Listen in the past the poor have had to improvise cheap food the rich never wanted as a means to survive. And over the many years of innovation made the food taste good until eventually the rich where like: “Oh hay you actually like that garbage? Why on earth would you like it?” Then they try it, love it, start buying it, and then drive the price up so much it becomes a luxury good.
They do this and its devastating, the food typically never becomes affordable again. It don’t matter how cheap the foo dis to produce, it doesn’t matter if there is almost no meat on the bone or its super difficult to eat and messy. Once the poor discover how to make some bit of cheap food taste good, the rich take it away via driving the price of it up.
THEY DID THIS TO RIBS.
Ribs were garage meat. Just look at them, there is hardly any meat on the bone, you have to eat them by hand usually, and they are messy. They where an undesirable cheap source of junk meat. But the poor being the poor made them taste good. (Because they don’t have much to choose from.) The rich discovered the meals the poor made with them and decided they liked ribs too. People discovered they could sell a few ribs to rich people and make way more money then selling lots of ribs to poor people and the price was driven up.
DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO CEREAL!!!
They did the same to brisket. You used to be able to get brisket for less than a dollar a pound, which meant you could get a twenty pound brisket fairly cheaply. And then you smoked it, sliced it, and had meat for weeks if not a full month. And it was tasty. I grew up eating brisket at least once a month because my family could afford it.
It was a cheap meat because no rich person looks at the dangly part of the neck of a cow and goes ‘ooh, that looks tasty!’.
But then Food Network started showcasing things like barbecued brisket. Rich people started showing up at places that weren’t just Rib Crib to get their barbeque. And the price of brisket went up. A lot.
I regularly see it for over five dollars a pound in stores now. And while yeah, that might not seem like a lot when you’re talking only a pound or two of meat, brisket is normally sold in ten to twenty pound sizes. It’s become completely unaffordable to the people that made it delicious.
Sushi used to be really cheap, too, until it became ‘trendy’. Guess why you’re now paying twelve dollars for your order of California rolls? Because rich people discovered something that poor people had been eating for ages.
Noticed the prices of fajita meat, chicken thighs, or ham hocks has gone up recently? You guessed it. Rich people are taking our food and now we’re scrambling to afford the things that we grew up eating.
Lobster is a perfect example of this phenomenon.
For hundreds of years, lobster was regarded as a sort of insect larvae from the depth of the sea. It had zero appeal as a “luxury food” until people living in NY and Boston developed a taste for it. Before the 19th century, it was considered a “poverty food” or used as fertilizer and bait - some household servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice a week.
It was also commonly served at prisons, which tells you something about prison food.
Only by cleverly marketing lobster as an indulgence for the privileged made it cost so much. It became a vehicle for enormous profit spawning a multi-billion dollar global industry in the process. This mythical affection for lobster flesh - not its practical value in terms of taste, nutrition, or any other reasonable consideration - drives its value.
LMAO. Wait.
Anyone else’s eye twitchin?
Food gentrification is a long standing practice and it’s some of the most evil shit I can think of. It’s why I refuse for example as someone living in the US to buy things with Quinoa in them. It is specifically pricing an indigenous population out of their prime staple food. It’s a horrific invasion of one of the final requirements of staying alive.
Oysters were another too poor to be eaten food, they were almost a waste product of the river pearl industry and were sold in London as cheap as it got, in the winter months oysters were one of the main sources of protein in workhouses. Now they’re a “delicacy”
But activists says the footage of the whale being slowly drowned, after becoming trapped in their nets, has merely highlighted an entirely legal loophole which is used to kill dozens of whales each year.
“This is neither an exceptional nor unexpected occurrence,” Mark Simmonds, senior marine scientist at Humane Society International (HSI), said in a release after the whale’s death.
“But what is exceptional is that this whole process was witnessed and filmed for the world to see.”
Indeed, the young mammal’s death once again has exposed the gaping chasm between Japan and the wider world when it comes to whale hunting: activists see a cruel and avoidable death, but the fishermen see a gift from the sea.
Japan - like a number of other nations around the world - has a centuries-long tradition of whale hunting. After the Second World War, as the country struggled to feed its population, whale meat became a staple of the Japanese table.
But for those who support whale hunting, it goes further than simply food on the plate: it is a source of national pride.
Yet for more than 30 years, fishermen were not allowed to hunt whales off the coast of Japan. The country had signed up to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) following a decades of overfishing which had pushed whale populations to the brink of extinction.
In July 2019, the whaling boats set off once more, despite demand for the meat having dropped. Supporters spoke to the BBC at the time of their relief that “the culture and way of life will be passed on to the next generation”.
This time, there were strict quotas in place, allowing for responsible hunting. The first year, the quota allowed for some 52 minke, which are not endangered, as well as 150 Bryde’s and 25 sei whales, to be caught over the course of the season - a total of 227. In 2020 and 2021, that total rose to 383.
The numbers are split between the official whalers, the government and a third category, known as “by-catch”. This year, 37 whales can be butchered and sold by fisherman under this heading.
The minke whose death was caught on camera was one of the 37 considered “by-catch” - a whale which no one set out to catch, but which just happened to swim into the wrong place, at the wrong time.
Ren Yabuki, the head of Japanese animal rights NGO Life Investigation Agency (LIA), first spotted the whale trapped in the permanent net off Taiji - the same town made famous for its annual dolphin hunt in The Cove - on 24 December.
A workplace that tells you to “take care of you mental health” is a workplace reminding you that any loss of productivity due to stress or trauma will result in your unemployment.
I tire so of hearing people say, / Let things take their course. / Tomorrow is another day. / I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. / I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
