Re-thinking Malthusian Limits?

I'm going to assume most people have at least a passing familiarity with the ideas of Thomas Malthus regarding human population and the planet's resources.

According to him, a society's population "adjusts" to accommodate the available supply of food and natural resources. People might learn how to raise more food more efficiently, but often the mechanisms of "adjustment" are things like war, disease, and famine. That's a simplistic summary, but you get the drift. (If you want to learn more, the internet is actually a good place to start looking. Even Wikipedia, which I don't normally recommend, offers a good primer on Malthus.)

Anyway, unless you're living under a rock, you know that demand for food and water have risen to historic highs, thanks to rising population and global affluence. Naturally that raises the question: How will Malthus' theory play out over the next few decades? Was he right? Completely off mark? Has technology altered his fundamental premise?

There's a fascinating article in this morning's Wall Street Journal about relevance, meaning, and importance of Malthusian economics in today's world. If you spend any time pondering stuff like, oh, high food prices, soaring costs for brewing materials, globalization, and other interesting-and-complicated-but-depressing topics, it's worth a look.

History Repeating Itself?

So the 75th anniversary of the return of legal beer has been on my mind lately. (Obviously, given that I've actually gotten off my ass to blog about it....)

But of course that means that the Great Depression has also been on my mind. The beer bill signed by FDR in March 1933 was, after all, intended as an economic stimulus package: breweries would get back in business and hire more workers. The Treasury would tax beer at five dollars a barrel, and that money would help pay for other back-to-work projects.

But the beer bill was just one part of the plan to repair the economy. On March 12, 1933, for example, FDR asked all banks to close for a brief "holiday." The goal was to stop the panic and the "bank runs" while Congress and the Federal Reserve shored up the nation's money supply. (If you've seen the movie "It's A Wonderful Life," you know what a bank run is.)

Anyway -- seventy-five years later, here we are approaching panic mode, with the Fed stepping in with moves and money designed to stop the panic and prevent full-blown economic disaster.

Will we end up where Americans were seventy-five years ago? Unemployment rates of one-third. Millions of foreclosures and bankruptcies? Homeless people on the road or camped out under bridges? Back in 1933 and 1934, Congress created mechanisms to prevent a repeat of that disaster: federal home loan programs, the FDIC, Social Security (which originated as a way to keep paychecks flowing even when people couldn't work).

In theory, those programs, most of which still exist, were designed to protect the economy. Whether they will or not is a question no one can yet answer.

But we don't have one thing Americans had back then: leadership in the form of a strong, focused, inspiring president. In fact we've got a president who didn't know, until someone told him, that gasoline was inching toward four dollars a gallon. a president who thinks the war in Afghanistan is "romantic."

Right now, we all need to work together, avoid panic, and hang in there. But it's hard to do that when there's no one guiding the ship. So here we are all, seventy-five years after the worst economic depression in our history, once again afloat on a sea of uncertainty, fear, and near-panic. But there ain't no captain guiding this ship.

Hang on to your hats and your loved ones. This could get ugly.

Back to the Meat Recall

There's a comment from a reader regarding my previous post about the meat recall. He says my attitude is callous.

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my original post. I'm not advocating cruelty to animals. My first point was that there's nothing unusual about what happened at that meatpacking plant (which is apparently now closed).

My second point was that IF Americans want animals treated more humanely, they're going to have to adopt new methods of meat processing.

Right now, meatpacking houses are factory operations that prize efficiency and speed. If packinghouse employees are told to slow down, wait for the animals, move lame animals out of the way carefully rather than with forklifts-- well, that kind of humane operation is going to move more slowly than an inhumane one.

Packers won't be able to process as many animals in a day as they do using forklifts. The company won't make as much profit, in part because its labor costs will rise, and the owners will compensate for that by raising prices.

Think of a widget factory: one factory makes the widgets by hand. Workers carve each one, using hand lathes and planes, and plenty of human labor. The factory turns out one hundred widgets a day. The supply is relatively small, and consumers pay high prices for those "natural" hand-crafted widgets.

Now consider a second widget factory. The owners have mechanized the entire operation, eliminating all hand craftsmanship. The widgets are made entirely by machine, rather than by humans. The factory cranks out thousands of widgets a day, and the price of one widget is half the price of the widgets made by hand.

The analogy holds true at meatpacking plants: treat each animal with respect and dignity, and workers will turn out fewer carcasses in a day. The packinghouse owners will have to pay the workers more money per carcass. That price will be passed on to consumers.

Is that good or bad? Depends on what you value. If you don't like seeing images of lame cows being tossed around by forklifts, then you'd better be prepared to pay more for your meat.

If what you value, however, is hamburger that only costs two dollars a pound, then you have to accept that you live in a society where packinghouses use "inhumane' and "callous" practices.

Bottom line: Americans want something for nothing. They want "pure" meat and happy cows, but they don't want to pay the higher price necessary to make that happen.

We can't have it both ways.

Crafty Number Crunching?

There's an interesting piece in today's Wall Street Journal about "big" brewers taking on "craft" brewing. If nothing else, it offers a larger perspective on the much vaunted "double digit growth" of craft brewing. Because I'm always just a weeeeeeee bit skeptical of the numbers tossed around. I hasten to add that I don't doubt the sincerity or the dedication of the folks in Boulder. But what, precisely, are they counting in those press releases touting craft brewing as the industry's hottest "growth" segment?? Whose beer is "craft" beer?

This all reminds me of a newspaper piece I recently read that REALLY set me thinking about the relative meaning of "size."

Thanks to David Fahey at the History of Drugs and Alcohol website for sending me the link. In beer, as in life, perspective is everything.

Pondering Beer's Future

In a comment on my previous blog entry, Stan Hieronymus of appellationbeer.com asks a good question: Will beer-based cookbooks and campaigns, like Here's to Beer, persuade Americans to re-think beer's role in daily life? (*1)

I'm all for the focus on food and beer. But that is well-trod territory, one that post-Prohibition brewers worked as they struggled to promote beer to an indifferent public. In the 1930s, for example, brewers hosted "ladies luncheons" in department stores, where hired chefs prepared food with beer. During the '40s and '50s, women's magazines and the "women's" section of daily newspapers routinely ran articles about how to cook with and serve beer. (I suspect those pieces were press releases submitted by breweries and their ad agencies.)

It didn't have much impact then. Will it now? I'm not sure, although I hasten to add that I'm all in favor of ANYTHING brewers can do to promote beer as a sophisticated, complex beverage. That won't be easy. Like just about everything else in daily life, public relations, marketing, and media are in turmoil. I'm not sure anyone, in or out of brewing, understands what kinds of promotions work in an age of remote controls, Ipods, and internet.

But to get back to Stan's question: In my opinion, until brewers persuade Americans to re-think their attitudes toward alcohol, cookbooks won't do much good. The "Here's to Beer" campaign won't have much impact. But they've got an uphill climb ahead of them, because the "other side" is far better organized and funded.

Right now, MADD owns the subject of alcohol. It sets both the tone and the agenda in the crusade to demonize alcohol and to eliminate its manufacture, sale, and consumption in the United States. What brewers need is an equally substantive, organized campaign to counteract the neo-Prohibitionists (eg, MADD and groups like it). The operative word here is ORGANIZED. As in: Unified. United. As in: they need to work together.

Brewing's great downfall c. 1915 was not the Prohibitionists per se. It was the prohibitionists' unifed action and the brewers' fragmented fractitiousness. Yes, the Brewers Association works hard to promote beer. But its budget and resources are limited.

Yes, Jim Koch at Boston Beer Company uses his ad dollars to air commercials that challenge our old image of beer. Yes, brewers' website urge vistors to "drink responsibly." Yes, the Here's to Beer campaign soldiers on. But it's not enough, and it's too disjointed and fractured. Brewers need to work hard TOGETHER. Not as competitors, but as partners in a larger battle. And yes, that means that the craft brewers need to reach out and accept the helping hand offered by That Big Giant that funds the Here's to Beer campaign. Because none of them can do it alone.

________________

*1: Full disclosure: I appeared in the Here's to Beer documentary titled "The American Brew." I was not paid for my time nor was I compensated for expenses incurred.

Pondering the Fear of Beer

I've been mulling Garrett Oliver's op-ed piece "Don't Fear Big Beer. It appeared in the New York Times on October 19. Something about it bugged me, but it took me awhile to figure out what it was.

Don't get me wrong. It's a fine piece, full of nice sentiments about the joys and wonders of American craft beer. But I think Oliver veered down the wrong road when he asserted that "there is no future" in what he calls "industrial beer" (by which I assume he means anything made by Anheuser-Busch or Miller Brewing).

He argues that just as Americans are drinking better coffee than they did ten years ago, so, too, they're discovering fine craft beer.

Maybe. Maybe not. Here's another take on it: Something like 95% of the beer consumed in the U.S. is "industrial." Only about 5% comes from "craft" brewers. Moreover, that proportion -- 95% versus 5% -- has remained fairly constant for the past fifteen or so years.

So it seems to me that the more interesting question is: Why? We're twenty-five years into the "real" beer revolution. Why haven't craft beermakers grabbed more of the market? Why do the vast majority of Americans prefer "industrial" beer?

I think it's because we don't take beer seriously. And we don't take beer seriously because we don't respect alcohol. Instead, we Americans demonize alcohol. We teach children that it's bad and evil, and so of course as teenagers, they want to be naughty. They learn to drink in their cars at midnight, rather than at home with their families. And when we're not demonizing it, we're infantilizing the act of drinking (slugging down shots, giggling at the notion of having a beer with lunch, cackling at our friends when they can't stand upright). Then they grow up and either stop drinking completely or save drinking for "special" occasions. And then they pass on the lessons learned to their kids, and the process starts all over again.

Lesson being: beer is something to slug down randomly rather than a fine beverage to consume with fine food. Another lesson learned: beer's not worth much money, certainly not worth as much as, say, good mayonnaise or a pair of shoes. Craft beer is more expensive than its "industrial" counterpart; typically quite a bit more expensive. When Susan and Joe Consumer shop for beer, they're shopping by price. Given the choice between splurging on beer or shoes, they're gonna choose shoes.

Our only "grown-up" beverage is wine. We think of it as a fitting companion for fine dining. I think that's because, prior to about 1960, American wine production was about zilch and wine consumption was even lower. But then people began investing in vineyards and grapes in California and elsewhere. When it came time to marketing their wares, they were starting from scratch. Americans didn't know much about wine.Vintners were smart: they promoted wine as a sophisticated beverage best consumed with food, rather than as an alternative to canned beer or martinis.

Post-Prohibition brewers and distillers, in contrast, rebuilt old industries. But they had to market their wares to an audience that had been taught to disrespect and fear both. Indeed, if there's a single long-term impact of Prohibition (other than the "three-tier system" of distribution), it is that the Prohibitionists endowed alcohol with shame, and Americans have not been able to shake that inheritance.

Garrett Oliver asserts there's no future in industrial beer. I say there's not much future in craft beer until and unless we learn to respect alcohol in general and beer in particular. Only then will it seem normal to serve a fine stout with a fine roast beef. If craft brewers want to own the future, then they need to address the deeper issue of Americans's mistrust and misuse of alcohol. Until then, BUD is likely to remain a good investment in "the future."