The American beer industry is “staggering into its crucial selling season from its weakest position in years,” writes Jeremy Mullman in Advertising Age. And despite “massive” marketing efforts, the biggest brands—Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Light—saw sales drop in the four weeks leading up to May 16.

Of course, those marketing efforts have included, just for example, a campaign for Bud Light Golden Wheat that had a walking, man-sized, bottle of beer having sex in an elevator with a walking, woman-sized bunch of wheat, making his coworker dudes jealous. So.

But inane, nonsensical advertisements are at worst only part of the problem for Anheuser Busch (BUD) and MillerCoors. Mainly, the demographics of the recession are to blame, Mullman reports. Both young men and Hispanics are slower to recover in the job market. They’re “opting for cheaper brews, or saving their consumption for a special occasion by splurging on craft-style beers. As a result, the ‘premium’ lights are being squeezed by moves in both directions.”

Beer – MillerCoors – Coors Brewing Company – Anheuser–Busch – Miller Lite

Michael Moss’s examination in Sunday’s New York Times of the food industry’s largely covert defense of salt is a reportorial tour de force loaded with brow-arching facts and observations:

• The Cargill promotional video where the agribusiness giant extols the “life-enhancing” qualities of salt’s “briny kiss.”
• The food industry people describing their own strategy as “delay and divert.”
• The food companies telling the government that consumers are to blame for all the salt in the American diet.
• The industry claim that salt can be reduced in a given food by no more 10 percent before consumers reject it.
• The warnings to government by the industry that if food makers have to reduce salt, they might have to, for example, increase sugar in some foods. Pick your poison, regulators. 
• The Cheez-Its with the salt removed that taste “medicinal” and the Kellogg‘s (K) Corn Flakes that tasted “medicinal” sans sodium.
• The Hungry Man frozen-dinner ingredient list that contains 10 references to salt and “nine additional references to sodium compounds,” and the can of Campbell‘s (CPB) chicken noodle soup that contains just 150 calories, but more than a day’s worth of salt.

As Moss observes, 80 percent of our salt intake comes from processed foods. And in the article’s biggest reveal, we learn that not only do food companies know that they could process many foods with a lot less salt, but they actually use that fact as the implied basis for their argument to government regulators. Different processes and alternative ingredients could solve the problem, the industry says. But that would be too expensive.

“Rather than challenging salt’s link to hypertension,” Moss writes, “industry representatives, in the private planning meetings with [New York City] officials, cited financial objections: the higher cost of other seasonings and the expense of new product labels and retooled production lines.”

They don’t say that in public, of course. There, companies have made a big deal out of the modest salt-reduction initiatives they have undertaken. That’s not good enough for Corby Kummer of The Atlantic’s Food Section.

“The answer, of course, isn’t to make a bad, flavorless version of Cheez-Its or chicken-noodle soup, Kummer writes. “It’s to improve the quality of the ingredients. As Moss points out, makers of pasta sauce can use better, riper tomatoes and fresher herbs and more of them to compensate for lack of salt. The color and texture and flavor of Cheez-Its are not amenable to such improvement. So companies should make better crackers and better soups. But they’re not motivated to, and the public isn’t demanding that they do.”

One reason for that is something Moss didn’t touch on: the increasingly popular “contrarian” arguments, made by both the food industry and people outside it, that salt isn’t bad for you at all, or at least is only minimally so. Among the ranks of those contrarians are the New York Times‘ own John Tierney, as well as Gary Taubes, who himself has written for the Times, most famously when he declared in the New York Times Magazine in 2002 that the idea that saturated fat is bad for you might be a “big, fat lie,” and basically argued in favor of the Atkins Diet. 

Such serious, sincere contrarian arguments are probably healthy (if too often expressed disingenuously). We need to hear contrarians, especially when it comes to something like salt, which, even for a food component, is unusually complicated and shouldn’t simply be labeled “bad.” (Just for example, there are some indications that, for some people, reducing salt intake might actually do more harm than good.) But for now, no matter what the contrarians might say, the evidence shows that if we were to substantially reduce our salt consumption, we would be a lot healthier on average. 

The problem is that big swaths of the public take such contrarian arguments as gospel, and as an excuse to ignore the fact that the science is, at least for now, against them. “Salt. is. not. bad. for. you.” wrote one commenter on Gawker’s post about the Moss article, prompting another commenter to complain about the “frauds who still claim that cholesterol and saturated fat are unhealthy.”

Such people seem to assume to be that most scientists are blinded by their own biases and tendencies toward groupthink. What they miss is that “contrarianism” carries its own set of highly problematic biases, and in the absence of a definitive answer on the order of “water contains oxygen,” we have to rely on imperfect and incomplete research. And for now, that research tells us that we need to eat a lot less salt.

Salt – Food Industry – New York Times – New York City – Atkins Diet

In 13 months, Hawaii will become the first state to ban the possession and sale of shark fins.

There are good reasons for such a law that totally eclipse the “rights” of anyone, including the state’s Chinese inhabitants and tourists, some of whom regard shark-fin soup as a “delicacy.” What is truly delicate is the continued existence of certain sharks that are being overfished and face extinction.

And anyway, people eat shark fins simply because they are shark fins and are expensive. They don’t taste like anything. “The flavor in shark fin dishes comes from the ingredients it’s cooked with,” notes Time, “either the rich sauce it’s served with on a plate or the savory pork and chicken base in shark fin soup.”

So really, what’s being lost here?

Meanwhile, the oceans are losing sharks. Nearly a third of ocean shark species are in danger of becoming extinct. To get the tasteless “delicacy,” sharks have their fins cut off and their carcasses are dumped back in the ocean. 

Shark – Hawaii – Shark fin soup – Law – Overfishing

Unemployed food writer Ed Murrieta tells an ironic, deeply felt tale in the Seattle Times‘ Sunday magazine. A couple of years ago, he carried a credit card given to him for his $1,300 a month in expenses as a food critic for the Tacoma News Tribune. In its place, he now carries a card given to him by the government so he can eat. He visits food banks (where he also volunteers) and works hard to stretch his food and yet still (mostly) satisfy his sophisticated—but far from picky—palate.

“As a professional assignment, writing about a thing such as shopping and eating on a budget is abstract,” he writes. “As a gut-punching, ego-bruising, bank-busting predicament, eating on the food lines is real. After six months of it, I still feel the occasional memory pang of expense-account indulgences gone by, but I don’t cry in my cabernet.”

Perhaps the most striking thing about the article is the online comments section. Except for a couple of nasty, anonymous people accusing Murrieta of being lazy (despite his having explicitly related his fruitless search for even menial jobs, and despite the article’s overall theme that it’s really hard to live on food stamps), most of the comments are laudatory—a measure, perhaps, of the effectiveness of the story. There’s nothing abstract about it, certainly.

In the end, Murrieta learned that it’s possible to eat well, and nutritiously, even if you’re poor. He says he has “come to cherish the basics.” And athough “it’s not without its labors and worries, life on the food lines tastes pretty good, from where I sit. But I know that feeding myself with my own money would taste a whole lot better.” 

Full disclosure: Murrieta is a friend of mine. 

Food – The Seattle Times – Food critic – Murrieta California – Magazine

The restaurant business was hit particularly hard by the recession, thanks largely to a glut of chain outlets and lots of debt. It seems to be crawling back now, but it’s doing so slowly, tentatively, and deliberately.

A sign of that tentativeness: the success of Middleby, a company in Elgin. Ill., that makes kitchen equipment specifically designed for cost-conscious restaurateurs who want to grow, but by only so much. According to a profile by Dow Jones Newswires, Middleby’s fryers, ranges, and countertop ovens are designed to take up less space and, most importantly, to not need the elaborate ventilation systems required by municipal codes for more traditional equipment.

Among the company’s customers are Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway, both of which are working to expand their menus. Both of those chains were designed from the outset to offer food that doesn’t require a lot of equipment. That saves costs, but, sans equipment like that offered by Middleby, it also makes it hard to offer a more varied selection.

But the overall trend of downsizing for growth is industrywide. Sales of commercial kitchen equipment fell by about 10 percent last year, and even though the industry is starting to grow again, equipment sales are expected to tick up only slightly.  ”The industry is moving to smaller restaurants,” David Henkes of consultancy Technomic told Dow Jones. “When you look at where some of the equipment growth is going to come from, it’s from smaller types of things.”

Business – Hospitality – Foodservice – Tools and Equipment – Subway