Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Investments, American. Food industry and trade"

This paper summarises workshop discussions at the 5th international MYCORED meeting in Ottawa, Canada (June 2012) with over 200 participants representing academics, government and industry scientists, government officials and farming organisations (present in roughly equal proportions) from 27 countries. Workshops centred on how mycotoxins in food and feed affect value chains and trade in the region covered by the North American Free Trade Agreement. Crops are contaminated by one or more of five important mycotoxins in parts of Canada and the United States every year, and when contaminated food and feed are consumed in amounts above tolerable limits, human and animal health are at risk. Economic loss from such contamination includes reduced crop yield, grain quality, animal productivity and loss of domestic and export markets. A systematic effort by grain producers, primary, transfer, and terminal elevators, millers and food and feed processers is required to manage these contaminants along the value chain. Workshops discussed lessons learned from investments in plant genetics, fungal genomics, toxicology, analytical and sampling science, management strategies along the food and feed value chains and methods to ameliorate the effects of toxins in grain on animal production and on reducing the impact of mycotoxins on population health in developing countries. These discussions were used to develop a set of priorities and recommendations.

Rapid globalization of the agrifood industry has important impacts on international trade and quality management (QM). Likewise, the European Union has negotiated a series of bilateral free trade agreements. Of note was the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States of America, where the debate focused on the mutual recognition and harmonization of quality standards, especially for agricultural and food products. This topic offered the mainstream media excellent substances for coverage. This paper explores German print media, television, and radio on the importance of international quality standards in the agrifood sectors in light of the TTIP. A quantitative and qualitative empirical content analysis was performed to investigate media reporting regarding (a) it is scientific character, (b) the use of the term “quality standards” of the agrifood industry, and (c) the reporting on the agrifood industry and QM linked with TTIP, focused on harmonization. The results showed that interrelations between QM and global trade were not presented to recipients in-depth. A trend toward information asymmetries in recipient’s knowledge is indicated. The study addresses recommendations for future collaborations between media, policy-makers, and further cooperation in the mutual recognition and harmonization of quality standards and control procedures within global trade.

The following paper deals with the American Chinese trade war and its impacts on Taiwan’s economy, particularly sales in Taiwan’s semiconductor industry. Indeed, trade tensions impact global supply chains, especially in the semiconductor industry, since its supply chain is highly globalized and dependent on many companies in various countries. Hence, the industry is susceptible to trade disruptions. With the largest microchip manufacturer TSMC, Taiwan is one of the key players in the fabrication of microchips. It has strong cultural, geographical, and economic ties to China and, on the other hand, strong economic and military relations to the United States. A trade war between those two countries is an enormous future challenge for the island. However, this paper proves that trade tensions had a lower-than-expected impact on Taiwan’s economy and the microchip industry. Due to capital that diverted from China to Taiwan and investments from Taiwanese companies in other countries like the USA. Additionally, Taiwan handled the Covid-19 pandemic extraordinarily well and therefore did not have any significant economic restrictions in the domestic market. Now it depends on the future action steps of the Taiwanese industry and government. If Taiwan manages to steer outgoing companies from China to Taiwan, the island could emerge as the surprise winner of the trade dispute. For this purpose, the paper gives concrete recommendations on how to increase the attractiveness for FDI through tax benefits or infrastructure investments.

This paper investigates and outlines a cost-energy optimised pathway for the UK food manufacturing industry to attain the national Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction target of 80%, relative to 1990 levels, by 2050. The paper employs the linear programming platform TIMES, and it models the current and future technology mix of the UK food manufacturing industry. The model considers parameters such as capital costs, operating costs, efficiency and the lifetime of technologies to determine the cheapest pathway to achieve the GHG emission constraints. The model also enables future parametric analyses and can predict the influence of different economic, trade and dietary preferences and the impact of technological investments and policies on emissions. The study showed that for the food manufacturing industry to meet the emission reduction targets by 2050 the use of natural gas as the dominant source of energy in the industry at present, will have to be replaced by decarbonised grid electricity and biogas. This will require investments in Anaerobic Digestion (AD), Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants driven by biogas and heat pumps powered by decarbonised electricity.

Aging is not lost youth, but a new stage of opportunity and strength. - Betty Friedan, American feminist, 1921-2006 (Cofounder of the National Organization for Women) Where Are We Going? If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Roman statesman, 4 BC-65 AD The most challenging aspect of creating a monthly column is to try to balance mission (i.e., long-term strategy), contemporary events (i.e., things happening now), and the urgent (i.e., news you need to know). This column will have a bit of all three. I chose “trade winds” as the theme for this article. As every sailor knows, you must tack to where the wind is, not where you want it to be. I know that every student and Young Professional is waiting for the wind to align with their path. Frankly, I cannot promise that will happen anytime soon, but I can promise it will happen. To borrow a phrase, “patience or pivot” is on everyone’s mind right now. What I would point out is that we have already done both; we have been patient and we have pivoted. I believe that our pivot has been to see the strength and missions of our industry as never before. This is not just in terms of the financial recovery that will significantly enhance activity across all sectors of our industry, but also the impact of having secure and cost-effective energy to power that economy and to provide so many direct benefits to society. My goal as SPE President is to ensure that every initiative that can be considered is considered, that every member feels valued, that their voice is heard, and most of all, that we collectively and proactively work to build the future of our industry. As an adolescent, a family member once told me that “sentimentality is the worst investment advisor.” Obviously, this advice was given as I was about to invest in something stupid and my family member used it as a moment to educate me. I confess it took a while to sink in, but it is true. We must be realistic about the value generated by our investments in life (e.g., time, education, personal relationships, and of course, money). SPE must make investments to remain relevant, and frankly, I need your support to ensure those investments are both wise and appropriate.

Before the 1970s, the U.S. economy was so large relative to the rest of the world that few American economists worried about the international sector and its relation to the U.S. economy. That view has changed dramatically in the past two decades. Total U.S. trade has increased from only $83 billion in 1970 to $866 billion in 1990, averaging a 12.4% increase each year. Exports accounted for less than 4% of U.S. gross national product (GNP) in the 1950s and 1960s, but now exports account for about 6% of U.S. GNP. These changes have radical implications for U.S. firms and government policies. The U.S. can no longer disregard economic occurrences in the rest of the world.

Purpose This paper aims to analyze whether the domestic policy reforms in India would suffice, or there is a need to conform to stricter international standards as well. The paper is arranged along the following lines. First, the paper offers a brief review of the cooperation in the field of harmonization of vehicle regulations which is provided by the so-called WP.29 Forum. Second, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) standards and their membership along with Indian participation in the forum are presented. Third, reforms in India through the “Make in India” (MII) initiative and its trade in the auto-component segment are analyzed. Fourth, the possible non-tariff barriers (NTBs) on imports of auto-components in select partner countries is computed and presented. Fifth, the penetration pattern of partner countries in India’s automotive sector export value chain is analyzed. Finally, based on the observations, key policy conclusions are drawn both from global and Indian perspectives. Design/methodology/approach This paper blends expertise in law and economics and enables readers to have a finer understanding of the automotive sector which is one of the most internationalized product groups in world trade, characterized by not only cross-border movement of final products, but also of intermediate products like auto-parts and components as well as major global investment and relocation decisions. This paper focuses on India for four crucial reasons, which makes India both a key player (and potential disruptor) at global level and the rather complex approach chosen by the country vis-a-vis many regulations (including UNECE and WTO), reflecting its tendency to rely on domestic consolidation through measures such as the 2014 MII initiative. Findings The data analysis in the current paper indicates that after conforming to the UNECE 1998 standard, India’s relative trade with these countries has increased both in terms of auto-components and automobile products. Moreover, the value contribution from these partner countries in India’s exports is rising. On the other hand, the relative share of the UNECE 1958 countries in India’s trade basket has declined and a mixed trend is noticed for the common contracting parties (CPs). In addition, the share of the countries without accession to any of the UNECE agreements in India’s trade has shown an upward trend. The observation indicates that the divergence in automotive product standards might crucially influence India’s trade flows. It seems that in the short run, an orientation for exporting to UNECE 1998 partners and non-members emerges as a dominant strategy, underlining a specialization in medium-quality segment. Nevertheless, the long-term robustness of such a move deserves closer analysis, particularly by focusing on whether India may need to join the UNECE 1958 agreement to sustain its export growth. Before joining UNECE 1998, the sector has enjoyed protection through high tariff barriers. Given the differing perspective on opening-up, automobile sector earlier emerged as an obstacle in conclusion of EU–India Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA), which is being negotiated since 2007. However, after entry into an regional trade agreement (RTA), tariff preference in itself may not provide a country the requisite market access. The recent standard-setting exercises in ASEAN, a group with which India is deepening trade integration since 2010, may be considered as a case in point. Research limitations/implications The analysis so far indicates that absence of participation in UNECE 1958 standard may restrict future options for India. Presently, Indian vehicle exports are reaching UNECE 1998 member countries (e.g., Ford India sending Ecosport to USA). It is also directed towards African and Latin American countries, presently not part of any agreement. However, the ASEAN countries, currently partnering India through free trade agreement (FTA), are increasingly moving towards UNECE 1958 standards. India’s sectoral trade surplus with ASEAN countries over 2009-2013 to 2014-2018 has declined from US$548.44mn to US$529.53mn, respectively. The potential challenges in reaching ASEAN and other UNECE 1958 member countries, in turn, may influence the relocation decisions of global auto majors in India, defeating the core purpose of MII initiative. Practical implications Given the scenario, a number of policy choices for India emerge. First, joining UNECE 1958 may not be a short-run option for India, but after evaluating the evolving trade pattern, in the long run, the country may consider adopting certain core 1958 standards, in line with its economic interests. Such a move may facilitate greater export flows from India to UNECE 1958 countries. The experience of Indonesia and Vietnam, who have conformed to select UNECE 1958 standards in spite of not being formally part of any agreement, deserves mention in this regard. Second, it is observed that India’s trade balance (TB) is not improving for several Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) member countries, in spite of obtaining tariff preferences through an existing trade bloc. Part of the poor performance has been explained by Indian exporters often using the most favoured nation route rather than the preferential route, to avoid the associated compliance-related complexities. The standards and mutual recognition agreements (MRAs) conformance provisions in ASEAN–India FTA are also found to be weaker vis-à-vis the comparable provisions for other ASEAN-centric bilateral RTAs with other RCEP members. This underlines the need for both rules of origin (ROO) reforms and agreement on MRAs, which may enhance the trade potential in general and in automotive sector in particular. In the short run, India should therefore attempt to enhance exports to the UNECE 1998 members and CPs, given the commonality in standards. However, in the long run, there is a need to explore harmonization with certain core 1958 standards, to promote exports in general and even within its RTAs in particular. Originality/value The automotive sector is one of the most internationalized product groups in world trade. It is known that harmonization of product standards with partner countries can facilitate bilateral trade flows. Presently, three agreements exist for harmonization of automotive standards relating to passenger and vehicle safety under the aegis of UNECE – UNECE 1958, UNECE 1997 and UNECE 1998. Through a series of reforms and launch of the MII initiative in 2014, India has deepened its presence in world automotive sector trade and aspires to play a bigger role in coming days. Moreover, India is a WTO member and has joined the UNECE 1998 standard in 2006, which means that several important conventions regulate and bind the country. The current paper intends to analyze whether the domestic policy reforms in India would suffice in promoting the exports from this sector, or there is a need to conform to stricter international standards. The data analysis reveals that India’s relative trade orientation is deepening towards the UNECE 1998 members and countries not part of any UNECE agreements. On the other hand, the relative trade share of the UNECE 1958 countries in India’s trade basket has declined and a mixed trend is noticed for the common CPs. The analysis indicates that the divergence in automotive product standards might crucially influence India’s trade flows in general and participation in international production networks in particular. The paper argues that in the long run, India needs to consider adherence to certain UNECE 1958 standards as well as speeding up the pending domestic reforms.

Remarkable changes have occurred over the years in the domestic and international economic environment of the fruit and vegetable industry. These changes are partly driven by the North American Free Trade Agreement, nutrition policies, and development and enforcement of new food safety standards. The articles in this invited session examined the effect of these drivers and their implication on the future competitiveness of the southern fruit and vegetable industry.

The article is devoted to the problem of revealing peculiarities of mutual influence and interdependence of changes in the economic structure of Ukraine and its participation in international economic relations at different stages of historical development. The purpose of the study is to summarize the historical and economic generalization of the experience of structural transformation in domestic agriculture from 1950 to 1960 in the context of foreign trade in food. It was revealed that the political need to resume bread exports after World War II was an important reason for the beginning of the reform of Soviet crisis-hit agriculture. The main directions of reforms are identified, such as the increase of public investments in the development of agrarian industry, reduction of taxes on producers, increase in state procurement prices for agricultural products, expansion of the acreage through the development of virgin lands, sharp increase in corn output, and advanced development of animal husbandry. It was found that the reduction of administrative pressure on producers, their increased material incentives and improvement of technical support of the enterprises caused a temporary economic recovery in the agrarian sector. It is proved that the curtailment of this policy due to the lack of domestic sources of financing and the predominance of extensive forms of management led to a slowdown in the development of agriculture, an increase in its crisis phenomena and the formation of dependence on food imports. Proposals are made on possible directions of using elements of historical experience gained in contemporary economic policy of Ukraine.

AbstractThe purpose of this meta-analysis study is to examine the acculturation process of halal food to the American food culture. Further, is to determine the effects the acculturation of halal food on the consumer and food economy in the U.S. and globally. Irrespective of where a Muslim resides or travels to, consuming halal food is an obligatory religious dietary requirement for all Muslims worldwide. According to recent census estimates, there are nearly 3.3 million Muslims living in the U.S. This number represents nearly 1% of the total U.S. population. By 2050, this number will more than double. The U.S. is considered a melting pot of a mélange of many ethnic groups and is one of the most culturally and ethnically diverse countries in the world. Through both Muslims immigration to the U.S. and trade globalization, halal food was introduced to the American food culture. Migrant Muslims have not brought only their Islamic religious traditions to the U.S., but also their traditional halal food preparation, including butchering of animals for consumption, their distinct cooking styles, and other Islamic dietary practices. This paper offers an analysis of the process of acculturation and transition of halal food products to both the Muslim and non-Muslim American consumers. This paper further examines the impact of the burgeoning halal food economy on the U.S. food industry and its share of the growing global halal food economy. There a need for further research to study the long-term socioeconomic and environmental sustainability impact on growing global Muslim populations living in low-income counties.

In this study, we will focus on the different dimensions of performance, and make a descriptive analysis of the industrial sector’s position in the national economy. We will also assess the clout and the performance of each industrial branch, through the measurement of the following indicators: the added value, the employment, the number of companies, the investment, the foreign trade, the comparative advantage and the degree of export commitment. This research shows that the industry contributes the most to GDP with an average of about 19% during the 1985-2016 period, followed by agriculture with (15%), trade with (12%), construction industry and public works with (5%). By industry, statistics show the predominance of the agri-food, textile, leather, mechanical, metal and electrical industries in overall industrial production over the period 1985-2016, while in terms of exports, the mechanical, metallic, electrical", and "textile and leather" branches are at the top of the list with a share of 27% for each. Over the period of 1985-2014, the chemical and parachemical industry ranks first in terms of investments in the industrial sector with a 33% share, and thus promises significant growth prospects. In terms of regions, figures show the predominance of the Grand Casablanca region, which accounts for 41% of companies created, 61% of national industrial production, 56% of industrial exports, and 50% of the total workforce employed during the 1985-2014 period. All this is happening with a remarkable rise of the Tangier-Tetouan region in recent years.

The article focuses on the strategic alternatives of the fishery complex, which takes the leading position in the food security system of the Russian Federation as a producer and supplier of food products with a high content of easily digestible animal proteins, fat-soluble vitamins and minerals. The strategic development of the fisheries industry is defined by the regulatory and legislative documents made up by the different management bodies, which is reflected in an inconsistency of goals and quantitative indicators of their achievement. Using the principles of the state programs Development of Fishing Industry and Strategies of the Development of Fisheries until 2030 there have been formulated the possible scenarios of the fishing industry development: optimization, innovative and customer-oriented, distinguishing characteristic of which is the allocation of a priority for investment. There has been proposed to use a strategic planning tool, GAP analysis, to justify the choice of strategic alternatives for the development of the fisheries complex. It has been stated that the ratio of the manufactured fish products and the investments was used as an indicator for comparing the development scenarios. There have been illustrated the figures of the manufactured fish products by types of strategies for the period of 2018–2024; the investment performance indicators by segments of optimization strategy, innovation, customer-oriented strategy; given a comparative characteristic of the investment efficiency of strategic alternatives in 2024. A conclusion has been made on practicability of client-oriented development strategy for the fisheries industry based on the harmonization of industrial, trade and sales policy, which allows to increase the affordability of fish for the population by reducing commercial and logistics expenses.

В современных условиях развитие агропромышленного комплекса, включающего материальные, финансовые и трудовые ресурсы, является крайне важным для продовольственной безопасности государства. Агропромышленный комплекс Республики Казахстан, в который входит сельское хозяйство и переработка продуктов питания, является основным поставщиком продовольствия населению страны и от его успешной деятельности напрямую зависит состояние продовольственной безопасности Казахстана. Целью исследования данной статьи является раскрытие роли, значения АПК для обеспечения продовольственной безопасности Казахстана, выявление зависимости производства продуктов питания от различных факторов, на основе использования методов математического моделирования – корреляционно-регрессионного анализа. Объектом исследования в данной статье выступает АПК Казахстана. В статье рассмотрено влияние на объем выпуска продукции сельского хозяйства следующих факторов: субсидии, инвестиции в основной капитал, объем кредитования, уровень активности в области инновации, уровня занятости в сельском хозяйстве. Выявлено, что наибольшее влияние на объем выпуска продукции сельского хозяйства оказывает государственная поддержка АПК в форме финансового инструмента - субсидирования и инвестиций в основной капитал сельского хозяйства. Показано, что наметилась отрицательная тенденция в развитии сельского хозяйства и АПК Казахстана, как отток трудовых ресурсов из отрасли из-за низкой заработной платы. Авторы пришли к выводу, что пока в АПК Казахстана не будет обеспечен достаточный приток инвестиций с целью реализации масштабной модернизации и реконструкции сельскохозяйственного производства, техническое и технологическое отставание будет сохранено в промышленности, следовательно, проблема повышения конкурентоспособности данной отрасли будет особенно реальной. В результате авторы предлагают в дальнейшем в качестве совершенствования государственной политики в сфере развития АПК осуществлять меры активной государственной поддержки АПК, не нарушающих правила ВТО, разработать программы адресной продовольственной помощи социально-незащищенных слоев населения. In modern conditions, the development of the agro-industrial complex, including material, financial and labor resources, is extremely important for the food security of the state. The agro-industrial complex of the Republic of Kazakhstan, which includes agriculture and food processing, is the main supplier of food to the population of the country and the state of food security of Kazakhstan directly depends on its successful activity. The purpose of this article is to disclose the role, significance of the agro-industrial complex for ensuring food security in Kazakhstan, identifying the dependence of food production on various factors, based on the use of mathematical modeling methods – correlation and regression analysis. The object of research in this article is the agro-industrial complex of Kazakhstan. The article examines the impact on the volume of agricultural output of the following factors: subsidies, investments in fixed assets, the volume of lending, the level of activity in the field of innovation, the level of employment in agriculture. It was revealed that the state support of the agro-industrial complex in the form of a financial instrument – subsidies and investments in fixed assets of agriculture – has the greatest impact on the volume of agricultural production. It is shown that there has been a negative trend in the development of agriculture and the agro-industrial complex of Kazakhstan, as an outflow of labor resources from the industry due to low salary. The authors came to the conclusion that until a sufficient inflow of investments is ensured in the agro-industrial complex of Kazakhstan in order to implement large-scale modernization and reconstruction of agricultural production, the technical and technological lag will remain in the industry, therefore, the problem of increasing the competitiveness of this industry will be especially real. As a result, the authors propose, in the future, to improve the state policy in the field of agro-industrial complex development, to implement measures of active state support for the agro-industrial complex that do not violate the WTO (World Trade Organization) rules, to develop programs for targeted food assistance to socially unprotected segments of the population.

Food crops added value is obtained by the process of being processed products through the role of agro-industry. In the era of globalization, Indonesia must immediately implement the development of agro-industries to produce highly competitive trade products and be able to gain global market share. The success of implementing agro-industry is the support and support of the government to increase farmers' income in an effort to realize their welfare. This paper aims to express more comprehensively of food crop-based agro-industry products development acceleration to produce quality processed products, and agricultural functions roles institutions empowerment and high efficiency seriously and sustainably. The acceleration of the implementation of agro-industry is predicted as one of the solutions to efficiency, effectiveness, continuity and the continuity of the trade in processed products rather than raw materials, labor and capital of processed products. It is necessary to increase the competitiveness of Indonesian agroindustry products which have been dominated by raw materials, which only rely on comparative advantages of natural resource abundance and uneducated labor. Obtained agricultural products processed added value that are competitive and meet the high demands of quality and hygiene (GMP), increase in income and welfare of farmers and processed business actors, as well as the transfer of exports of raw materials to processed products. Thanks to the efforts of RMU to process rice into rice, rice flour and crackers (made from rice and rice flour), the RC ratio value of approximately 1.53, 1.28 and 5.91 showed business feasibility and obtained value-added products from processing operations which increased acquisition income. The development and improvement of technological innovations in processed products, investments and HR of business actors is predicted to be able to become the "driving engine" of strong economic progress, especially if the empowerment and institutional development function in line with the development policy programs implemented. Agro-industry products are expected to be able to reach the export market, be able to create jobs and increase interest in young labor in agriculture, able to increase income and the economy in rural areas, and be able to drive the development of rural industrialization.

Introduction. At present, the task of expanding the market for selling Ukrainian products to Ukrainian enterprises is very urgent, as well as establishing foreign relations not only for better profit of the enterprise, but also for attracting additional investments, which will contribute to the rapid development of production. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the prerequisites and features of the entry into the international markets of opportunities and threats for domestic producers and to determine on the basis of the conducted research the prospects associated with entering the international markets. Results. The paper examines the current state of foreign trade relations, stages of entering the foreign market, identifies opportunities and threats that may face domestic industrial enterprises. Before engaging in foreign economic activity, it is necessary to study the prerequisites for entering the international market and determine whether the company owns them. The complexity and frequent change of state methods of regulation of foreign economic activity have a negative impact on the export activity of enterprises. Insufficient knowledge of the legal framework of foreign countries governing the import of goods complicate export activities. Exports are hampered by the poor quality of the product due to technology backwardness and low staff skills. The development of export activity of enterprises can be constrained by high taxes on foreign economic activity, the mandatory sale of the state part of foreign exchange earnings, insufficient assistance from the state to expand export activity through various levers of economic regulation and support. export activity from the standpoint of its sufficiency in quantitative and qualitative aspects. An important prerequisite for export activity is the availability of the necessary financial resources for the company. Conclusion. The analysis of the prerequisites for the entry of Ukrainian enterprises into the international market made it possible to distinguish the most important of them: the export of the corresponding product of the enterprise potentially provides higher profitability in comparison with its realization in the domestic market; the company needs the currency to buy the necessary equipment abroad, equipment that is either missing from the domestic market or of poor quality; by means of export the enterprise tries to use the available production capacities or to expand the field of its activity at the expense of those industries whose products are in demand abroad; The company manufactures high quality products that meet the world standards due to the high qualification of personnel and the introduction of advanced technology, and at the same time has overall marketing advantages.

Purpose The food processing industry is growing with retail and catering supply chains. With the rising complexity of food products and the need to address food customization expectations, food processing systems are progressively shifting from production line to job-shops that are characterized by high flexibility and high complexity. A food job-shop system processes multiple items (i.e. raw ingredients, toppings, dressings) according to their working cycles in a typical resource and capacity constrained environment. Given the complexity of such systems, there are divergent goals of process cost optimization and of food quality and safety preservation. These goals deserve integration at both an operational and a strategic decisional perspective. The twofold purpose of this paper is to design a simulation model for food job-shop processing and to build understanding of the extant relationships between food flows and processing equipment through a real case study from the catering industry. Design/methodology/approach The authors designed a simulation tool enabling the analysis of food job-shop processing systems. A methodology based on discrete event simulation is developed to study the dynamics and behaviour of the processing systems according to an event-driven approach. The proposed conceptual model builds upon a comprehensive set of variables and key performance indicators (KPIs) that describe and measure the dynamics of the food job-shop according to a multi-disciplinary perspective. Findings This simulation identifies the job-shop bottlenecks and investigates the utilization of the working centres and product queuing through the system. This approach helps to characterize how costs are allocated in a flow-driven approach and identifies the trade-off between investments in equipment and operative costs. Originality/value The primary purpose of the proposed model relies on the definition of standard resources and operating patterns that can meet the behaviour of a wide variety of food processing equipment and tasks, thereby addressing the complexity of a food job-shop. The proposed methodology enables the integration of strategic and operative decisions between several company departments. The KPIs enable identification of the benchmark system, tracking the system performance via multi-scenario what-if simulations, and suggesting improvements through short-term (e.g. tasks scheduling, dispatching rules), mid-term (e.g. recipes review), or long-term (e.g. re-layout, working centres number) levers.

Accelerated global trade and mass immigration have brought rapid change to food culture in the United States over the past fifty years. San Francisco has been at the center of these changes. Bay Area restaurateurs Cecilia Chiang (The Mandarin) and her son Philip Chiang (P.F. Chang's), illustrate how Chinese food changed in the United States, moving out of historic Chinatowns and into the suburbs. David Brown's India House restaurant in San Francisco embodied the way Indian food was understood before the 1960s – interpreted through the lens of the British Empire. By the 2000s, Indian food had broken free of this colonial association and was available in its diverse regional variations – especially in the Bay Area suburbs fueled by the computer industry. These case studies all illustrate the impact of globalization and immigration on American food culture through the lens of San Francisco.

In 1993, the Canadian federal government ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Prior to ratification, compulsory licensing was eliminated from Canada’s Patent Act and intellectual property rights (IPRs) were strengthened. Compulsory licensing allows competitors to produce drugs under patent without the consent of the patent holder, challenging drug monopolies and lowering prices, whereas IPRs lengthen patent protections, shielding patent holders from competition and increasing prices. We perform a critical discourse analysis of key provisions in Chapter 17 of NAFTA in light of industry claims that pharmaceutical innovation requires important investments in research and development, justifying high drug prices. We note that since NAFTA, spending in research and development in Canada has decreased and drug prices have increased, becoming a major barrier to equitable access to critically necessary medications. We argue that by modifying the law, the federal government has wronged the Canadian people by discursively appropriating the language of protecting the public good while in practice legitimizing and consolidating private drug development and production, legalizing exorbitant profits, and excluding well-tested publicly financed alternatives. While NAFTA has now been superseded by the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement, our analysis offers important lessons moving forward.

In this article, we present a historical analysis on how Sardinian pastoralism has become an integrated activity in global capitalism, oriented to the production of cheap milk, through the extraction of ecological surplus from the exploitation of nature and labour. Pastoralism has often been looked at as a marginal and traditional activity. On the contrary, our objective is to stress the central role played by pastoralism in the capitalist world-ecology. Since there is currently little work analysing the historical development of pastoralism in a concrete agro-ecological setting from a world-ecology perspective, we want to contribute to the development of the literature by analysing the concrete case of Sardinian pastoralism. To do so, we will use the analytical framework of world-ecology to analyse the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and the production of nature through which pastoralism -understood as a socio-cultural system that organises nature-society relations for the reproduction of local rural societies- became an activity trapped in the production of market commodities and cheap food exploiting human (labour) and extra-human factors (e.g. land, water, environment, animals etc.). Looking at the exploitation of extra-human factors, the concept of ecological surplus allows us to understand how capital accumulation and surplus was possible thanks to the exploitation of nature, or rather the creation of cheap nature and chap inputs for the production of cheap commodities. We analyse historical pastoralism to understand how geopolitical configurations of global capitalism interact with the national and local scales to change pastoral production, nature and labour relations. We will pay particular attention to the role of land and the relationship between pastoralists and animals. The article is based on secondary data, historical material and primary data collected from 2012 to 2020 through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research. We identify four main cycles of agro-ecological transformation to explore the interactions between waves of historical capitalist expansion and changes in the exploitation of agroecological factors. The first two phases will be explored in the first section of the paper: the mercantilist phase during the modern era and the commodification of pastoralist products, which extend from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the mercantilist phase, the expansion of pastoralism finds its external limits in the trend of international demand (influenced by international trade policies that may favour or hinder exports) and its internal limits in the competition/complementarity with agriculture for the available land that results in a transhumant model of pastoralism. In this phase, the ecological surplus needed for capitalist accumulation is produced by nature as a gift, or nature for free, which results in the possibility of producing milk at a very low cost by exploiting the natural pasture of the open fields. The second cycle, “the commodification of pastoralist products”, started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction on the island of the industrial processing of Pecorino Romano cheese, and which was increasingly in demand in the North American market. This pushed pastoralism towards a strong commodification. Shepherds stopped processing cheese on-farm and became producers of cheap milk for the Pecorino Romano processing industry. Industrialists control the distribution channels and therefore the price of milk. Moreover, following the partial privatisation of land and high rent prices, shepherds progressively lose the ecological surplus that was guaranteed by free land and natural grazing, key to lower production costs and to counterbalance the unequal distribution of wealth within the chain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, although the market for Pecorino Romano was growing, these contradictions emerged and the unfair redistribution of profits within the chain (which benefited industrialists, middlemen and landowners to the detriment of shepherds) led to numerous protests and the birth of shepherds' cooperatives. The second section of the paper will explore the third agro-ecological phase: the rise of the “monoculture of sheep-raising” through the modernisation policies (from the fifties until 1990s). The protests that affected the inland areas of Sardinia, as well as the increase in banditry, signal the impossibility of continuing to guarantee cheap nature and cheap labour, which are at the basis of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. On the basis of these pressures, the 1970s witnessed a profound transformation that opened a new cycle of accumulation: laws favouring the purchase of land led to the sedenterization of pastoralism, while agricultural modernisation policies pushed towards the rationalisation of the farm. Land improvements and technological innovations (such as the milking machine and the purchase of agricultural machinery) led to the beginning of the “monoculture of sheep raising”: a phase of intensification in the exploitation of nature and the extraction of ecological surplus. This includes a great increase of the number of sheep per unit of agricultural area, thanks to the cultivated pasture replacing natural grazing and the production and purchase of stock and feed. Subsidised agricultural modernisation and sedentarisation can once again "sustain" the cost of cheap milk that is the basis of the industrial dairy chain. However, agricultural modernisation results in the further commodification of pastoralism, which becomes increasingly dependent on the upstream and downstream market, making pastoralists less autonomous. Moreover, given the impossibility of further expanding the herd, the productivity need of keeping low milk production costs has to be achieved through an increase in the average production per head. Therefore, there are higher investments in genetic selection to increase breed productivity, higher investments to improve animal feeding and a more intensive animal exploitation to increase productivity. These production strategies imply higher farm costs. In this context, the fourth phase, the neoliberal phase (analysed in the third section of the paper) broke out in Sardinia in the mid-1990s. With the end of export subsidies and the opening of the new large-scale retail channel in which producers are completely subordinate, it starts a period of increased volatility in the price of milk. In order to counter income erosion and achieve the productivity gains needed to continue producing cheap milk, pastoralists have intensified the exploitation of both human (labour) and non-human (nature) factors, with contradictory effects. In the case of nature, the intensive exploitation of land through monocultural crops has reduced biodiversity and impoverished the soil. In the case of labour, pastoralists have intensified the levels of self-exploitation and free family labour to extreme levels and have also resorted to cheaply paid foreign labourers. Throughout the paper, we reconstruct the path towards the production of "cheap milk" in Sardinia, processed mainly into pecorino romano for international export. We argue that the production of ecological surplus through the exploitation of nature and labour has been central to capital accumulation and to the unfolding of the capitalist world ecology. However, we have reached a point of crisis where pastoralists are trapped between rising costs and eroding revenues. Further exploitation of human (cheap labour) and extra-human (nature and animals) factors is becoming unsustainable for the great majority, leading to a polarization between pastoralists who push towards further intensification and mechanisation and pastoralists who increasingly de-commodify to build greater autonomy.

The article presents assessment of the level of investment security of Ukraine during 2006-2018. Most influential factors of the country’s investment security have been identified. They include structure of foreign direct investment (FDI), particularly its high research intensity. It has been identified that the integral indicator of investment security is highly sensitive to the change in the investment share of high-tech industries in total FDI volumes. The regression analysis has confirmed significant influence of structural changes in foreign direct investment on the state of macroeconomic security of Ukraine during 2006-2018. The inverse relationship between unemployment rate and such indicators of FDI structure as investment share in high-tech industries and in metallurgical production has been identified. No correlation was found between unemployment rate and changes in the investment share in wholesale and retail trade, food, beverage and tobacco, information and telecommunications activities, financial activities and insurance in total FDI. It is established that there is a close direct relation between GDP per capita and the change in the structure of FDI in the investment share in food, beverage and tobacco, information and telecommunications, financial and insurance. A strong direct relation between GDP growth rate and the change in total FDI share of investment in metallurgical industry and investment in high-tech industries was confirmed. A weak direct correlation is found between the Consumer Price Index and the shares in the FDI structure of investments in wholesale and retail trade and in high-tech industries. The inverse relationship is found between the Consumer Price Index and the share of investment in information and telecommunications activities in total FDI.

AbstractDuring the last decade, we have seen an increased opposition to globalization. Within this wave of criticism, firms and more specifically multinational corporations have been major targets, accused of multiple wrongdoings, such as social dumping, fiscal evasion, job cuts, trade deficits, abuses of power, and environmental damages. In many respects, this debate echoes the one that took place during the 1970s with respect to oil shocks, de-industrialization, and imperialism. At that time, several international organizations, such as the OECD, ECOSOC, ILO, and the European Community started to address the issue of multinationals and international investments, and advocated for the creation of guidelines to regulate their activities. The following paper explores the reactions of Swiss multinationals to these attempts, as well as their strategies for protecting their latitude in conducting business. Relying on archival material of the Swiss Union of Commerce and Industry and of the Federal Archives, this paper shows how the biggest companies in the pharmaceutical, machine, and food processing industries—all of them still being global players —decided to create a task force to deal with these emerging regulations at the international level.

The manufacturing industry for a long period of time remains the most important and vital economic activity in the international arena, is a priority in ensuring the security of the state, forming the structure of export trade, promoting the development of other industries. In carrying out the research, the main problem that is relevant in today's conditions is identified - the main imperatives of the development of processing industries on an innovative basis. The peculiarities of the innovation activities of the processing industries, including through the development of scientific and industrial parks, clusters were covered in their scientific works by eminent specialists. The problems of functioning of the food and metallurgical industries on an innovation basis, including through the creation of organizational forms of innovation, are actively investigated by scientists. However, it requires a more detailed further study, in particular, in the development of proposals for the improvement of legislative and other regulatory acts on the activities of scientific, industrial and technological parks, clusters, which can be mechanisms for the innovative development of processing industries. The setting of tasks consists in defining the basic principles for the development of innovative activities of the processing industries in the context of Ukraine’s European integration the study of the main trends in the innovative development of the processing industry in Ukraine in recent years, as well as the development of proposals for improving legislative and other regulatory acts on the activities of science parks, industrial and technological parks, clusters. The aim of the study is to identify innovative aspects of the activities of industrial enterprises of the processing industry of Ukraine. The main methods that were used in the process of conducting a study are analysis, statistical, comparisons, research of documents, legal regulation. Review of domestic experience in the functioning of the processing industry, in particular the food industry and the development of metallurgy in Ukraine in modern conditions of European integration. The features of the current state of development of the food industry in Ukraine are investigated. An assessment of the main economic indicators of the domestic food industry on an innovative basis. The positive aspects of development and the factors constraining the functioning of the food industry are identified. The main development trends are analyzed, the problems and risks of the innovation activities of domestic metallurgical enterprises are identified. Potential areas of cooperation in the functioning of the food and metallurgical industry, particularly in the aspect of the development of special forms of organization of innovation in the context of Ukraine’s European integration, are substantiated. Certain features of the institutional support of the functioning of the processing industries of Ukraine on the basis of innovation. Developed proposals for the further functioning of the processing industries in Ukraine. The field of application of the research results is socio-economic development. One of the main prerequisites for sustainable economic development of the country is the accelerated expansion of the processing industry in Ukraine. The growth of the level of competitiveness of domestic producers is possible through the introduction of institutional mechanisms of state regulation. Considerable attention should be paid to increasing the volume and quality of products in the food and metallurgical industries through systematic technical and economic renewal of enterprises, introduction of innovations that contribute to creating high-quality and safe products, creating and developing forms of organizing innovative activities, as well as attracting investments and creating favorable investment climate.

Abstract Ephedra sinica Stapf or Ma Huang has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for over 5000 years as a bronchodilating and stimulatory agent. In the West, it is popularly used in dietary supplements for weight loss and to enhance athletic performance. Adverse events have been reported following consumption of dietary supplements containing ephedrine alkaloids. There are about 50 known species of Ephedra. The ratio of ephedrine to other alkaloids varies from species to species; all North American species lack alkaloids. The method commonly used in the dietary supplement industry for botanical authentication is to analyze the product for the presence of chemical markers known to be present in the specific herb. However, this method does not ensure that the product contains authentic herb, especially if it has been spiked with chemical marker compounds. In the trade and raw drug market, Ephedra is available in the form of stem cuttings or powders, without any vouchers, thus making identification of the species difficult. Using light microscopy, we can detect the presence of Ephedra herb, even in powder form, and identify within certain limits its geographical origin. Identification of Chinese and North American species of Ephedra has been made easier by developing a key using leaf and internode length as key identification characters.

Este artigo visa estabelecer um panorama da indústria de celulose e papel sediada no Brasil, evidenciando o desempenho de algumas variáveis importantes para análise do setor, tais como a capacidade de produção, os tipos de produtos, as magnitudes das exportações e das importações e o destino das exportações, o nível e a capacidade de utilização e o preço médio das exportações no período de 2001 a 2011. Para tanto, foram utilizados dados do Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio Exterior (MDIC, 2012), da Associação Brasileira de Celulose e Papel (BRACELPA, 2011) e da Organização das Nações Unidas para Alimentação e Agricultura (FAO, 2011). No geral, os resultados revelam que a indústria de celulose vem ganhando espaço no âmbito do comércio internacional, diante de uma nova redistribuição espacial da produção, em função do obsoletismo das indústrias europeias, norte-americanas e canadenses e da inserção da celulose de fibra curta nos diferentes estágios de produção. No caso da indústria de papel, os indicadores apontam um cenário não tão promissor, diante do acirramento da concorrência internacional, embora o mercado interno possa vir a se constituir num grande impulso para a indústria local. AbstractOverview of the pulp and paper industry in Brazil: 2001/2011. This research aims to analyze the performance of the Brazilian pulp and paper industry, from 2001 to 2011, towards the main variables for the sector analysis, such as production capacity, sort of products, magnitude of exports, imports, destination of exports, level and capacity of utilization, and the average price of exports. In order to that, it used primary data from Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade (MDIC, 2012), Brazilian Association of Pulp and Paper (BRACELPA, 2011) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 2011). In general, results indicate that cellulose industry has gained importance in international trade, before a new spatial redistribution of production, according to the obsolescence of European, North American and Canadian industries, and the insertion of hardwood pulp in different stages of production. In relation to the paper industry, the results suggest a scenario not as promising as for the pulp one, even though domestic market may constitute a major boost to the industry.Keywords: Forests; forest economics; exports; international trade.

AbstractThis article examines transnational connections between African American emancipation in the United States and Chinese and Indian indenture within the British Empire. In an era of social upheaval and capitalist crisis, planters and colonial officials envisioned coolies as a source of uninterrupted plantation labor. This vision was often bound to the conditions of African American emancipation. In British Honduras, colonial officials sought to bring emancipated African Americans to the colony as labor for sugar plantations. When this project failed, interest turned toward indentured Chinese labor managed by white planters from the U.S. South. In India’s North-Western Provinces, the outbreak of famine came to be seen as a “kindred distress” to the crisis in Lancashire’s textile industry. Unemployed English factory workers were seen as suffering from famine due to the scarcity of slave-produced cotton, just as colonial subjects suffered from scarcity of food. While some weavers in the North-Western Provinces were taken into the coolie trade, the emigration of unemployed Lancashire weavers was looked to as a possible alternative to indenture. Drawing upon archives in Australia, Belize, Britain, India, and the United States, this article explores connections between seemingly disparate histories. By focusing upon their interrelation, this article locates the formation of crisis not in raw materials, but rather within a transnational struggle over racialized labor exploitation, or what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “dark and vast sea of human labor.”

One of the most important objectives of the innovation policy of both developed and developing countries is the development of national and regional innovation systems. These are institutions and skills that aim to introduce innovations increasing competitiveness of the economy and improving the quality of life in society. Maintaining economic growth based on building a knowledge-based economy requires increasing the economic potential, mainly through increasing productivity and innovation. What is important in creating the innovative potential of the Polish economy is the fact that the large size of the Polish market, combined with the low level of openness to trade isolates domestic companies from their international competition. Domestic markets products and services are among the least liberalized in the EU and OECD. Polish companies may be sufficiently profitable in the domestic market, and therefore the pressure to compete with their counterparts abroad through investments in innovation and R&D, is lower. An important role in building an innovative economy is played by the business environment institutions providing specialized services to support the development of enterprises. Between these entities that are a part of the entrepreneurship support system in Poland, there are numerous organizational and competence links. The aim of this study is to determine the course of action for activities undertaken in the framework of innovation policy, which are aimed at creating system support for the development of the agri-food sector. The idea behind the study was to verify the hypothesis that the availability of the system services affects the increase of competitiveness, profitability, or viability and potential of the agri-food sector. The object of the study was a pilot service in the field of marketing and sales of products for micro and small companies in the agri-food processing industry. It was carried out based on the system project of the Polish Agency for the Development of Entrepreneurship (PARP), “Providing enterprises with access to new services of the National Service Network (KSU),” financed under Sub-measure 2.2.1 of the Operational Programme Human Capital 2007-2013.

The globalization of the automotive industry in the last twenty years has manifested itself ina rapid increase in the assembly of automobiles and the production of automotive components and spareparts outside of the traditional centers of automotive manufacturing. On the basis of contemporary researchand literature, we can distinguish two types of emerging centers of automobile manufacturing.First are potentially large domestic markets with a low level of motor vehicle ownership and rapidlygrowing economy such as Brazil. The second type of new automobile manufacturing center consistsof the peripheries of automotive core regions such as Mexico in the case of the North American coreregion and Central Europe in the case of the Western European core region. These new growth centershave benefitted from their lower production costs compared to those of core regions and their geographicproximity to the largest automobile markets. These emerging centers of manufacturing havebecome attractive locations, especially for export-oriented manufacturing facilities operated by largetransnational automotive corporations attempting to improve their global competitiveness. The purposeof this paper is to evaluate the effect of foreign direct investment on the development of automobile productionin these three emerging regions. The paper reviews post-1990 production trends and changes inthe geography of automobile production, especially new greenfield investments in the three analyzedregions. We examine changes in international trade in Brazil, Mexico and Central Europe with a focuson automobiles and automobile parts. Based on the results of our research, we determine the effects offoreign direct investment and industrial upgrading on the role of these emerging production centers inthe global production system.

Abstract A number of analytical methods for constituents commonly measured in distillers dried grains (DDG) are practiced in laboratories serving the agricultural sector. A large interlaboratory variability among results has been observed in the industry. Methods for moisture, crude fat, and crude fiber are empirical, thus part of this variability can be attributed to the use of different methods of analysis. A study was organized and supported by the American Feed Industry Association, the Renewable Fuels Association, and the National Corn Grain Association to evaluate the efficacy, applicability, and the intralaboratory variation of a number of methods for moisture, crude protein, crude fat, and crude fiber in DDG with solubles (DDGS). The moisture methods included in the study are AOAC 930.15, AOAC 934.01, AOAC 935.29, AOAC 2003.06, and National Forage Testing Association (NFTA) 2.2.2.5; the crude protein methods studied are AOAC 990.03 and AOAC 2001.13; the crude fat methods studied are AOAC 945.16, AOAC 954.02, AOAC 2003.05, and AOAC 2006.06; and the crude fiber methods studied are AOAC 978.10 and AOCS Ba 6a-05. A second study was undertaken to assess existing interlaboratory variation of the same methods in 23 laboratories. Based on the results of these studies, the sponsoring associations established recommended reference methods for use in commercial trade of DDGS. The reference methods selected are NFTA 2.2.2.5 for moisture, AOAC 990.03 and AOAC 2001.11 for crude protein, AOAC 945.16 for crude fat, and AOAC 978.10 for crude fiber.

Since the mid-1990s a plethora of voluntary labour initiatives has been introduced in global supply chains that serve northern-based consumer markets. The chief aim of these new systems of labour governance is to establish minimum standards and conditions for workers employed in the production of goods for export. This concern for labour follows a period of market liberalism, a major shift in the regulatory position of nation-states and the globalization of business. Voluntary initiatives, which largely draw on the International Labour Organization (ILO) core conventions, include codes of conduct, certifiable standards and International Framework Agreements (IFAs). The article explores the effectiveness of these initiatives in a highly concentrated industry: the banana trade. The banana trade is dominated on the production side by three North American agri-businesses: Chiquita Brands International, Dole Food Company and Fresh Del Monte Produce. Yet these businesses are increasingly being directed by international retailers, particularly in the UK, where the four major supermarket groups command access to the consumer, and comprise Tesco, ASDA (owned by Wal-Mart), J Sainsbury and Wm Morrison Supermarkets. The continuing increase of retail buyer power within global supply chains, coupled with supermarkets’ intent to respond to demands for social responsibility in the chains that serve them, raises the prospect of better conditions for workers. However, the article argues that although some improvements have been made, while supermarkets continue to drive down costs to benefit consumers, workers ultimately pay the price.

Background: Inaccurate disclosures of physician and industry relationships in scientific reporting may create an asymmetry of information by hiding potential biases. The accuracy of conflict of interest disclosure in sports medicine research is unknown. Purpose: To compare author financial disclosures in published articles in 2016 in the American Journal of Sports Medicine ( AJSM) with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Open Payments Database (OPD) to determine the percentage of payments values and percentage of eligible authors with discrepancies. Study Design: Cross-sectional study; no level of evidence (nonclinical). Methods: All articles published in 2016 in AJSM were screened to identify eligible authors. On the basis of OPD reporting, physician authors affiliated with a US institution were included. Stated disclosures in AJSM publications for these authors were identified and compared with industry-reported payments on OPD. Results: A total of 434 authors were included in this study. Mean and median total payments per author per year were $76,941 and $1692, respectively. The most commonly received payment was for food and beverage (81.3% of authors), followed by travel and lodging (45.4%) and consulting (31.8%). Authors with higher total payments were less likely to be discrepant in their reporting—notably, authors earning >$500,000 had 16.1% of payment values with discrepancy, as opposed to 85.3% for those earning <$10,000 ( P < .001). First authors had a lower percentage of payment values with discrepancy (13.8%) versus middle authors (31.9%, P = .001). Finally, men had a lower percentage of payment values with discrepancy (418 authors, 22.3% of payment values with discrepancy) as compared with women (16 authors, 95.3%; P < .001). Regarding industry payments specifically requested on the AJSM disclosure form for authors (royalties, consulting, research payments, and ownership and investments), only 25.3% of authors had a discrepancy in these payment categories in aggregate. Conclusion: Discrepancies exist between disclosures reported by authors publishing in AJSM and what is reported in the OPD. Authors receiving lower total payments, middle authors, and women are more likely to have disclosure discrepancies. Additionally, industry research funding support and ownership interest are most likely to go unreported. However, this study did not assess whether authors with industry payments preferentially published studies pertaining to products from companies from which they received funding. As national registries such as the OPD are increasingly utilized, physicians may benefit from referencing such databases before submitting conflict of interest disclosures.

A foodborne-disease surveillance program is an essential part of a food safety program. Foodborne surveillance should be able to issue early alerts on contaminated food to which a large population is exposed; collate notifications of enteric diseases and laboratory isolations; report foodborne disease incidents on a regular basis; and use sentinel and specific epidemiological studies as required. Although most countries have some kind of reporting of notifiable diseases, few have foodborne-disease surveillance programs, and little is known of foodborne disease in general on a worldwide basis. However, in the last decade many European countries have generated annual reports to join those of Canada, England/Wales, Japan and the United States. In addition, a few other countries are attempting to develop foodborne-disease reporting programs but are hampered by lack of resources. However, it is apparent that staphylococcal intoxication has been decreasing in most nations, except in some Latin American countries where cheese from unpasteurized milk and cream-filled desserts are widely consumed. In contrast, salmonellosis has been increasing or remaining steady as the main foodborne disease in practically all other countries. Newly-recognized agents such as E. coli O157:H7 and other verotoxigenic E. coli, or previously-known agents in new food associations such as Clostridium botulinum, are also being documented in several countries. Although the socioeconomic impact of foodborne diseases is very high, there are at best limited effective control measures to reduce them, even in industrialized countries. One reason control is difficult to achieve is that surveillance is inadequate and the burden of foodborne disease is not fully understood by policy-makers. Another reason is that a consistent and coordinated effort by industry and government is required, as has been practiced in Sweden to reduce substantially the Salmonella contamination of poultry. Improvement of surveillance on a worldwide basis is all the more important with increasing world trade and travel, and international organizations need to take a lead role in accomplishing this.

The purpose of the article is a systemic economic analysis of the investment climate in the process of ensuring sustainable development of Ukraine. European integration strategy of Ukraine necessitates the formation of an investment climate in order to adapt to European requirements, create a development strategy to integrate with developed countries, harmonize economic trade and environmental processes. Methodology. In the course of this analysis, the investment climate was considered as a complex open system with the application in the study of the methodology of systemic analysis, which allowed to emphasize certain aspects of the specific nature of its operation. Results. It is established that in modern conditions of acceleration of transformation processes the mechanisms of expansion of investment opportunities and overcoming of investment restrictions at all levels of hierarchy of taxonomic systems are characterized by any importance and intensity. At the global level, this affects the international movement of capital and the formation of world investment wealth through the internationalization of the economies of different countries. At the national level, this applies to regulatory and legal support, formation of institutional support for investment processes, diversification of ownership, sources and types of investment resources. At the local and territorial levels, it is especially important to ensure investment in human capital and the social sphere. The factors of negative influence on the development of Ukrainian industry are determined: reduction of world prices for ferrous metals; national gaps in the development of railway transport causing problems with logistics; the need to repair production facilities in the fields of metallurgy, electricity, gas and steam, carbonite and refining; low level of yield in agriculture (for the food industry); sanctions of the Russian Federation; inflation; reduction in use of electricity and gas due to global warming; market advantage of imports of competitive products. The priority tasks for the development of Ukrainian industry are also outlined: renewal of industrial production facilities; development of infrastructure and logistics; balancing of external and internal market conditions; providing the food industry by increasing the volume of agricultural production; ensuring the purchasing power of domestic consumers and expanding demand. It is established that the level of capital investments in the first half of 2020 lags significantly behind the previous year. In addition, with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the situation with the inflow of foreign direct investment in Ukraine has also deteriorated significantly. According to preliminary results, the balance of FDI amounted to -112.6%. This was not the case even in the unfavorable economic development of 2014, which was characterized as a crisis period associated with the military conflict in the east and the annexation of Crimea. Practical implications. The analysis of the peculiarities of the investment climate and its goals allows to determine the role of investment in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, to identify key priorities in solving environmental problems, to form the potential for sustainable development. For Ukraine, these are components of the formation of the investment climate in a pandemic. Value/originality. The use of systems analysis allows to identify the main problems of formation of the investment climate in modern conditions.

AbstractWith growth in retail sales estimated by industry at 15–25% yr−1, organic food represents the only significant growth sector in Canada's food system. This reality, in combination with mounting evidence that substantial environmental and economic benefits can arise from organic farming adoption, suggests that organic sector development should be a priority for governments. However, organic food remains a marginal component of Canadian agricultural and trade policy. This study was designed to examine the opportunities and costs to the province of Ontario of strategic investment in the expansion of the organic sector. Drawing on existing literature and Ontario land use and production data, the study used an iterative process to identify how the province could reach a target of 10% of Ontario's cropped acres in organic production within 15 years, from the current level of about 1%. We concluded that after 15 years 5343 organic farmers would be producing organically in all major commodities, including 4254 converting farmers entering the organic sector and 600 new entrants to farming. The 489 organic farms reported in 2004 would be included in this total of 5343 because we assume that they all make modest additions over this time period to their existing operations. Organic production would occur on about 367,000 ha of land, and some 1.4 million animals would be reared organically. After 15 years, these farmers would reduce fertilizer applications by about 43 million kg (saving $18.4 million yr−1), pesticide applications by about 296,000 kg active ingredient (saving $9.1 million yr−1), and 7079 kg of growth-promoting antibiotics/medications consumed in animal feed. This 30-point program would require new investments by the provincial government of about $51 million over 15 years. Phase I (first 5 years) costs would total $7.1 million and Phase II (following 10 years) costs $43.9 million. Net program costs would be significantly lower since farmers would have directly saved on inputs and received premium organic prices for most of their goods sold, thereby reducing government costs related to supporting farm finances. Additionally, this program would contribute significantly to reducing the externalized costs of current approaches to agriculture, conservatively estimated at $145 million annually or $2.18 billion over the 15-year life of the program. Not all those costs would be saved within 15 years, but this exceedingly modest investment in organic production, representing only 2.3% of these externalized costs, would generate savings in externalized costs far beyond this one-time investment. Implementation of this plan would allow domestic producers to capture 51% of Ontario's organic consumption, up from the currently low-range estimate of 15%. Organic foods would represent 1.9% of the total food retail market after 5 years and 5.3% of the total market after 15 years.

Investment in the country is the most effective and efficient driver of the economy. Their availability will inevitably lead to effective employment through the creation of new jobs, and deep modernization. Increasing the competitiveness of goods will contribute to the growth of sales, exports and foreign exchange earnings in the country. The purpose of the article is to characterize foreign economic activity as a factor in intensifying investments in the Brest region of Belarus. Methods used in the study. The use of the induction method allowed us to identify areas for improving the procedures for determining the effectiveness of the application of tax benefits. Research hypothesis. In the Republic of Belarus, this is favored by a well-developed transport infrastructure, an extensive network of Railways and highways, modern logistics centers, and a highly qualified workforce. The key factor in the growth of the country's economy is the investment of funds in the regions. Statement of the main material. The modern Brest district is a region where light industry, agriculture, food industry, construction industry, forestry, and woodworking are actively developing. The geographical position of the region on the border with the European Union creates favorable conditions for trade and investment cooperation with European countries. The products of JSC ”Savushkin product“, the Belarusian-German joint venture ”Santa Bremor“ and the Belarusian-Russian joint venture ”Brestgazoapparat“, and the holding company ”Pinskdrev“ are widely known on the world markets. The national center for marketing and pricing study of the Ministry of foreign affairs will continue to promote economic cooperation between enterprises of the Brest region and foreign partners. Originality and practical value. The free economic zone ”Brest“ has been created and is successfully operating in the region, the advantages of which are well known to investors far beyond the country's borders. The residents of this economic zone have successfully used tax and customs benefits, guarantees in respect of the ownership and disposition of profit. In addition to the benefits provided in the free economic zone, preferences also apply when investing in objects located in small towns and rural areas. Conclusions. The Brest region can offer foreign investors comfortable working conditions and profitable projects. In total, the region's investment portfolio includes more than 20 offers totaling more than 100 million dollars.In the article, analyzes the effectiveness of foreign economic activity of the Brest region of the Republic of Belarus and appreciates its investment potential. The assessment of the economic activity of the region allows us to draw conclusions not only about the weaknesses and strengths of key economic entities, but also to identify the prospects for the development of the Brest region by increasing the use of existing benefits and preferences.

Objective of the study: The main objective of this research work was to analyze the importance of a Technology Transfer Office (TTO) as an innovation promoter in regional development in Mexico. Methodology/Approach: An analysis bibliographic was used, application of surveys and generation of indexes. In 2014, a survey was applied to 131 TTOs to measure their impacts.Originality/Relevance: To perform this analysis, we used a self-generated indicator, an index that measures the degree of specialization by geographic region and economic sector, using indicators of regional agglomeration as a basis. The agglomeration model generated was composed of national patent applications, international patents, utility models, industrial designs, and trade secrets.Main results: The results by geographical area in Mexico, were the Northwest, specializing in aquaculture, fisheries, aeronautics and agriculture; the Northeast, in biotechnology, chemistry and metallurgy mechanics; the Center, in automobile, energy, and software; the West, in aerospace, automobile, chemistry and metallurgy mechanics; the Southeast, in food industry, construction, and mining.Theoretical/methodological contributions: We found that the specialization of the TTOs among the various productive sectors in Mexico has contributed to the highest rates of growth in patent registration in the Latin American region.Social/management contributions: Although contributions generated in protecting intellectual property at international level are still insufficient, we believe we are on the right track. At least Mexico started to generate the innovation ecosystem that other countries began four decades ago.

Significant shifts in the type of foods consumed by South Africans have taken place since 1994 and packaged food and beverage innovation has accelerated since then. Globally, advances in science and technology have benefitted food processing and food manufacturing technologies and systems. Significant capital investments have been made by the South African food and beverage manufacturing industry (SAFBMI). It is, however, not clear which technology areas have received investments and for what purposes. The objective of this study was thus to understand how the SAFBMI has invested in and applied science and technology since 1994. Data were sourced from food and beverage trade magazines, dating from 1986 to 2012. Trends over the past 30 years were analysed to determine the application of science and technology. The findings suggest that the dairy, soft drinks and bakery sectors have been most active. The main advances were to upgrade manufacturing facilities and build new plants to increase capacity, deliver new products and improve efficiencies and product quality and safety. Investments to improve thermal processing and packaging were also noted. We found evidence of the application of commercially available new preservation technologies and a low level of experimentation with non-commercial novel technologies by the SAFBMI. South Africa appears to be keeping pace with advances in food manufacturing in automation, process control and quality and food safety practices, material handling, and centralised distribution centres with warehouse management systems. Continued investment in food science and technology research will ensure that the growing consumer demand for packaged foods and beverages is met.

AbstractIn Germany more than 20% of the energy mix is made up of renewable energy and its share is rapidly increasing. The federal government expects renewables to account for 35% of Germany's electricity consumption by 2020, 50% by 2030 and 80% by 2050. According to the German Energy Agency, multi-billion euro investments in energy storage are expected by 2020 in order to reach these goals. The growth of this fluctuating energy supply has created demand for innovative storage options in Germany and it is accelerating the development of technologies in this field. Along with batteries and smart grids, hydrogen is expected to be one of the lead technologies. 2010 a commercialization roadmap for wind hydrogen was set up by the two northern federal states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein with the goal of utilizing surplus wind power for the electrolytic production of hydrogen. With the creation of the “performing energy initiative”, 2011, Brandenburg and Lower Saxony joined this undertaking. The aim of this initiative is to set up demonstration projects in order to develop and optimize wind-hydrogen hybrid systems and prepare their commercialization for the time after 2020. Beside the conversion of hydrogen into electricity and fuel for cars, further markets like raw material for the chemical, petrochemical, metallurgy and food industry are going to be addressed. Considering the fact there are over 40 caves currently used for natural gas storage with a total volume of 23.5 billion cubic meters and 400 000 km gas grid available in Germany, the German Technical and Scientific Association for Gas and Water sees opportunities for hydrogen to be fed into the existing natural gas grid network. The name of this concept is power-to-gas. According to the current DVGW-Standards natural gas in Germany can contain up to 5% hydrogen. The GERG, European Group on the Gas Research sees potential to increase this amount up to 6% to 20%. Power-to-gas could serve both for fuel and for the storage of extra energy produced by renewable sources. The hydrogen produced via electrolysis could be drawn upon – directly or as synthetic natural gas (SNG) in a second additional methanation process step – to provide electricity by means of CCGT (combined cycle gas turbines) or CHP (combined heat and power) using for example fuel cells. It could also address the industrial and household heat market. DVGW is furthermore participating in the “Power-to-Gas Platform” that was set up in 2012 by the German Energy Agency, bringing together RnD institutes, renewable energy project developers and park operators, utilities, underground storage providers in order to create political support for this new technology. Demonstration projects will be completed by 2020 in order to develop business models (for storage, production and trade of “green gas”) and devices (electrolysers, turbines, smart gas metering, compressors, storage capacities amongst others) to enable the implementation of this concept on a broad scale. This means that a multitude of industrial players will be involved in the changes that will occur in the value chain: utilities (electricity, gas), power technology companies, car makers, heating device manufacturers, but also manufacturers of measurement, regulation and control devices, suppliers of the biogas and methanation industry. Germany is the pioneer in this field. This technology however increasingly interests its neighbours, with project developments in France, Italy, Spain, and UK but also in North America and North Africa. Germany can contribute its valuable experience (e.g. legal framework for power-to-gas) to the development of these industries. German participants in demonstration projects in these countries could for example be renewable energy park operators, RnD institutes and suppliers.

We study the effects of mandatory disclosure on competitive interactions in the setting of oil & gas (O&G) reserve disclosures by North American public firms. We document that reserve disclosures inform competitors: when one firm announces larger increases in O&G reserves, competitors experience lower announcement returns and higher real investments. To sharpen identification, we analyze several sources of cross-sectional variation in these patterns, the degree of competition and the sign and the source of reserves changes. We also exploit two plausibly exogenous shocks: the tightening of the O&G reserve disclosure rules and the introduction of fracking technology. Additional tests more directly focused on the presence of proprietary costs confirm that the mandated reserve disclosures result in a relative loss of competitive edge for announcing firms. Our collective evidence highlights important trade-offs in the market-wide effects of disclosure regulation.

There is a general unawareness of food crops indigenous to the African continent that have contributed to Western culture. This under-appreciation is particularly relevant in the current context of societal movements to end historic racism and value the contributions of peoples of African origin and African skin colors. Lack of awareness of the contributions of Africa's crops has negative practical consequences, including inadequate investments in preserving and maximizing the use of crop diversity to facilitate breeding. This paper provides an overview and analysis of African crops that have made significant contributions to the United States and globally, and/or hold potential in the twenty-first century. The paper specifically discusses watermelon, coffee, kola, rooibos, oil palm, shea, cowpea/black eyed pea, leafy greens, okra, yam, sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, teff, and fonio. The review focuses on the intersection of these crops with racialized peoples, with a particular focus on African-Americans starting with slavery. The analysis includes the sites of domestication of African crops, their historical migration out of Africa, their sociocultural contributions to cuisines and products around the world, their uses today, and the indigenous knowledge associated with traditional cultivation and landrace selection. The untapped potential of local genetic resources and indigenous agronomic strategies are also described. The review demonstrates that African crops played an important role in the development of American cuisine, beverages and household products. Many of these crops are nutritious, high value and stress tolerant. The paper concludes that African crops hold significant promise in improving the resiliency of global food production systems, to mitigate climate change and alleviate food insecurity and rural poverty, especially in dry regions of the world. It is hoped that this review contributes to teaching the next generation of agriculturalists, food scientists and international development professionals about the valuable contributions of Africa's resilient crops and peoples.

There is a general unawareness of food crops indigenous to the African continent that have contributed to Western culture. This under-appreciation is particularly relevant in the current context of societal movements to end historic racism and value the contributions of peoples of African origin and African skin colors. Lack of awareness of the contributions of Africa's crops has negative practical consequences, including inadequate investments in preserving and maximizing the use of crop diversity to facilitate breeding. This paper provides an overview and analysis of African crops that have made significant contributions to the United States and globally, and/or hold potential in the twenty-first century. The paper specifically discusses watermelon, coffee, kola, rooibos, oil palm, shea, cowpea/black eyed pea, leafy greens, okra, yam, sorghum, pearl millet, finger millet, teff, and fonio. The review focuses on the intersection of these crops with racialized peoples, with a particular focus on African-Americans starting with slavery. The analysis includes the sites of domestication of African crops, their historical migration out of Africa, their sociocultural contributions to cuisines and products around the world, their uses today, and the indigenous knowledge associated with traditional cultivation and landrace selection. The untapped potential of local genetic resources and indigenous agronomic strategies are also described. The review demonstrates that African crops played an important role in the development of American cuisine, beverages and household products. Many of these crops are nutritious, high value and stress tolerant. The paper concludes that African crops hold significant promise in improving the resiliency of global food production systems, to mitigate climate change and alleviate food insecurity and rural poverty, especially in dry regions of the world. It is hoped that this review contributes to teaching the next generation of agriculturalists, food scientists and international development professionals about the valuable contributions of Africa's resilient crops and peoples.

Agriculture is the primary source of livelihood for about 58 per cent of India’s population. Gross Value Added by agriculture, forestry and fishing is estimated at Rs 18.53 trillion (US$ 271.00 billion) in FY18. According to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), the Indian food processing industry has cumulatively attracted Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) equity inflow of about USD 9.08 billion between April 2000 and March 2019. The agriculture sector in Asian country is anticipated to come up with higher momentum within the next few years thanks to accrued investments in agricultural infrastructure like irrigation facilities, deposit and cold storage. What is more, the growing use of genetically changed crops can probably improve the yield for Indian farmers. India is anticipated to be self-sustaining in pulses within the returning few years because of conjunctive efforts of scientists to urge early-maturing types of pulses and therefore the increase in minimum support value. FDI works as a way of integration developing countries into the world market place and increasing the capital accessible for investment, so resulting in inflated economic process required to cut back financial condition and lift living standards. India is expected to achieve the ambitious goal of doubling farm income by 2022. This study main objective is analyzing Indian agricultural manufacturing and allied industries are qualified for the future expansion of agriculture sector through its modernization of agro based machineries industries. This study centered solely the chances of the allied industries (R& D, equipments, and machineries up gradation.

In October 2019, the Mexican government reformed its General Health Law thus establishing the warning approach to front-of-pack nutrition labeling (FOPNL), and in March 2020, modified its national standard, revamping its ineffective FOPNL, one preemptively developed by industry actors. Implementation is scheduled for later in 2020. However, the new regulation faces fierce opposition from transnational food and beverage companies (TFBCs), including Nestlé, Kellogg, Grupo Bimbo, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo through their trade associations, the National Manufacturers, American Bakers Associations, the Confederation of Industrial Chambers of Mexico and ConMéxico. Mexico, as a regional leader, could tip momentum in favor of FOPNL diffusion across Latin America. But the fate of the Mexican FOPNL and the region currently lies in this government’s response to three threats of legal challenges by TFBCs, citing international laws and guidelines including the World Trade Organization (WTO), Codex Alimentarius, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)/US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). In this perspective, we argue that these threats should not prevent Mexico or other countries from implementing evidence-informed policies, such as FOPNLs, that pursue legitimate public health objectives.

AbstractSince 2006, when the Emma Maersk broke into the world of shipping, the growth in containership size has remained a continuous trend.For the last 14 years, since 2006, the enlargement of fullcontainerships size has remained a continuous trend since Emma Maersk broke into the world of shipping. This process - that also affected north-south trades - has crucial implications in the shipping business, particularly in the planning of ports and its services and related activities. This paper analyses the global increase in vessel size and forecasts larger vessels’ arrival to South American coasts. The paper analyses evidence since 2006 to understand the factors behind the trend for bigger ships (fleets between 18,000 and 24,000 TEU) and introduce a validated methodology for the prediction of the size of container ships. Experts presented a consensus vision in which factors associated with infrastructure, economics, technology, and the environment play a crucial role in driving the trend. Next, the paper presents a methodology for forecasting the size of containerships and applies it to Latin America’s trade. The models include two alternative thresholds for the dependent variables (1310 ft LOA and 18,000 TEU of nominal capacity) that are controlled by cascading effect (i.e., the size gap between Latin America and the world’s main trade routes), and the economic activity at the destination countries (represented by port activity). Finally, the conclusions highlight the forecast’s call to take action on infrastructure planning and investments, analyzing issues such as “economies of scale,” concentration, or entry barriers. Overall, the paper warns about the importance of efficient medium-term planning in the port industry to maximize its economic impact.

Canadian supply management policies in dairy, poultry and eggs have been hotly debated for over 50 years. During the most recent renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2017-2018, the U.S. threatened to cancel NAFTA if concessions were not made to Canada’s supply management policies in agriculture. During the renegotiation, many arguments for and against supply management in agriculture were repeated, some were updated, and some newer perspectives relating to sustainability and social responsivity were more enthusiastically discussed. Most arguments critical of supply management have been developed using economic analyses of market and industry-level impacts of supply management. On the other hand, supportive arguments are often qualitative, focus on the survival of smaller farms and generally lack empirical investigation based on application of relevant theory. This paper uses management theory to investigate the impact of supply management of management and business activities on food processing firms. We use a framework that links business activities with the broad regulatory environment to interpret evidence from a study of independent meat processors in Ontario, Canada, particularly those that processed turkey, which is a supply managed sector; and pork, which is not. Results suggest that the broad regulatory environment facing Ontario meat processors is of greater concern to managers of independent processing businesses than the specific regulatory environment of supply management. Results also suggest the value creation activities and strategies used by a business may affect how managers assess opportunities and challenges in this specific regulatory environment.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

During World War II, the Soviet Union’s food supply was in a state of crisis. Hitler’s army had occupied the agricultural heartlands of Ukraine and Southern Russia in 1941 and, as a result, agricultural production for the entire nation had plummeted. Soldiers in Red Army, who easily ate the best rations in the country, subsisted on a daily allowance of just under a kilogram of bread, supplemented with meat, tea, sugar and butter when and if these items were available. The hunger of the Red Army and its effect on the morale and strength of Europe’s eastern warfront were causes for concern for the Soviet government and its European and American allies. The one country with a food surplus decided to do something to help, and in 1942 the United States agreed to send thousands of pounds of meat, cheese and butter overseas to help feed the Red Army. After receiving several shipments of the all-American spiced canned meat SPAM, the Red Army’s quartermaster put in a request for a more familiar canned pork product, Russian tushonka. Pound for pound, America sent more pigs overseas than soldiers during World War II, in part because pork was in oversupply in the America of the early 1940s. Shipping meat to hungry soldiers and civilians in war torn countries was a practical way to build business for the U.S. meat industry, which had been in decline throughout the 1930s. As per a Soviet-supplied recipe, the first cans of Lend-Lease tushonka were made in the heart of the American Midwest, at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Ohio (Stettinus 6-7). Government contracts in the meat packing industry helped fuel economic recovery, and meatpackers were in a position to take special request orders like the one for tushonka that came through the lines. Unlike SPAM, which was something of a novelty item during the war, tushonka was a food with a past. The original recipe was based on a recipe for preserved meat that had been a traditional product of the Ural Mountains, preserved in jars with salt and fat rather than by pressure and heat. Thus tushonka was requested—and was mass-produced—not simply as a convenience but also as a traditional and familiar food—a taste of home cooking that soldiers could carry with them into the field. Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the arrival of tushonka was instrumental in helping the Red Army push back against the Nazi invasion (178). Unlike SPAM and other wartime rations, tushonka did not fade away after the war. Instead, it was distributed to the Soviet civilian population, appearing in charity donations and on the shelves of state shops. Often it was the only meat product available on a regular basis. Salty, fatty, and slightly grey-toned, tushonka was an unlikely hero of the postwar-era, but during this period tushonka rose from obscurity to become an emblem of socialist modernity. Because it was shelf stable and could be made from a variety of different cuts of meat, it proved an ideal product for the socialist production lines where supplies and the pace of production were infinitely variable. Unusual in a socialist system of supply, this product shaped production and distribution lines, and even influenced the layout of meatpacking factories and the genetic stocks of the animals that were to be eaten. Tushonka’s initial ubiquity in the postwar Soviet Union had little to do with the USSR’s own hog industry. Pig populations as well as their processing facilities had been decimated in the war, and pigs that did survive the Axis invasion had been evacuated East with human populations. Instead, the early presence of tushonka in the pig-scarce postwar Soviet Union had everything to do with Harry Truman’s unexpected September 1945 decision to end all “economically useful” Lend-Lease shipments to the Soviet Union (Martel). By the end of September, canned meat was practically the only product still being shipped as part of Lend-Lease (NARA RG 59). Although the United Nations was supposed to distribute these supplies to needy civilians free of cost, travelers to the Soviet Union in 1946 spotted cans of American tushonka for sale in state shops (Skeoch 231). After American tushonka “donations” disappeared from store shelves, the Soviet Union’s meat syndicates decided to continue producing the product. Between its first appearance during the war in 1943, and the 1957 announcement by Nikita Khrushchev that Soviet policy would restructure all state animal farms to support the mass production of one or several processed meat products, tushonka helped to drive the evolution of the Soviet Union’s meat packing industry. Its popularity with both planners and the public gave it the power to reach into food commodity chains. It is this backward reach and the longer-term impacts of these policies that make tushonka an unusual byproduct of the Cold War era. State planners loved tushonka: it was cheap to make, the logistics of preparing it were not complicated, it was easy to transport, and most importantly, it served as tangible evidence that the state was accomplishing a long-standing goal to get more meat to its citizenry and improving the diet of the average Soviet worker. Tushonka became a highly visible product in the Soviet Union’s much vaunted push to establish a modern food regime intended to rival that of the United States. Because it was shelf-stable, wartime tushonka had served as a practical food for soldiers, but after the war tushonka became an ideal food for workers who had neither the time nor the space to prepare a home-cooked meal with fresh meat. The Soviet state started to produce its own tushonka because it was such an excellent fit for the needs and abilities of the Soviet state—consumer demand was rarely considered by planners in this era. Not only did tushonka fit the look and taste of a modern processed meat product (that is, it was standard in texture and flavor from can to can, and was an obviously industrially processed product), it was also an excellent way to make the most of the predominant kind of meat the Soviet Union had the in the 1950s: small scraps low-grade pork and beef, trimmings leftover from butchering practices that focused on harvesting as much animal fat, rather than muscle, from the carcass in question. Just like tushonka, pork sausages and frozen pelmeny, a meat-filled pasta dumpling, also became winning postwar foods thanks to a happy synergy of increased animal production, better butchering and new food processing machines. As postwar pigs recovered their populations, the Soviet processed meat industry followed suit. One official source listed twenty-six different kinds of meat products being issued in 1964, although not all of these were pork (Danilov). An instructional manual distributed by the meat and milk syndicate demonstrated how meat shops should wrap and display sausages, and listed 24 different kinds of sausages that all needed a special style of tying up. Because of packaging shortages, the string that bound the sausage was wrapped in a different way for every type of sausage, and shop assistants were expected to be able to identify sausages based on the pattern of their binding. Pelmeny were produced at every meat factory that processed pork. These were “made from start to finish in a special, automated machine, human hands do not touch them. Which makes them a higher quality and better (prevoskhodnogo) product” (Book of Healthy and Delicious Food). These were foods that became possible to produce economically because of a co-occurring increase in pigs, the new standardized practice of equipping meatpacking plants with large-capacity grinders, and freezers or coolers and the enforcement of a system of grading meat. As the state began to rebuild Soviet agriculture from its near-collapse during the war, the Soviet Union looked to the United States for inspiration. Surprisingly, Soviet planners found some of the United States’ more outdated techniques to be quite valuable for new Soviet hog operations. The most striking of these was the adoption of competing phenotypes in the Soviet hog industry. Most major swine varieties had been developed and described in the 19th century in Germany and Great Britain. Breeds had a tendency to split into two phenotypically distinct groups, and in early 20th Century American pig farms, there was strong disagreement as to which style of pig was better suited to industrial conditions of production. Some pigs were “hot-blooded” (in other words, fast maturing and prolific reproducers) while others were a slower “big type” pig (a self-explanatory descriptor). Breeds rarely excelled at both traits and it was a matter of opinion whether speed or size was the most desirable trait to augment. The over-emphasis of either set of qualities damaged survival rates. At their largest, big type pigs resembled small hippopotamuses, and sows were so corpulent they unwittingly crushed their tiny piglets. But the sleeker hot-blooded pigs had a similarly lethal relationship with their young. Sows often produced litters of upwards of a dozen piglets and the stress of tending such a large brood led overwhelmed sows to devour their own offspring (Long). American pig breeders had been forced to navigate between these two undesirable extremes, but by the 1930s, big type pigs were fading in popularity mainly because butter and newly developed plant oils were replacing lard as the cooking fat of preference in American kitchens. The remarkable propensity of the big type to pack on pounds of extra fat was more of a liability than a benefit in this period, as the price that lard and salt pork plummeted in this decade. By the time U.S. meat packers were shipping cans of tushonka to their Soviet allies across the seas, US hog operations had already developed a strong preference for hot-blooded breeds and research had shifted to building and maintaining lean muscle on these swiftly maturing animals. When Soviet industrial planners hoping to learn how to make more tushonka entered the scene however, their interpretation of american efficiency was hardly predictable: scientifically nourished big type pigs may have been advantageous to the United States at midcentury, but the Soviet Union’s farms and hungry citizens had a very different list of needs and wants. At midcentury, Soviet pigs were still handicapped by old-fashioned variables such as cold weather, long winters, poor farm organisation and impoverished feed regimens. The look of the average Soviet hog operation was hardly industrial. In 1955 the typical Soviet pig was petite, shaggy, and slow to reproduce. In the absence of robust dairy or vegetable oil industries, Soviet pigs had always been valued for their fat rather than their meat, and tushonka had been a byproduct of an industry focused mainly on supplying the country with fat and lard. Until the mid 1950s, the most valuable pig on many Soviet state and collective farms was the nondescript but very rotund “lard and bacon” pig, an inefficient eater that could take upwards of two years to reach full maturity. In searching for a way to serve up more tushonka, Soviet planners became aware that their entire industry needed to be revamped. When the Soviet Union looked to the United States, planners were inspired by the earlier competition between hot-blooded and big type pigs, which Soviet planners thought, ambitiously, they could combine into one splendid pig. The Soviet Union imported new pigs from Poland, Lithuania, East Germany and Denmark, trying valiantly to create hybrid pigs that would exhibit both hot blood and big type. Soviet planners were especially interested in inspiring the Poland-China, an especially rotund specimen, to speed up its life cycle during them mid 1950s. Hybrdizing and cross breeding a Soviet super-pig, no matter how closely laid out on paper, was probably always a socialist pipe dream. However, when the Soviets decided to try to outbreed American hog breeders, they created an infrastructure for pigs and pig breeding that had a dramatic positive impact of hog populations across the country, and the 1950s were marked by a large increase in the number of pigs in the Soviet union, as well as dramatic increases in the numbers of purebred and scientific hybrids the country developed, all in the name of tushonka. It was not just the genetic stock that received a makeover in the postwar drive to can more tushonka; a revolution in the barnyard also took place and in less than 10 years, pigs were living in new housing stock and eating new feed sources. The most obvious postwar change was in farm layout and the use of building space. In the early 1950s, many collective farms had been consolidated. In 1940 there were a quarter of a million kolkhozii, by 1951 fewer than half that many remained (NARA RG166). Farm consolidation movements most often combined two, three or four collective farms into one economic unit, thus scaling up the average size and productivity of each collective farm and simplifying their administration. While there were originally ambitious plans to re-center farms around new “agro-city” bases with new, modern farm buildings, these projects were ultimately abandoned. Instead, existing buildings were repurposed and the several clusters of farm buildings that had once been the heart of separate villages acquired different uses. For animals this meant new barns and new daily routines. Barns were redesigned and compartmentalized around ideas of gender and age segregation—weaned baby pigs in one area, farrowing sows in another—as well as maximising growth and health. Pigs spent less outside time and more time at the trough. Pigs that were wanted for different purposes (breeding, meat and lard) were kept in different areas, isolated from each other to minimize the spread of disease as well as improve the efficiency of production. Much like postwar housing for humans, the new and improved pig barn was a crowded and often chaotic place where the electricity, heat and water functioned only sporadically. New barns were supposed to be mechanised. In some places, mechanisation had helped speed things along, but as one American official viewing a new mechanised pig farm in 1955 noted, “it did not appear to be a highly efficient organisation. The mechanised or automated operations, such as the preparation of hog feed, were eclipsed by the amount of hand labor which both preceded and followed the mechanised portion” (NARA RG166 1961). The American official estimated that by mechanizing, Soviet farms had actually increased the amount of human labor needed for farming operations. The other major environmental change took place away from the barnyard, in new crops the Soviet Union began to grow for fodder. The heart and soul of this project was establishing field corn as a major new fodder crop. Originally intended as a feed for cows that would replace hay, corn quickly became the feed of choice for raising pigs. After a visit by a United States delegation to Iowa and other U.S. farms over the summer of 1955, corn became the centerpiece of Khrushchev’s efforts to raise meat and milk productivity. These efforts were what earned Khrushchev his nickname of kukuruznik, or “corn fanatic.” Since so little of the Soviet Union looks or feels much like the plains and hills of Iowa, adopting corn might seem quixotic, but raising corn was a potentially practical move for a cold country. Unlike the other major fodder crops of turnips and potatoes, corn could be harvested early, while still green but already possessing a high level of protein. Corn provided a “gap month” of green feed during July and August, when grazing animals had eaten the first spring green growth but these same plants had not recovered their biomass. What corn remained in the fields in late summer was harvested and made into silage, and corn made the best silage that had been historically available in the Soviet Union. The high protein content of even silage made from green mass and unripe corn ears prevented them from losing weight in the winter. Thus the desire to put more meat on Soviet tables—a desire first prompted by American food donations of surplus pork from Iowa farmers adapting to agro-industrial reordering in their own country—pushed back into the commodity supply network of the Soviet Union. World War II rations that were well adapted to the uncertainty and poor infrastructure not just of war but also of peacetime were a source of inspiration for Soviet planners striving to improve the diets of citizens. To do this, they purchased and bred more and better animals, inventing breeds and paying attention, for the first time, to the efficiency and speed with which these animals were ready to become meat. Reinventing Soviet pigs pushed even back farther, and inspired agricultural economists and state planners to embrace new farm organizational structures. Pigs meant for the tushonka can spent more time inside eating, and led their lives in a rigid compartmentalization that mimicked emerging trends in human urban society. Beyond the barnyard, a new concern with feed-to weight conversions led agriculturalists to seek new crops; crops like corn that were costly to grow but were a perfect food for a pig destined for a tushonka tin. Thus in Soviet industrialization, pigs evolved. No longer simply recyclers of human waste, socialist pigs were consumers in their own right, their newly crafted genetic compositions demanded ever more technical feed sources in order to maximize their own productivity. Food is transformative, and in this case study the prosaic substance of canned meat proved to be unusually transformative for the history of the Soviet Union. In its early history it kept soldiers alive long enough to win an important war, later the requirements for its manufacture re-prioritized muscle tissue over fat tissue in the disassembly of carcasses. This transformative influence reached backwards into the supply lines and farms of the Soviet Union, revolutionizing the scale and goals of farming and meat packing for the Soviet food industry, as well as the relationship between the pig and the consumer. References Bentley, Amy. Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity. Where: University of Illinois Press, 1998. The Book of Healthy and Delicious Food, Kniga O Vkusnoi I Zdorovoi Pishche. Moscow: AMN Izd., 1952. 161. Danilov, M. M. Tovaravedenie Prodovol’stvennykh Tovarov: Miaso I Miasnye Tovarye. Moscow: Iz. Ekonomika, 1964. Khrushchev, Nikita. Khrushchev Remembers. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1970. 178. Long, James. The Book of the Pig. London: Upcott Gill, 1886. 102. Lush, Jay & A.L. Anderson, “A Genetic History of Poland-China Swine: I—Early Breed History: The ‘Hot Blood’ versus the ‘Big Type’” Journal of Heredity 30.4 (1939): 149-56. Martel, Leon. Lend-Lease, Loans, and the Coming of the Cold War: A Study of the Implementation of Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1979. 35. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 59, General Records of the Department of State. Office of Soviet Union affairs, Box 6. “Records relating to Lend Lease with the USSR 1941-1952”. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative reports 1940-1954. USSR Cotton-USSR Foreign trade. Box 64, Folder “farm management”. Report written by David V Kelly, 6 Apr. 1951. National Archive and Records Administration (NARA). RG 166, Records of the Foreign Agricultural Service. Narrative Reports 1955-1961. Folder: “Agriculture” “Visits to Soviet agricultural installations,” 15 Nov. 1961. Skeoch, L.A. Food Prices and Ration Scale in the Ukraine, 1946 The Review of Economics and Statistics 35.3 (Aug. 1953), 229-35. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Fond R-7021. The Report of Extraordinary Special State Commission on Wartime Losses Resulting from the German-Fascist Occupation cites the following losses in the German takeover. 1948. Stettinus, Edward R. Jr. Lend-Lease: Weapon for Victory. Penguin Books, 1944.

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society." -- Orville Schell Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley "Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financial information, but I don't think people know what good information is when you get into culture, society, and politics." -- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's Content Once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much more complicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And they possessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you've known all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oats boxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass of water with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessen your indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be a little obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space of magazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads got too annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel. The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slamming your front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired a more complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of their familiar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote a best-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders which identified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hanging around Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden, subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple props to help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions of female anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aesthetic streamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular feature of the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was the simple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like David Ogilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and was replaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal Techniques The book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing about congressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominent motivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the new ad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession. The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even Vance Packard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," he wrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old- fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knows that things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In fact what seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletons they once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features and benefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazement at the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads for watches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcely mention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified the product. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modern advertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images and feelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the product and why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seem totally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J. Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying to convey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart of corporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine, "far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho- persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departments of mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail not from McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names like Archetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannot sell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four- wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; or deconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalit observes, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, which holds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of the Oedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goal of effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for the fact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporate America by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising Yet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become, the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where" it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modern advertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" of advertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. The ultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot be distinguished from their background environment. When this happens, the environment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts in magazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early science fiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgrounds and suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is not being driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products but by media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertising space. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the new world of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of this change in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" from the 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscription fees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content for free, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it". Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have also been a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't like paying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track the effectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to pay for actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web as readers' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowl for new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity of advertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In the process, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societal institutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new "territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape of popular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TV commercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded by thousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keep them out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of the old door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar, on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseball caps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a little more personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They have even wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-out counter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasoline pumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article is not an ad.) Advertising and Entertainment In advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have been crossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising's search for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largely invisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising from entertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of the increasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed out in best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economy and Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom, Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becoming synonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will be entertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on this expectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, in The Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses to provide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compelling experience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditional entertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage" of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new media that carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose of entertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment was also simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. There was money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make a healthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, the entertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways to squeeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products in paid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins to other areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popular with the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning" of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainment content is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once. A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is a good chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in video rentals. Advertising and Journalism The merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards a world of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising and journalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitous advertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make money provides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final "promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week, this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. The more the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder it will be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by news organisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence by keeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length. But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for online media. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons for this. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorial content than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines and newspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy, these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reason making it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growing merger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewer corporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimately advertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a product when it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalist works for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make direct investments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes, CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago in September 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4% stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network for trading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors to cnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in the awkward position of both providing coverage of online trading and profiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such as Dow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties to their own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on the expense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice of accepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. The confusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with "an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thriving online. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of puffery inserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- it doesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones, into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example in forbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-written articles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift to discipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsored edits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking fees of up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness", its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclose future promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach online companies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less "revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of the Internet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes "as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush to colonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce is beginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is an irrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When you can't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land? The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is not the increasing merger of advertising with other industries (like entertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of online commerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technology provides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websites and to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websites take a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, a media site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every product mentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economic partnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rate ads where there is little connection between product sales and the advertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, the emerging Internet technology for their application is one of the great economic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. The promise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides product manufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit from selling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturer of a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now, however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations and entertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transaction fees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general population provides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising. This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliate programs" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internet technology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money through affiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in the sale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are most likely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves with e-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media at Forrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites will receive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17 billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great direct response advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anything sold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that all of us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising. All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When this happens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nice things about products, what is the need and importance of subliminal techniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try to trick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics? It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming an increasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens when one can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticism because it is based around disconnection rather than connection to products. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics are becoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea of transaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money on transaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies is little more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago by Vance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" of modern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of a revolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a point well made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still may remain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest cultural criticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, voting for a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue to need unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must ask what happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationship with suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquity of advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certain point, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthy and what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have a corrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media's importance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns, "if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than a Marxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become types of Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to America to learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. In effect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy with that old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. America stands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growing ubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities or threats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand, there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and its centre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, there is the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society in the early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy to recognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture. Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of the Internet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture rather than in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slam that front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or toss that magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television. We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, that television commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of the characteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJ Reynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alien abduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel through space then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through all our space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted by a new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday. (Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products which can make a new you.) References Brill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. <http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_41/b3650163.htm>. Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph, and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999. Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27 Sep. 1999. <http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/09/27/persuaders/index.php>. Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999. Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php>. Chicago style: John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/ads.php> ([your date of access]).

Background “The sense of taste,” write Nelson and colleagues in a 2002 issue of Nature, “provides animals with valuable information about the nature and quality of food. Mammals can recognize and respond to a diverse repertoire of chemical entities, including sugars, salts, acids and a wide range of toxic substances” (199). The authors go on to argue that several amino acids—the building blocks of proteins—taste delicious to humans and that “having a taste pathway dedicated to their detection probably had significant evolutionary implications”. They imply, but do not specify, that the evolutionary implications are positive. This may be the case with some amino acids, but contemporary tastes, and changes in them, are far from universally beneficial. Indeed, this article argues that modern food production shapes and distorts human taste with significant implications for health and wellbeing. Take the western taste for fried chipped potatoes, for example. According to Schlosser in Fast Food Nation, “In 1960, the typical American ate eighty-one pounds of fresh potatoes and about four pounds of frozen french fries. Today [2002] the typical American eats about forty-nine pounds of fresh potatoes every year—and more than thirty pounds of frozen french fries” (115). Nine-tenths of these chips are consumed in fast food restaurants which use mass-manufactured potato-based frozen products to provide this major “foodservice item” more quickly and cheaply than the equivalent dish prepared from raw ingredients. These choices, informed by human taste buds, have negative evolutionary implications, as does the apparently long-lasting consumer preference for fried goods cooked in trans-fats. “Numerous foods acquire their elastic properties (i.e., snap, mouth-feel, and hardness) from the colloidal fat crystal network comprised primarily of trans- and saturated fats. These hardstock fats contribute, along with numerous other factors, to the global epidemics related to metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease,” argues Michael A. Rogers (747). Policy makers and public health organisations continue to compare notes internationally about the best ways in which to persuade manufacturers and fast food purveyors to reduce the use of these trans-fats in their products (L’Abbé et al.), however, most manufacturers resist. Hank Cardello, a former fast food executive, argues that “many products are designed for ‘high hedonic value’, with carefully balanced combinations of salt, sugar and fat that, experience has shown, induce people to eat more” (quoted, Trivedi 41). Fortunately for the manufactured food industry, salt and sugar also help to preserve food, effectively prolonging the shelf life of pre-prepared and packaged goods. Physiological Factors As Glanz et al. discovered when surveying 2,967 adult Americans, “taste is the most important influence on their food choices, followed by cost” (1118). A person’s taste is to some extent an individual response to food stimuli, but the tongue’s taste buds respond to five basic categories of food: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. ‘Umami’ is a Japanese word indicating “delicious savoury taste” (Coughlan 11) and it is triggered by the amino acid glutamate. Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda identified glutamate while investigating the taste of a particular seaweed which he believed was neither sweet, sour, bitter, or salty. When Ikeda combined the glutamate taste essence with sodium he formed the food additive sodium glutamate, which was patented in 1908 and subsequently went into commercial production (Japan Patent Office). Although individual, a person’s taste preferences are by no means fixed. There is ample evidence that people’s tastes are being distorted by modern food marketing practices that process foods to make them increasingly appealing to the average palate. In particular, this industrialisation of food promotes the growth of a snack market driven by salty and sugary foods, popularly constructed as posing a threat to health and wellbeing. “[E]xpanding waistlines [are] fuelled by a boom in fast food and a decline in physical activity” writes Stark, who reports upon the 2008 launch of a study into Australia’s future ‘fat bomb’. As Deborah Lupton notes, such reports were a particular feature of the mid 2000s when: intense concern about the ‘obesity epidemic’ intensified and peaked. Time magazine named 2004 ‘The Year of Obesity’. That year the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health was released and the [US] Centers for Disease Control predicted that a poor diet and lack of exercise would soon claim more lives than tobacco-related disease in the United States. (4) The American Heart Association recommends eating no more than 1500mg of salt per day (Hamzelou 11) but salt consumption in the USA averages more than twice this quantity, at 3500mg per day (Bernstein and Willett 1178). In the UK, a sustained campaign and public health-driven engagement with food manufacturers by CASH—Consensus Action on Salt and Health—resulted in a reduction of between 30 and 40 percent of added salt in processed foods between 2001 and 2011, with a knock-on 15 percent decline in the UK population’s salt intake overall. This is the largest reduction achieved by any developed nation (Brinsden et al.). “According to the [UK’s] National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), this will have reduced [UK] stroke and heart attack deaths by a minimum of 9,000 per year, with a saving in health care costs of at least £1.5bn a year” (MacGregor and Pombo). Whereas there has been some success over the past decade in reducing the amount of salt consumed, in the Western world the consumption of sugar continues to rise, as a graph cited in the New Scientist indicates (O’Callaghan). Regular warnings that sugar is associated with a range of health threats and delivers empty calories devoid of nutrition have failed to halt the increase in sugar consumption. Further, although some sugar is a natural product, processed foods tend to use a form invented in 1957: high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). “HFCS is a gloopy solution of glucose and fructose” writes O’Callaghan, adding that it is “as sweet as table sugar but has typically been about 30% cheaper”. She cites Serge Ahmed, a French neuroscientist, as arguing that in a world of food sufficiency people do not need to consume more, so they need to be enticed to overeat by making food more pleasurable. Ahmed was part of a team that ran an experiment with cocaine-addicted rats, offering them a mutually exclusive choice between highly-sweetened water and cocaine: Our findings clearly indicate that intense sweetness can surpass cocaine reward, even in drug-sensitized and -addicted individuals. We speculate that the addictive potential of intense sweetness results from an inborn hypersensitivity to sweet tastants. In most mammals, including rats and humans, sweet receptors evolved in ancestral environments poor in sugars and are thus not adapted to high concentrations of sweet tastants. The supranormal stimulation of these receptors by sugar-rich diets, such as those now widely available in modern societies, would generate a supranormal reward signal in the brain, with the potential to override self-control mechanisms and thus lead to addiction. (Lenoir et al.) The Tongue and the Brain One of the implications of this research about the mammalian desire for sugar is that our taste for food is about more than how these foods actually taste in the mouth on our tongues. It is also about the neural response to the food we eat. The taste of French fries thus also includes that “snap, mouth-feel, and hardness” and the “colloidal fat crystal network” (Rogers, “Novel Structuring” 747). While there is no taste receptor for fats, these nutrients have important effects upon the brain. Wang et al. offered rats a highly fatty, but palatable, diet and allowed them to eat freely. 33 percent of the calories in the food were delivered via fat, compared with 21 percent in a normal diet. The animals almost doubled their usual calorific intake, both because the food had a 37 percent increased calorific content and also because the rats ate 47 percent more than was standard (2786). The research team discovered that in as little as three days the rats “had already lost almost all of their ability to respond to leptin” (Martindale 27). Leptin is a hormone that acts on the brain to communicate feelings of fullness, and is thus important in assisting animals to maintain a healthy body weight. The rats had also become insulin resistant. “Severe resistance to the metabolic effects of both leptin and insulin ensued after just 3 days of overfeeding” (Wang et al. 2786). Fast food restaurants typically offer highly palatable, high fat, high sugar, high salt, calorific foods which can deliver 130 percent of a day’s recommended fat intake, and almost a day’s worth of an adult man’s calories, in one meal. The impacts of maintaining such a diet over a comparatively short time-frame have been recorded in documentaries such as Super Size Me (Spurlock). The after effects of what we widely call “junk food” are also evident in rat studies. Neuroscientist Paul Kenny, who like Ahmed was investigating possible similarities between food- and cocaine-addicted rats, allowed his animals unlimited access to both rat ‘junk food’ and healthy food for rats. He then changed their diets. “The rats with unlimited access to junk food essentially went on a hunger strike. ‘It was as if they had become averse to healthy food’, says Kenny. It took two weeks before the animals began eating as much [healthy food] as those in the control group” (quoted, Trivedi 40). Developing a taste for certain food is consequently about much more than how they taste in the mouth; it constitutes an individual’s response to a mixture of taste, hormonal reactions and physiological changes. Choosing Health Glanz et al. conclude their study by commenting that “campaigns attempting to change people’s perception of the importance of nutrition will be interpreted in terms of existing values and beliefs. A more promising strategy might be to stress the good taste of healthful foods” (1126). Interestingly, this is the strategy already adopted by some health-focused cookbooks. I have 66 cookery books in my kitchen. None of ten books sampled from the five spaces in which these books are kept had ‘taste’ as an index entry, but three books had ‘taste’ in their titles: The Higher Taste, Taste of Life, and The Taste of Health. All three books seek to promote healthy eating, and they all date from the mid-1980s. It might be that taste is not mentioned in cookbook indexes because it is a sine qua non: a focus upon taste is so necessary and fundamental to a cookbook that it goes without saying. Yet, as the physiological evidence makes clear, what we find palatable is highly mutable, varying between people, and capable of changing significantly in comparatively short periods of time. The good news from the research studies is that the changes wrought by high salt, high sugar, high fat diets need not be permanent. Luciano Rossetti, one of the authors on Wang et al’s paper, told Martindale that the physiological changes are reversible, but added a note of caution: “the fatter a person becomes the more resistant they will be to the effects of leptin and the harder it is to reverse those effects” (27). Morgan Spurlock’s experience also indicates this. In his case it took the actor/director 14 months to lose the 11.1 kg (13 percent of his body mass) that he gained in the 30 days of his fast-food-only experiment. Trivedi was more fortunate, stating that, “After two weeks of going cold turkey, I can report I have successfully kicked my ice cream habit” (41). A reader’s letter in response to Trivedi’s article echoes this observation. She writes that “the best way to stop the craving was to switch to a diet of vegetables, seeds, nuts and fruits with a small amount of fish”, adding that “cravings stopped in just a week or two, and the diet was so effective that I no longer crave junk food even when it is in front of me” (Mackeown). Popular culture indicates a range of alternative ways to resist food manufacturers. In the West, there is a growing emphasis on organic farming methods and produce (Guthman), on sl called Urban Agriculture in the inner cities (Mason and Knowd), on farmers’ markets, where consumers can meet the producers of the food they eat (Guthrie et al.), and on the work of advocates of ‘real’ food, such as Jamie Oliver (Warrin). Food and wine festivals promote gourmet tourism along with an emphasis upon the quality of the food consumed, and consumption as a peak experience (Hall and Sharples), while environmental perspectives prompt awareness of ‘food miles’ (Weber and Matthews), fair trade (Getz and Shreck) and of land degradation, animal suffering, and the inequitable use of resources in the creation of the everyday Western diet (Dare, Costello and Green). The burgeoning of these different approaches has helped to stimulate a commensurate growth in relevant disciplinary fields such as Food Studies (Wessell and Brien). One thing that all these new ways of looking at food and taste have in common is that they are options for people who feel they have the right to choose what and when to eat; and to consume the tastes they prefer. This is not true of all groups of people in all countries. Hiding behind the public health campaigns that encourage people to exercise and eat fresh fruit and vegetables are the hidden “social determinants of health: The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system” (WHO 45). As the definitions explain, it is the “social determinants of health [that] are mostly responsible for health iniquities” with evidence from all countries around the world demonstrating that “in general, the lower an individual’s socioeconomic position, the worse his or her health” (WHO 45). For the comparatively disadvantaged, it may not be the taste of fast food that attracts them but the combination of price and convenience. If there is no ready access to cooking facilities, or safe food storage, or if a caregiver is simply too time-poor to plan and prepare meals for a family, junk food becomes a sensible choice and its palatability an added bonus. For those with the education, desire, and opportunity to break free of the taste for salty and sugary fats, however, there are a range of strategies to achieve this. There is a persuasive array of evidence that embracing a plant-based diet confers a multitude of health benefits for the individual, for the planet and for the animals whose lives and welfare would otherwise be sacrificed to feed us (Green, Costello and Dare). Such a choice does involve losing the taste for foods which make up the lion’s share of the Western diet, but any sense of deprivation only lasts for a short time. The fact is that our sense of taste responds to the stimuli offered. It may be that, notwithstanding the desires of Jamie Oliver and the like, a particular child never will never get to like broccoli, but it is also the case that broccoli tastes differently to me, seven years after becoming a vegan, than it ever did in the years in which I was omnivorous. When people tell me that they would love to adopt a plant-based diet but could not possibly give up cheese, it is difficult to reassure them that the pleasure they get now from that specific cocktail of salty fats will be more than compensated for by the sheer exhilaration of eating crisp, fresh fruits and vegetables in the future. Conclusion For decades, the mass market food industry has tweaked their products to make them hyper-palatable and difficult to resist. They do this through marketing experiments and consumer behaviour research, schooling taste buds and brains to anticipate and relish specific cocktails of sweet fats (cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice cream) and salty fats (chips, hamburgers, cheese, salted nuts). They add ingredients to make these products stimulate taste buds more effectively, while also producing cheaper items with longer life on the shelves, reducing spoilage and the complexity of storage for retailers. Consumers are trained to like the tastes of these foods. Bitter, sour, and umami receptors are comparatively under-stimulated, with sweet, salty, and fat-based tastes favoured in their place. Western societies pay the price for this learned preference in high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and obesity. Public health advocate Bruce Neal and colleagues, working to reduce added salt in processed foods, note that the food and manufacturing industries can now provide most of the calories that the world needs to survive. “The challenge now”, they argue, “is to have these same industries provide foods that support long and healthy adult lives. And in this regard there remains a very considerable way to go”. If the public were to believe that their sense of taste is mutable and has been distorted for corporate and industrial gain, and if they were to demand greater access to natural foods in their unprocessed state, then that journey towards a healthier future might be far less protracted than these and many other researchers seem to believe. References Bernstein, Adam, and Walter Willett. “Trends in 24-Hr Sodium Excretion in the United States, 1957–2003: A Systematic Review.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 92 (2010): 1172–1180. Bhaktivedanta Book Trust. 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