At first I thought it was pretty funny (ha ha, who are the dummies buying this – I’m all for expensive tea, but when it’s good), but then realized – this is 3 times cheaper than buying a cup of tea at the Starbucks :-/

Starbucks: [[SBUX]]

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There’s been some talk on Twitter about food prices. Normally I avoid thinking about how much I spend on food, ’cause it’s a lot. But today I faced the ugly truth.

How does this compare to prices where you are?

For reference, that’s a 5lb (2.27kg) bag of potatoes, about 1.5lb (700g) of cherries, and 10 medium figs per box. Obscene-looking root is horseradish.

Green – organic, orange – conventional.

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By the way… mushrooms are super-retainers of radiation. Most we buy are probably hydroponic, safe from “natural” exposure. But mushrooms are often irradiated to keep them fresh longer, and that’s also radiation. The solution is to buy organic or avoid.

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And I noticed things go out of stock a lot faster (credit issues? other reasons for stocking less?), which means the prices go up quite often. It’s been happening for at least 18 months now.

Food inflation is rampant, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar is doing really well.

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FDA Allows Irradiation of Produce

The U.S. government will allow food producers to irradiate fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce in order to kill organisms like E. coli and salmonella. It is the first time that the FDA has allowed any produce to be irradiated at these levels.

Advocates for food safety condemned the agency’s decision, and asserted that irradiation lowers nutritional value, creates unsafe chemicals and ruins flavor.

Source: NYT

New Generation of Drug-Producing GM Crops Could Threaten Food Supply and Devastate US Farmers

A new generation of genetically modified (GM) crops, engineered to produce pharmaceutical or industrial products and ingredients, poses an even more serious threat to health and the environment than older GM crops, the Union of Concerned Scientists has warned…

Most commercial genetic engineering to date has focused on making food crops more resistant to herbicides or pests. Even this degree of modification has raised concerns about cross-pollination and contamination of non-modified varieties, and the health impacts this could have on humans and wildlife.

Source: Naturalnews.com

FDA Admits Cloned Meat, Milk May Have Already Entered Food Supply

Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products.

I’ve read similar news in regards to the U.K. (Great Britain). Outrageous!! I’d like to see the FDA people eat this cloned meat exclusively for a year. After all, it’s “safe”.

Source: Reuters

The Doomsday Seed Vault

This is actually old news, I just wanted to bring it to the attention of people who might have not heard about this.

After several years of planning and digging, the world has its first secure, deep-frozen repository for backup supplies of seeds from hundreds of thousands of plant varieties that underpin agriculture.

• Norway paid for construction of the vault, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates paid to ship the seeds.
• Each country owns and has access to the seeds they have deposited.
• Its official name is “The Svalbard Global Seed Vault” and it has a maximum capacity of 2,250,000,000 seeds.
• The seeds are stored at a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit.

There’s more to it… Along with Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, Syngenta and Monsanto are involved as well. These are the most evil organizations in my book. Are they worried they will contaminate all food with their GMO’s? Maybe not exactly worried; I think that’s their plan – to contaminate everything – and they’re just collecting these natural non-GMO bio-diverse seeds for their own use. Not a shadow of doubt in my mind.

In the last couple of years, seed producers across the U.S. have been bought out by Monsanto. There’s this consolidation going on… Soon enough you won’t be able to buy non-GMO seeds.

60 Minutes and NYT

PETA Offers $1 Million Prize to Producer of Artificial Meat

Idiots.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has announced plans to offer $1 million to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

Source: NYT

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Dow Jones Industrial Average P/E ratio stills stands at a lofty 27.22 (including dividends), it was around 28.2 on June 8 when I checked last. Something’s gotta give: earnings must rise (unlikely judging from the latest announcements) or the market goes down some more.

A High Price for Healthy Food
As of Dec, 2007 “energy-dense munchies cost on average $1.76 per 1,000 calories, compared with $18.16 per 1,000 calories for low-energy but nutritious foods.” Since then healthy food went up in price even more, and more than the junk in percentage terms.

We’re doing our part in staying out of hospitals by eating well, shouldn’t we be able to deduct some of our grocery bills? or at least pay less in medical taxes?

Corn

Some corn uses are: feed for livestock, heating, plastics, fabrics, high fructose corn syrup.

This year corn crop is ruined by rains and floods. Prepare for much higher food prices next year, and possibly shortages. I’ll be looking for some corn stocks or funds, don’t want to try futures since I haven’t really figured out the stock part of the market yet. If you have any ideas on how to play this situation, let me know.

Corn field under water (this is Pennsylvania, Iowa has been flooded much worse).
Photo credit – courane01

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http://www.thepetitionsite.com/169/petition-to-stop-bill-c51

Proposed by the conservative government this bill will severely restrict natural products, and heavily favours pharmaceutical drugs.

Even if you’re personally not interested in taking vitamins/supplements, please recognize this as a personal freedom-limiting law and protest. You don’t have to be a Canadian to sign the petition.

Does this seem reasonable to you?

Canada’s Police State Bill C51 Camouflaged as a Health Bill

Under Bill C-51 the State could:

•   Enter private property without a warrant
•   Take your property at their discretion
•   Dispose of your property at will
•   Not reimburse you for your losses
•   Seize your bank accounts without a warrant
•   Charge owners shipping and storage charges for seized property
•   Store your property indefinitely
•   Levy fines of up to $5,000,000.00 and/or seek 2 years in jail per charge
•   Will not have to report seizures to a court.
•   They can charge you just for talking about or promoting natural alternatives

Bill C-51 full text

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Frustrating…

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I’ve touched on the topic of ethical investing before. While our investments aren’t blameless (nobody can say mining is harmless), this company takes the cake for being the most evil — MONSANTO.

They sell death, and use some pretty underhanded tactics to attack their opponents. Here’s an abridged list of things Monsanto has created. Each one on its own has the ability to destroy or at least seriously cripple humans. Imagine the eventual effect of these 4 combined.

• Aspartame (NutraSweet) – Formaldehyde Poisoning, Health Destruction, & Lawsuits
• Genetically – Engineered “Frankenfoods”
• rBGH (Posilac) – Breast Cancer and Prostate Cancer
• Monsanto Terminator Technology – Worldwide Famine & Starvation

The only way to fight this is to vote with your wallet:
– do not invest in Monsanto;
– do not buy products they have “touched”.

Sometimes I wonder… what do people who lead this company think of the future and the future of their children? They aren’t able to control their GMO technology: it has contaminated several non-GMO batches of rice in the U.S., for instance. So do they genuinely believe that their GMO foods and rBGH-contaminated milk are safe? Or are they so arrogant as to believe that they will be able to somehow avoid these foods? Do they have a vault of all-organic seeds, similar to Norway’s Doomsday Vault? Some things are much more important than profit for today.

This is a bit off topic. I’m going to humour my inner conspiracy theorist. As we know pharmaceutical companies must invent chemical drugs, even though alternative healing methods exist, such as herbs (by the way, most earlier chemical drugs were derived from herbs). They have to modify the herbs not because those aren’t effective, but because they cannot patent something that exists in nature and charge exorbitant amounts of money for it.

Now, imagine for a minute this scenario (I’ll be the first to admit, it’s crazy and outlandish, but not impossible): Monsanto has patented their GMO technology and charges some crazy licensing fees to farmers – even those whose crops got accidentally contaminated.

Since food provides building blocks for our bodies, it’s reasonable to assume and, in fact has been proven, that when you eat GMO foods, parts of it remain in your body. Genetically-modified particles become part of your digestive system etc. So what if Monsanto comes along and says that you’ve become a user of their patented GMO technology and therefore, it has every right to charge you licensing fees. They will essentially own you – a modified organism at this point.

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Wikipedia: “Inflation is defined as the increase in the price of some set of goods and services in a given economy over a period of time. It is measured as the percentage rate of change of a price index. A variety of inflation measures are in use, because there are many different price indices, designed to measure different sets of prices that affect different people. Two widely known indices for which inflation rates are commonly reported are the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures nominal consumer prices, and the GDP deflator, which measures the nominal prices of goods and services produced by a given country or region.”

There’s this method of figuring out commodity valuations: you take an index value (i.e., DOW) and divide it by the price of a commodity in question and see how much you can buy. Often oil and gold are compared using this index “buying ability”. I don’t know if there’s an official name to this method/formula.

Since hard assets (commodities) are usually a better indicator of inflation than paper assets (stocks and bonds) this can be an interesting inflation exercise.

Here’s the science behind the madness (see chart if this too cryptic):

• In December 1999 the US markets were at their peak. Let’s compare peak to today.
• I then found oil, natural gas, gold and silver prices and 4 agricultural commodities corn, soy, wheat and rice prices – average from Dec’99 and today at close. And I’ll tell you, historical data is still hard to find despite the amount info available on the Internet. Most of the data is not free, so I had to dig up some government reports.
• I divided the index values (DOW and S&P) by commodity prices which gave me the number of units of each commodity I could buy for one unit of the index.
• Then I figured out the difference in the buying ability of the indices, expressed as percentages, Dec’99 vs. now. They should really be negative numbers but I need them to be positive for the final calculation.
• And here’s the payoff: I took the average difference, divided it by 4 (between the 4 commodities in each table) and then divided that number again by 8 (eight years).

Commodity price increases show these inflation rates, unajusted for GDP: 7.72%, 8.50%, 6.60% and 7.56%, with an average being 7.60%.

True inflation rate cannot be measured without factoring in the GDP deflation rate of course, so what is the average U.S. GDP over the past 8 years? 2007 GDP will be adjusted some months later, so I’ll use the latest estimates.

Inflation rate we got from the commodity prices increases (7.60%) – average GDP growth rate (4.70%)
= 2.90 % average annual inflation over the last 8 years

This is supposedly the true inflation rate. This doesn’t feel right, does it? I mean we all know that the inflation is way above this number. We know it every day, when we get out our wallets to pay for stuff. So what’s wrong with the picture? Let’s look up the GDP definition:

GDP = consumption + investment + (government spending) + (exports – imports)

Break it down some more…

Government spending or government expenditure consists of government purchases, which can be financed by seigniorage, taxes, or government borrowing. It is considered to be one of the major components of gross domestic product.

So as long as the government keeps borrowing money in sufficient amounts, the economy will be okay on paper? Amazing.

“Inflation continues till common man is completely sucked out of money, then recession sets in and continues till he becomes suckable again.” – B. J. Gupta

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