Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar. (All yogurt in the same product line has the same amount of sugar, but it's more fun to quote it for cookies-and-cream. https://www.yoplait.com/product/regular-original-cookies-cre... )
Chobani didn't change the idea that yogurt is high in sugar. What was that comment about?
> There's a chance that is lactose, which, per the FDA [1] counts as sugar for nutrition labelling purposes.
I'd expect most sugar in yogurt to not be lactose: part of the point and advantage of yogurt and other fermented dairy (and they're commonly consumed in places with low to no lactase persistence) is the cultures break down much of the milk's lactose into simpler sugars. In fact, the chobani nutrition section quotes 6g carbs, 4g sugars, less than 5% lactose.
More to the point, unsweetened yogurt should contain about the same sugar ratio as milk (4~6% by weight on average), >10% (the yoplait one) is way above the upper end and indicates added sugars. GP misread the chobani's nutrition label though, they quote 6g carbs (4g sugars) per 5.3oz (150g) not 15g.
I think you read that wrong. It doesn’t have 15g of sugar.
Greek yogurt is regular yogurt that has been strained— the whey that they discard has a lot of the sugar content. Its closer to a soft cheese than a traditional yogurt.
None in the chobani (GP misread the nutrition information, it lists 6g carbs of which 4g sugars), a ton in the yoplait (sugars is the second ingredient in the list).
Please cite your sources accurately. The Yoplait has more than four times the amount of sugar as the Chobani, almost twice the calories, and less than half the protein.
Total Fat 0g 0%
Saturated Fat 0g 0%
Trans Fat 0g
-
Cholesterol 10mg 3%
Potassium 210mg 6%
Sodium 55mg 2%
Total Carbs 6g 2%
Dietary Fiber 0g 0%
Sugars 4g
-
Protein 15g
I'm sure with falling prices the market will correct itself.
I was going to make a snarky comment about US dairy subsidies, but aside from a billion dollar giveaway in 2009, those are almost nothing today. $370,000 in 2017.
It sounds like these dairy subsidies fluctuate greatly.
In 2016, the dairy industry asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a staggering $150 million to buy their excess cheese. A spokesperson for the National Farmers Union said they were disappointed to receive “only” $20 million. [0]
And according to this 600 page Canadian report, indirect subsidies are also a huge factor and contribute to 73 percent of producer returns coming from subsidies. [1]
The American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015.
The first graph, "New York's Shrinking Dairy Herd Starts To Grow Again", has a Y-axis starting at 610,000 and a maximum of about 627,000. I expect Bloomberg to represent a 2.5% change more honestly.
It's common in financial publications, and in other publications with numerically literate audiences, to focus statistical graphics on the region of interest (except in bar charts, in which bars are expected to sit on a baseline of zero). For example, stock charts, one of the most common plots in financial publications, follow this practice:
I’m actually surprised as well. Totally a match for the American diet. Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.
It might have more to do with the image of poutine. It’s gravy, cheese, and fries, it looks messy and unhealthy. I’m not sure about the messy part (forks maybe), but sprinkle some chives on top (mostly for color) and most people will be fooled.
That's often different thing from real Quebecois poutine, most of the time. The cheese curds are different than queso-type cheese sauce I usually see in the US. It's only relatively recently that I've been able to regularly find curd cheese in the grocery store; when I was a kid, one of the best parts of going to Canada was getting packages of "squeaky cheese" as a road snack from little Esso stations.
Of course they're not exactly the same, but I'm saying you're not going to wow Americans with poutine. They'll look at it and say it's some kind of chili cheese fries. And it kind of is.
I hear what you're saying. But that's like saying that sausage on a bun is just a kind of hotdog. They're the same, but they're also not.
I love me a good chili fries and I love poutine. I especially love shawarma poutine which is a massive hit here in Ontario. People and their tastes are a very interesting thing.
True that. Before Chobani Americans had yogurt, but it was all that runny stuff that people from other countries wouldn't call yogurt. So same situation basically.
The shawarma poutine sounds brilliant! Perfect use case of cultural appropriation.
That sounds really negative. We have middle Eastern immigrants mixing middle Eastern food and Quebecois food. Isn't that exactly what we hope to get out of immigration? We invented something new and wonderful by combining cultures.
Maybe I'm just sensitive to the word "appropriation" being used as a blanket for "political correctness." aka. a new form of xenophobia because thou shalt not mix cultures for some reason?
Yeah. See: Britain and its Indianised cuisine. Nobody calls or thinks of that as appropriation and I really think that whole thing is overblown, only what I call the ‘college left’ tend to worry about that.
It gets blown up on the internet though, you actually see more memes mocking that than actual people bothered about it.
It’s silly anyway most American dishes are ultimately from somewhere else originally or use local ingredients to change them.
The bar fight scene in Talladega Nights put it perfectly, with Ricky Bobby listing off examples of "American" food and his new French arch-nemesis correcting him with actual countries of origin.
They called shawarma poutine "brilliant", so "cultural appropriation" was probably meant approvingly.
Whether or not you agree with the concept, cultural appropriation seems pretty easy to understand. Some things have deep meaning to people, like religious symbols. Other things don't, like most food. Also, many people don't like caricatures of their culture. That's about it.
I always find it fascinating when someone says they've "only recently found" something that I see even at places like gas stations and liquor stores. There's cheese EVERYWHERE in the midwest US.
> Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.
Brindle Room, right? I've only had their burgers, but Mile End also has poutine for $9 and I can confirm that it is authentic enough for this Canadian.
Lots of popular foods in American cuisine are messy and unhealthy. Nor sure how that'd be a problem for poutine.
The actual answer to the question of "why ain't poutine more popular south of Canada?" is because it sounds French (which - unless that Frenchiness is tied to being from Louisiana - typically implies something fancy and expensive). It needs better marketing.
I've been saying this for years. Fries with gravy and cheese is delicious, and cheese fries are already popular in America. Big chains like McD and BK sell poutine in Canada, so why haven't they experimented in an American city with many Canadian tourists, like Bellingham?
Just give me cheap cheese curds period. I can demolish a bag in a siting no prob. They’re just stupid expensive unless I drive to Tillamook, and even then they’re a bit spends.
Cultures change. When I was growing up, we had a class of milk with lunch and dinner, and often ate cereal for breakfast with milk. We don't do that any more. We still sometimes eat cereal with milk for breakfast, but the glasses of milk with lunch and dinner are gone, replaced by carbonated water, apple juice, or wine. Repeat that times a hundred million people, and it's no wonder dairy farmers are hurting.
Bound to be, but also some competitors on the international market like New Zealand (which has no government price supports or subsidies), have free trade agreements with China.
If you become insular and erect tariff walls people play where there are none and they make more money.
The real problem is govt price supports, often brought in to tide people over for a year, once people start to depend on them they really stop working, you get stuck with inefficient industries when people should be growing something else, or simply be in another business. When NZ cut all farm subsidies back in the 80s farmers formed farmer cooperatives, in the dairy industry they now own most of the back end milk processing infrastructure, they're big enough that they are big players on the world markets, and the profits go back to their owners
(Not sure who 'we' is but,) in the recent renegotiation of NAFTA, Canada did surrender some additional access to their domestic dairy market. The USA was demanding 100% access, but got only a couple of % more. But CETA, CPTPP, and USMCA combined get only 10% total of the total Canadian market.
Basically, Canada prefers to have its supply management system, and the USA prefers have its massive subsidies.
Canadian here. Although my personal politics tends to be CENTRE-right (note the capitalization) and favouring market forces, I do see some merit in supply management to avoid the extreme pain being experienced by the American dairy farmers mentioned in the article. Yes, we mostly do prefer supply management, paid for by dairy consumers, than massive subsidies, paid for by all taxpayers and leading to wasted output.
For details, read Wikipedia [0]. Some quotes:
- High (tariffs) are only placed on imports above the quota, not on all the dairy products sold to Canada.
- Canada's milk quota system is butterfat-based so the highest TRQ is on butter at 298.5%.
- By 2018 the United States's quantitative (tariff) threshold for the import of milk products is 3% and Canada's is 10%.
- designed to prevent shortages and surpluses, to ensure farmers a fair rate of return and Canadian consumer access to a high-quality, stable, and secure supply of these sensitive products.
Mr T, in his incendiary speeches to his tribe, was selective with his facts. The 300% tariff does not apply to all dairy; only butter and only when exceeding USA's quota (Canadian farmers who exceed their quota cannot sell at all). The threats and beatings delivered by Mr T's negotiators did "open up" the Canadian dairy market a little, but supply management is still intact and "diversification" is now on the minds of many Canadians.
As a sidebar, the US has its own 'supply management'-style policies in place for markets like sugar, where Canada's access was limited to 0.1% of the market, pre-USMCA. [0]
I wonder what will end having greater economic impact in the long run: the relatively minor 'tweaks' USMCA makes in these markets, or the extent to which Mr T has shaken the foundations of Canadians' relationship with the US.
Switzerland has had the exact same problem due to heavy dairy subsidies. Besides scaling back on subsidies, Fondue and Raclette was pushed heavily in marketing, which is probably why these are staples of Swiss food nowadays. I'm sometimes asking myself whether tabletop style Raclette couldn't be popular in the US. How strong is America's distaste for cooking food at the table (I'm just going by Lost in Translation here)?
I doubt your numbers. According to [1], average per capita consumption of Raclette was 1.35kg per year in 2006, and that includes infants. Gruyere was even >1.7kg per year, and I'm sure a lot of that goes into Fondues. I don't know about you, but I can't down 1.35kg of Raclette in one sitting, and I don't think Swiss have changed that much since 2006 ;).
Same thing in Austria, at least until a few years ago.
Farmers still complain over falling milk prices, and that they cannot survive. Yet the market is still saturated, milk was literally drained down the gutter regularly, every milk product is incredibly cheap IMO, considering how it is produced (although there was a butter shortage and a price "spike" last year).
Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.
> Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.
It’s important to understand why they are there. There are not there because states are scared of food instability. Austria for instance tracks how much of the daily food intake it can produce locally and there are yearly goals to make it 100% self sustainable.
If that goal is still important as EU member I can’t answer but it’s still a goal.
Not entirely true in my experience. This would be particularly national interests and don't explain EU subsidies.
When staying particularly in Austria, the subsidies are there because national politicians and EU politicians from Austria want some part of the EU subsidies pot for their farmers, contributing to the general constant rope-pulling and trading "a piece of the cake" (i.e. EU budgets) - usually in the form of: "You get subsidies for x, we then get support for our poor farmers in poorer regions, since they are starving".
Generally the EU subsidies for agriculture are misguided and just money down the drain. Until they begin to dry up causing uproar and "EU took our money!"-complaints.
I think there might be some retroactive argumentation going on about why they exist which does not go back to the roots of it, but if you look at why and how the CAP was made and how subsidies and price fixing within the countries works, you can still see where it came from.
And don't we have price floors for milk in the US? In a free market the price would just keep dropping, which can't happen here, so you just get a glut.
At some point, the cost to package & bring the milk to the store will exceed the price of selling the milk, so you’ll hit a price floor regardless.
And it becomes the same issue: you now can’t sell the excess milk but you still have all the production facilities. So you store it in your buffer and hold onto production, and eventually if you end up overflowing the buffer, you’ll have no choice but to drop production (which is expensive to bring back up, so highly avoidable)
No, absent collision and when you have fixed costs, in a free market any individual producer ends up producing as much as possible. The market regulates production by people going out of business entirely.
This is why the EU built a complex production management system.
When I go to the doughnut shop at the end of the day, why are they almost out of doughnuts? It would be possible to produce a lot more doughnuts than that.
When I go to the grocery store, why do I see them tossing out tons of perfectly good bread, boxed products etc?
Presumably if the free market could reach equilibrium then we would see only as much food produced as necessary, so then food waste should be minimized. Yet that's obviously not the case and we see vast amounts of waste.
It's definitely not how it's explained to a tenth grader. In high school economics classes I was definitely introduced to marginal cost curves for firms in perfectly competitive markets, like so: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Economic...
This does not even consider basic supply and demand. You can sell 100 widgets for $1 a piece, or 20 widgets for $10 a piece. You're going sell 20 widgets. In real life Apple is the most obvious example here. They choose to sell their products at an extremely high markup which limits the number that are purchased, but thanks to that markup they end up making far more profit per item than most other comparable companies.
Milk is not an Apple. It's a commodity. Individual producers have no pricing power. Try to sell milk at $10 a liter and you sell none, because you're undercut by someone selling an identical product for less.
There should be a major asterisk - as long as it remains profitable. If producing more causes the price to go down the margins get worse they won't do more work to earn less. Many prices aren't fixed but per quantity.
I wouldn't read Washington Post for technology: I read it for politics. I don't read Bloomberg for technology news, I read it for investment news.
Well, there's certainly a problem with Bloomberg's technology / cyber-attack division. But Bloomberg as a whole is one of the better investment newspapers. IMO, Bloomberg probably should just stop writing about cyber-attacks. They're clearly incompetent at that and its causing people to lose trust in the greater newspaper.
But I won't go to Ars Technica to read about insider Washington politics. Its a matter of recognizing what these papers are "good" in.
Haven't you seen that idea, that you might know some media sucks in tech, but think is ok in other stuff, because you are an expert in tech, but not in that other stuff? E.g. Bloomberg might suck in everything, but you'd only see a problem with tech.
I'm not an expert in finance / investing. But I think I'm good enough to see that Bloomberg has great economic analysis and breakdowns into company financials.
Here are some key quotes from the article in question that demonstrate Bloomberg's research ability into financial / investment matters.
> From April 2017 to April 2018, sales of Chobani products grew only 1 percent while sales by all companies in the segment slipped 2.2 percent.
> The key ratio of income-to-feed costs reveals that dairy farmers have very little margin left these days, said Bill Brooks, an economist at INTL FCStone. Feed such as alfalfa and hay are more expensive than last year, as are labor and energy expenses.
> The amount of milk dumped by farmers in the U.S. Northeast reached almost 145 million pounds through July—the most in at least a decade—including 23.6 million pounds that month alone.
-------
These are specific statistics. And sure, they may be available from publicly available research sources, but they contribute to the article's primary thesis. Knowing what statistics seem relevant for a particular article is what Bloomberg is good at.
Besides, these individual statistics are relatively easy to check. The main benefit of Bloomberg is their ability to collate various information sources together into a singular article.
Didn’t read the article. Just saw the “Bloomberg” in parentheses and thought “ah some reporter at Bloomberg is trying to get his yearly bonus by moving the dairy market.”
Which is irrational and silly. But it’s amazing the way something like the controversy around “The Big Hack” brews suspicion.
Milk is an industrially produced commodity in the US with it's own contamination problems. Most flavored Yogurt in the US is so full of sugar it's more of a health liability than a health product, I had to give it up.
Chobani is mentioned so many times that this must be paid for by that company. The article is a dress that barely covers an advertisement's bare bottom.
Keep in mind it often has a much longer shelf life so the shelf space is not a good measure.* Also, my local store has milk cart shelves on wheels that can be restocked much faster than fixed shelves.
Tip: the same non dairy milk can be found a smidgen cheaper non refrigerated
At Costco, they sell box type non-dairy milk as room temp and shelf stable, while other almond and coconut milks are in half gallon form and refrigerated. Not sure whether the latter actually require refrigeration before opening.
They could have export more milk, UHT, Cream Cheese, Butter etc.
Instead they won't interested. They won't interested in completing against EU, AUS, New Zealand's dairy products. I doubt they will lose any money if they were priced competitively against it, they are just likely to have less profit margins.
Actually that is not a totally fair assessment, since a few of them did complete on price, but their quality won't as good. And they blame it on their international sales staff, which has since changed hands multiple times.
P.S Those companies do not include any Multinational like Nestle USA, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.
This made me think of this incredible piece of art by Mishka Henner that I saw in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Gallery: https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots
It looked so disconcerting I clicked it away immediately. I was so sure it was a tiled wall of some kind in a slaughter house - and a nightmarish rendition of a cross section of a heart or an animal or a clogged vein.
Prior to slaughter, most large scale farming of animals has a finishing step where the animals are confined to limit movement to fatten them up. In and Out has said it was limiting their expansion eastward to Texas because they did not want to freeze their beef, probably not coincidentally cattle feedlots range from California to Texas, north to Colorado, that I have seen personally.
If you live in California, you can smell the feedlots for miles near Coalinga/Harris Ranch on I-5 while driving between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and when cattle are visible, it appears much denser than that photograph, but that may be sample bias where the cows just like to get closer to the fence for some reason, need a drone to have a better idea.
I had a thought the other day. Did we convince people that fat was bad, and then used that to water down milk so that from one harvest we could sell more watery milk and other dairy fat products?
Removing fat from milk does not make it “watered down”, it’s just not as rich in fat. If you’re trying to say there’s some kind of collusion going on between milk producers and other makers of high-fat foods — do you really think any of the industrial food companies care at all that people would exceed their RDA of fat?
They skimmed the fat so it could be sold as cheese and other dairy products, yes. Americans basically didn't even reduce their dairy fat intake, they just increased how much $$ they were spending on it across more dairy products.
Planet Money recently had a great episode about "Big Government Cheese", which covered the Carter administration's proposal to subsidize milk, which created a milk surplus so big that it had to create a bureaucracy to grade and store cheese, and then eventually, to repackage and give it away:
> DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers around $2 billion a year. The government was buying 1 in every 4 pounds of the country's cheddar cheese. They actually had to rent out space in multiple caves. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen.
If the Earth's cows were a country, they'd be the #3 GHG emitter. Making milk to make fuel would be horribly inefficient and detrimental to the environment. We simply need less cows.
It would be nice to get rid of the excess cows, but since that won't happen. It's better to make something out of the excess rather than let it go to waste.
Especially considering that a large amount of fat is produced from skim milk. This fat just goes into making cheese, and deflating the cost of cheese. More cheese than most people would like to eat.
Seems like that would be awfully inefficient. We use oil (fertilizer) to grow corn and soybeans, which we then feed to cows, which then convert it to milk. Each step in the process reduces the efficiency. Why not just use the oil for fuel? Or convert the corn the ethanol if that type of oil is not useful as fuel? The efficiency of ethanol is already in question due to the use of corn.
It could be a way to use the excess or that milk which is about to spoil. There's a large amount of fat left over from the production of skim milk. This fat usually gets turned into cheese, that's why pizzas are more cheesy than in the past.
I'm curious how much of this is because of demographic trends in America--Lactose intolerance for adults is relatively common among everyone except northern europeans.
Would especially explain the decline in liquid milk consumption (and also part of the popularity of greek yogurt, which is pretty low in lactose content).
The US dairy industry and the USDA have a large operation to promote cheese. With everything. Over half of Dunkin' Donuts offerings now include cheese, and they are rebranding to "Dunkin". Cheese filled tacos are now a thing.
I recently chewed out a restaurant manager of a "natural" and "green" restaurant when they started putting cheese on a piece of plain salmon on top of fresh greens. That's a chef problem - they have to add something to justify being paid more than McDonalds.
I found accidentally many of my digestive problems gone just after I stopped consuming milk-based products for a week. I wonder now how and why our diet has evolved in that way.
The ability to digest milk's lactose in adults is only retained in some Northern European and African (notably cattle raising cultures like the Maasai) descendants who traditionally drank milk as adults. It's genetic AFAIK.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadUm...
Plain yogurt from Chobani: serving size 150g, of which 15g sugar. ( https://www.chobani.com/products/greek/plain/non-fat-plain/ )
Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar. (All yogurt in the same product line has the same amount of sugar, but it's more fun to quote it for cookies-and-cream. https://www.yoplait.com/product/regular-original-cookies-cre... )
Chobani didn't change the idea that yogurt is high in sugar. What was that comment about?
[1] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/interactivenutritionf...
[2]https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/johannah-sakimura-nut...
I'd expect most sugar in yogurt to not be lactose: part of the point and advantage of yogurt and other fermented dairy (and they're commonly consumed in places with low to no lactase persistence) is the cultures break down much of the milk's lactose into simpler sugars. In fact, the chobani nutrition section quotes 6g carbs, 4g sugars, less than 5% lactose.
More to the point, unsweetened yogurt should contain about the same sugar ratio as milk (4~6% by weight on average), >10% (the yoplait one) is way above the upper end and indicates added sugars. GP misread the chobani's nutrition label though, they quote 6g carbs (4g sugars) per 5.3oz (150g) not 15g.
Greek yogurt is regular yogurt that has been strained— the whey that they discard has a lot of the sugar content. Its closer to a soft cheese than a traditional yogurt.
Not sure where you've read that, the page lists 6g carbs (4g sugars), roughly in line with cow milk.
> Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar.
"Sugars" is literally the second ingredient in the list, right behind low-fat milk.
I was going to make a snarky comment about US dairy subsidies, but aside from a billion dollar giveaway in 2009, those are almost nothing today. $370,000 in 2017.
In 2016, the dairy industry asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a staggering $150 million to buy their excess cheese. A spokesperson for the National Farmers Union said they were disappointed to receive “only” $20 million. [0]
And according to this 600 page Canadian report, indirect subsidies are also a huge factor and contribute to 73 percent of producer returns coming from subsidies. [1]
The American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015.
[0] https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/377406-dairy-...
[1] https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies-...
http://google.com/search?q=GOOG
It might have more to do with the image of poutine. It’s gravy, cheese, and fries, it looks messy and unhealthy. I’m not sure about the messy part (forks maybe), but sprinkle some chives on top (mostly for color) and most people will be fooled.
I love me a good chili fries and I love poutine. I especially love shawarma poutine which is a massive hit here in Ontario. People and their tastes are a very interesting thing.
The shawarma poutine sounds brilliant! Perfect use case of cultural appropriation.
Maybe I'm just sensitive to the word "appropriation" being used as a blanket for "political correctness." aka. a new form of xenophobia because thou shalt not mix cultures for some reason?
It gets blown up on the internet though, you actually see more memes mocking that than actual people bothered about it.
It’s silly anyway most American dishes are ultimately from somewhere else originally or use local ingredients to change them.
Whether or not you agree with the concept, cultural appropriation seems pretty easy to understand. Some things have deep meaning to people, like religious symbols. Other things don't, like most food. Also, many people don't like caricatures of their culture. That's about it.
“Squeaky Cheese... Aaaaah...”
> Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.
Brindle Room, right? I've only had their burgers, but Mile End also has poutine for $9 and I can confirm that it is authentic enough for this Canadian.
Lots of popular foods in American cuisine are messy and unhealthy. Nor sure how that'd be a problem for poutine.
The actual answer to the question of "why ain't poutine more popular south of Canada?" is because it sounds French (which - unless that Frenchiness is tied to being from Louisiana - typically implies something fancy and expensive). It needs better marketing.
If you become insular and erect tariff walls people play where there are none and they make more money.
The real problem is govt price supports, often brought in to tide people over for a year, once people start to depend on them they really stop working, you get stuck with inefficient industries when people should be growing something else, or simply be in another business. When NZ cut all farm subsidies back in the 80s farmers formed farmer cooperatives, in the dairy industry they now own most of the back end milk processing infrastructure, they're big enough that they are big players on the world markets, and the profits go back to their owners
Basically, Canada prefers to have its supply management system, and the USA prefers have its massive subsidies.
For details, read Wikipedia [0]. Some quotes:
- High (tariffs) are only placed on imports above the quota, not on all the dairy products sold to Canada.
- Canada's milk quota system is butterfat-based so the highest TRQ is on butter at 298.5%.
- By 2018 the United States's quantitative (tariff) threshold for the import of milk products is 3% and Canada's is 10%.
- designed to prevent shortages and surpluses, to ensure farmers a fair rate of return and Canadian consumer access to a high-quality, stable, and secure supply of these sensitive products.
Mr T, in his incendiary speeches to his tribe, was selective with his facts. The 300% tariff does not apply to all dairy; only butter and only when exceeding USA's quota (Canadian farmers who exceed their quota cannot sell at all). The threats and beatings delivered by Mr T's negotiators did "open up" the Canadian dairy market a little, but supply management is still intact and "diversification" is now on the minds of many Canadians.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada)
I wonder what will end having greater economic impact in the long run: the relatively minor 'tweaks' USMCA makes in these markets, or the extent to which Mr T has shaken the foundations of Canadians' relationship with the US.
[0] https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/f...
There are no dairy subsidies in the US right now.
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1254398531823
http://plastiquarian.com/?page_id=14228
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galalith
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raclette
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/record-growth-in-swiss-cheese-c...
??? Jarlsberg is a region in Norway not Switzerland?
Farmers still complain over falling milk prices, and that they cannot survive. Yet the market is still saturated, milk was literally drained down the gutter regularly, every milk product is incredibly cheap IMO, considering how it is produced (although there was a butter shortage and a price "spike" last year).
Subsidies (and even worse EU wide subsidies) seem to do more damage than good in the long run.
It’s important to understand why they are there. There are not there because states are scared of food instability. Austria for instance tracks how much of the daily food intake it can produce locally and there are yearly goals to make it 100% self sustainable.
If that goal is still important as EU member I can’t answer but it’s still a goal.
When staying particularly in Austria, the subsidies are there because national politicians and EU politicians from Austria want some part of the EU subsidies pot for their farmers, contributing to the general constant rope-pulling and trading "a piece of the cake" (i.e. EU budgets) - usually in the form of: "You get subsidies for x, we then get support for our poor farmers in poorer regions, since they are starving".
Generally the EU subsidies for agriculture are misguided and just money down the drain. Until they begin to dry up causing uproar and "EU took our money!"-complaints.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/02/607787950/epis...
Sounds like a contradiction - if no one else, free-market will tell you how much to produce. Does not look like farmers are listening.
And it becomes the same issue: you now can’t sell the excess milk but you still have all the production facilities. So you store it in your buffer and hold onto production, and eventually if you end up overflowing the buffer, you’ll have no choice but to drop production (which is expensive to bring back up, so highly avoidable)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/05/01/ame...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy...
This is why the EU built a complex production management system.
Presumably if the free market could reach equilibrium then we would see only as much food produced as necessary, so then food waste should be minimized. Yet that's obviously not the case and we see vast amounts of waste.
- Do you spend on production or ramp up marketing instead?
- Do projections support taking out a loan to expand future production?
- Do you have other products where your capital would be better directed?
- Is there a point where marginal cost exceeds sale price?
The list of further considerations is endless. Nobody is just blindly producing as much as possible.
Well, there's certainly a problem with Bloomberg's technology / cyber-attack division. But Bloomberg as a whole is one of the better investment newspapers. IMO, Bloomberg probably should just stop writing about cyber-attacks. They're clearly incompetent at that and its causing people to lose trust in the greater newspaper.
But I won't go to Ars Technica to read about insider Washington politics. Its a matter of recognizing what these papers are "good" in.
Here are some key quotes from the article in question that demonstrate Bloomberg's research ability into financial / investment matters.
> From April 2017 to April 2018, sales of Chobani products grew only 1 percent while sales by all companies in the segment slipped 2.2 percent.
> The key ratio of income-to-feed costs reveals that dairy farmers have very little margin left these days, said Bill Brooks, an economist at INTL FCStone. Feed such as alfalfa and hay are more expensive than last year, as are labor and energy expenses.
> The amount of milk dumped by farmers in the U.S. Northeast reached almost 145 million pounds through July—the most in at least a decade—including 23.6 million pounds that month alone.
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These are specific statistics. And sure, they may be available from publicly available research sources, but they contribute to the article's primary thesis. Knowing what statistics seem relevant for a particular article is what Bloomberg is good at.
Besides, these individual statistics are relatively easy to check. The main benefit of Bloomberg is their ability to collate various information sources together into a singular article.
Which is irrational and silly. But it’s amazing the way something like the controversy around “The Big Hack” brews suspicion.
Not really irrational. Half of what's published is PR in one form or another.
In their market research of consumers, the same article found that many people are intentionally consuming less dairy.
...nearly one in five (19%) Americans claims to be consuming less dairy for health reasons.
[0]http://www.nutritionaloutlook.com/article/us-non-dairy-milk-...
Tip: the same non dairy milk can be found a smidgen cheaper non refrigerated
Instead they won't interested. They won't interested in completing against EU, AUS, New Zealand's dairy products. I doubt they will lose any money if they were priced competitively against it, they are just likely to have less profit margins.
Actually that is not a totally fair assessment, since a few of them did complete on price, but their quality won't as good. And they blame it on their international sales staff, which has since changed hands multiple times.
P.S Those companies do not include any Multinational like Nestle USA, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.
It was all of these things
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
> DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers around $2 billion a year. The government was buying 1 in every 4 pounds of the country's cheddar cheese. They actually had to rent out space in multiple caves. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of cheese for every single American citizen.
I have heard of vodka made from milk[1]. I would really like to try that one. There's also milk beers[2]. Although I don't like the taste of them.
[1]: https://www.blackcow.co.uk/
[2]: http://allaboutbeer.com/article/milk-stout-2/
Especially considering that a large amount of fat is produced from skim milk. This fat just goes into making cheese, and deflating the cost of cheese. More cheese than most people would like to eat.
Would especially explain the decline in liquid milk consumption (and also part of the popularity of greek yogurt, which is pretty low in lactose content).
1. northwestern Europeans, centered around Belgium
2. The Maasai tribe, of Kenya and Tanzania
I recently chewed out a restaurant manager of a "natural" and "green" restaurant when they started putting cheese on a piece of plain salmon on top of fresh greens. That's a chef problem - they have to add something to justify being paid more than McDonalds.