was interviewed in Celia Barbour's recent Oprah.com article about online shopping (which mentions Zingerman.com having "the perfect Reuben"). Here's an excerpt:

I couldn't reconcile my growing habit with my purported support for sustainable eating. 

Then I talked to Christopher Weber, research assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, who recently co-wrote a study on the carbon footprint of e-tailing and found that it's surprisingly modest -- if you buy direct from the producer.

"The biggest reason you see greenhouse-gas savings is that you don't drive to and from the store," he says. Indeed, "customer transport" accounts for 65 percent of the energy spent on traditional shopping. "Then the store itself needs to be lit and heated," he said. Add to that distribution and warehousing, and the UPS guy starts to look more and more like Al Gore.

Here's a link to Chris's entire paper. If you want to lower your food carbon footprint he gives this advice:

...dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG [Green House Gas] reduction than buying all locally sourced food.

Last but not least, the caveat I gave in my last post still stands. There are many good reasons to buy local foods—especially vegetables in season. For one, they usually taste better.

Behold the Power of Cheese

Last time I got punched in the eye protecting someone's virtue I put a raw steak on it. Now there's a vegetarian solution. Turns out I could have used cheese.

From the annals of awesome, here's an article on how Olympian Lindsey Vonn is treating her skiing injury with what amounts to cream cheese.

Auteur Design

 Today, a link to an article from the New York Times about Apple and design that, at least to me, has words that ring true. While I think the author is misrepresenting wisdom of the crowd and he completely ignores customers and users—the only ones we design for, after all—he shines a light on the very idiosyncratic, weird, personal parts of creativity that I think are very important. The  strange combination of data and instinct. The power of one person to make an impact. The thoughtfulness and deliberation. And to some extent, the loneliness.

For me, during the process of design, there is constant tension. It's a three way tug of war between what I learn and hear from others, what I know exists, and what I want to be. All three change my mind, change the thing I'm designing. That's not just when I'm working on the website or catalog. It's during any act of creativity. Writing, cooking, even, I daresay, designing a training program. After all, when it's done well, I firmly believe business is an act of creativity.

Full link here.

Excerpts:

The fashionable recipe for nurturing new ideas these days emphasizes a kind of Internet-era egalitarianism that celebrates the “wisdom of the crowd” and “open innovation.”

In the auteur model there is a tight connection between the personality of the project leader and what is created.

Mr. Jobs, of course, is one member of a large team at Apple, even if he is the leader.

Great products, according to Mr. Jobs, are triumphs of “taste.” And taste, he explains, is a byproduct of study, observation and being steeped in the culture of the past and present, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then bring those things into what you are doing.”

The Jobs formula, say colleagues, relies heavily on tenacity, patience, belief and instinct.

He is also a skilled listener to the technology to judge when an intriguing innovation is ready for the marketplace.

Underployment

Unemployment figures — currently running around 15% in Michigan, about half that in Ann Arbor  — count people who are actively looking for a job. If you stop looking you're no longer considered unemployed. If you have a job that's not full time, or not as full time as you want, you're not considered unemployed either.

The last group are the folks who, in my personal lexicon, I call underployed. They'd like to work more but they can't. The work isn't there.

This December, if you you talked to the temporary crew who worked at ZMO, you probably found lots of the underployed. I met a few:

There was a self-employed man who ran his own moving, cleaning and landscaping business. It was slow so he came to work for us (plus he wanted to see how we did what we did).

There was an Michigan MBA who has her own consultancy. It was a little slow. She also wanted a peek inside Zingerman's.

There was a graphic designer whose own business was a little slow. He always thought it'd be interesting to see how we worked.

There was a person who worked for a major resort hotel on Mackinaw Island. December is a slow season for island resorts on the Great Lakes.Guess why she applied? Same story: she knew about Zingerman's and wanted to work "inside."

We were certainly blessed, in a sad and perverse way, with an abundance of riches in our crew this December. Unemployment and underployment were rampant. In the next few years, unemployment may subside. But when you’re a good company you can often find the underployed. They're interested in who we are, how we work. The experience they had this year may mean some come back. Or they’ll tell other underployed friends.

My favorite crew story wasn't about underployment, though. There was one man who had a full time job. He worked for us for only one reason: to buy a ring so he could — in his words,"properly" — ask his girl of ten years to be his bride.