Honey, McRib, Peak Oil, Earth from space, Surprise link

The title of today's blog entry is not creative, but it is descriptive. With that, let's begin.

1. Oh, Honey: It's like I don't know you anymore.

I've learned some terrible things about honey this week. Let's start with the fact that a lot of stuff that is sold as "honey" in supermarkets (three quarters of it, maybe) can't legally be called honey. This is because the honey has been been ultra-filtered to have the pollen removed from it, and the FDA has ruled that honey must contain pollen to legally be called honey. Now, whether or not honey has pollen in it most likely seems somewhat inconsequential from your perspective (why should you care if your honey has bits of flowers in it?), but don't be lulled into complacency. Without pollen in the honey, there is no way to trace the source of the honey, and this means there's no way to tell where your honey comes from. And you definitely want to know where your honey comes from, because--apparently--the cheapest honey around is from China, which is also where the most dangerous honey is from. Says Food Safety News:

A third or more of all the honey consumed in the U.S. is likely to have been smuggled in from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.

Yep. Evidently, Chinese honey is very often tainted with chloramphenicol, which can cause fatal reactions in 1 in every 30,000 people. The United States doesn't even let food animals eat the stuff! And then there are the heavy metals in the honey--it seems mom-and-pop beekeping operations in China have a pesky habit of using "small, unlined, lead-soldered drums to collect and store [their] honey." This is no good, people. No good.

But how does contaminated Chinese honey get into the US of A, you ask? Especially if all the pollen has been filtered out of it--and if everybody knows it's poisonous? Simple: via (a) negligence of the FDA, and (b) honey laundering schemes (I kid you not--look, senator Schumer from my home state made a whole stink about it last year). The United States has placed steep tariffs on honey from China to dissuade their import; in response China has adopted the practice of routing its honey through other countries, most recently India. Europe allows neither Chinese nor Indian honey to be imported...but America apparently has no problem with the Indian variety despite the well-known fact that much of it comes from China. America: land of the free and home of the brave honey eaters!

Which is all to say, I think the Food Safety News report on honey laundering, where a lot of the above information comes from, is definitely worth a read.

From now on, I think I'll stick to honey I purchase from local producers.

2. Ribses.

I've never eaten a McRib sandwich, and I have no intention of ever doing so. But I'm gathering from a lot of postings on Facebook, commercials on TV, and various internet articles, that the McRib is/was back on the market--for a limited time only (apparently, you've missed your chance to eat one at this point). Two things I've read about the McRib have stuck with me, so I'm sharing them with you.

(Side question: Why am I reading about the McRib at all? Because it's oddly fascinating, that's why. Also because I am nothing if not good at procrastination...more important things to do? Time to research the McRib on the interwebs!)

Numero Uno. Yesterday I read skimmed a fascinating article about the McRib as arbitrage, in which it is argued that McDonalds only introduces the McRib when pork prices are falling. The author even made a graph to prove it (blue is the price of pork, black is when the McRib has been reintroduced):

Neato, huh?

In addition to being an interesting read--definitely worth a perusal--the McRib arbitrage article also contained a one-sentence summary of the American fast food industry that I liked very much (such nice imagery):

Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of.

And what a nice segue that is to McRib thing Numero Dos: What's the McRib made of? It's certainly not made of actual ribs. If you've digested one of these things, you probably don't want to know the ingredients...but I'm going to tell you anyway: The patty is comprised of chopped up pig innards and "plenty of salt." The bun? Well, that contains 34 ingredients, among which is azodicarbonamide, something also found in gym mats, and a banned ingredient in European and Australian food.

I'm sure there's a joke in here about "chewing on that" next time you chew on a McRib, but it's not coming easily to me so I'll just move on.

3. We're so screwed.

This is a really, really interesting article about public/scholarly debate, popular perception, and the reality of overpopulation, over-consumption of resources, and the future of the world (if you can't view the full article, a summary is here). Rather than abstracting the article in my own words, I'll just quote a large bit of text from the conclusion--the authors write much more eloquently on the subject than I could. I know the following quote is long, but it's a nice reminder of the bind the world is in and I encourage you to read it all.

The world today faces enormous problems related to population and resources. These ideas were discussed intelligently and, for the most part, accurately in many papers from the middle of the last century, but then they largely disappeared from scientific and public discussion….Most environmental science textbooks focus far more on the adverse impacts of fossil fuels than on the implications of our overwhelming economic and even nutritional dependence on them. The failure today to bring the potential reality and implications of peak oil, indeed of peak everything, into scientific discourse and teaching is a grave threat to industrial society. The concept of the possibility of a huge, multifaceted failure of some substantial part of industrial civilization is so completely outside the understanding of our leaders that we are almost totally unprepared for it.

There are virtually no extant forms of transportation, beyond shoe leather and bicycles, that are not based on oil, and even our shoes are now often made of oil. Food production is very energy intensive, clothes and furniture and most pharmaceuticals are made from and with petroleum, and most jobs would cease to exist without petroleum. But on our university campuses one would be hard pressed to have any sense of that beyond complaints about the increasing price of gasoline, even though a situation similar to the 1970s gas shortages seemed to be unfolding in the summer and fall of 2008 in response to three years of flat oil production, assuaged only when the financial collapse decreased demand for oil.

No substitutes for oil have been developed on anything like the scale required, and most are very poor net energy performers….Our new sources of “green” energy are simply increasing along with (rather than displacing) all of the traditional ones.

If we are to resolve these issues, including the important one of climate change, in any meaningful way, we need to make them again central to education at all levels of our universities, and to debate and even stand up to those who negate their importance, for we have few great intellectual leaders on these issues today. We must teach economics from a biophysical as well as a social perspective. Only then do we have any chance of understanding or solving these problems.

4. Now some fun. Look at the Earth from space!

5. Finally, the surprise link. What the...