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Most (if not all) people in Ireland are noticing rising food prices, which come on top of (and are connected to) the sharp rise in energy bills. Russia's invasion of Ukraine is one immediate factor, because it looks like the conflict will reduce Russian and Ukrainian food and fertilizer exports. Then there are the ongoing […]

But convergence in the East North Central portion of the Midwest is slower. Follow up to this post. Figure 1: CPI – food at home nationwide (bold blue), ERS forecast of February (light blue square), Midwest B/C cities (tan), East North Central (green). Midwest and East North Central series seasonally adjusted using X-13. NBER defined […]

We are aware that Sir Simon did not write the headline but:Banning ultra-processed food is not a nanny-state issue. It's common senseSo, on the basis of a laughable book from Dimbleby fils (the man, recall, who made his money selling fish finger sandwiches) we should ban:Fizzy drinks (sugary or sweetened); crisps and packaged snacks; chocolate, confectionery; ice-cream; mass-produced packaged breads and buns; margarines and other spreads; biscuits, pastries, cakes; breakfast 'cereals', 'cereal' and 'energy' bars; milk drinks, 'fruit' yoghurts and drinks; 'instant' sauces. Many preprepared ready-to-heat products including pies and pasta and pizza dishes; poultry and fish 'nuggets' and 'sticks', sausages, burgers, hot dogs, and other reconstituted meat products; and powdered and packaged 'instant' soups, noodles and desserts. Infant formulas, follow-on milks, other baby products.That is actually the recommendation. Or as it can be put, "Enjoy your turnips, serfs".We'd actually enjoy watching someone try to do this. But then we do have that anarchist love of watching riots and chaos in the streets. For there's just no way that this could be done in a free society or without them. Therefore it will not be done. But as we say, it would be fun watching someone try.Our own opinion is that this is just another version of the desire for sumptuary laws, as with the hopes for bans on fast fashion. If even the poor can have a change of clothes, interesting food, then what's the point of being privileged? Therefore those things that enable the poor to be as their betters must be banned.It's a very common and very unattractive part of human nature.The other way to look at this is as a proof of Hayek's contention in The Road to Serfdom. If government becomes the provider of health care - the NHS - then the population will be managed at the pleasure of the health care system.

Chris Edwards


The Biden–GOP debt deal adjusted work requirements in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) but did not cut the program's spending. Cuts are needed because SNAP outlays have exploded from $63 billion in 2019 to an estimated $145 billion in 2023. Congress will have another chance at reform later this year when the program is reauthorized as part of the farm bill.
One chronic failing of SNAP is that billions of dollars are lost through fraud and abuse. Individuals, businesses, and organized gangs steal benefits. The switch from paper food stamps to electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards two decades ago created new avenues for abuse.
My new article for National Review discusses 10 types of fraud and abuse in SNAP.
Card skimming has become a particularly severe problem in recent years. EBT numbers and PINs are a great target for theft because the cards do not have chips.
SNAP is difficult to police because it includes 250,000 retailers and 42 million recipients, who have changing income levels and other factors that affect eligibility and benefit levels. And because the federal government funds SNAP benefits, state administrators have little reason to minimize the fraud and abuse.

In the last few years Asia's food security has suffered a series of crises induced by conflict, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, causing great disruptions to food supply systems and increasing the number of ...

"Humanitarian assistance is part and parcel of the war machine," said one observer. It is used by the various factions as a political weapon against opponents.

Into mid-2011, the world's worst food crisis is being felt in East Africa, in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

Despite successive failed rains, the crisis has been criticized as avoidable and man-made. This is because the situation had been predicted many months before by an international early warning system. Both the international community and governments in the region have been accused of doing very little in the lead up to this crisis. In addition, high food prices have forced food out of the reach of many people, while local conflicts exacerbate the situation.

As the international organization Oxfam describes: 12 million people are in dire need of food, clean water, and basic sanitation. Loss of life on a massive scale is a very real risk, and the crisis is set to worsen over the coming months, particularly for pastoralist communities.

This page also presents news coverage from Inter Press Service on this crisis.

Read full article: East Africa Food Crisis 2011

In 2022, the northern Australia food technology innovation project was established to investigate the business and technical case for producing shelf-stable foods using novel food-processing technologies in the Northern Territory and the north of Western ...

Despite their popularity, food trucks at the National Mall are paying a hefty price to operate.

We've just published our annual report about radioactivity in food and the environment. Our radiation specialist Becca Williams shares the headlines from our monitoring and assessment work and talks about how artificial radioactivity gets into the environment. Headlines Radioactivity in …

Alexandra Fay (UCLA School of Law) has posted True Co-management: Critical Approaches to Indigenous Food Sovereignty (41 Yale Law & Policy Review 233 (2023)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Note examines the Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska's project to...

"That people make choices and can substitute towards cheaper items is an underappreciated point for those concerned about fungal pathogens. While fungi might increase prices of some goods, people can purchase relatively cheaper ones. This suggests they might be less likely to suffer from food shortages." ~ Byron Carson