food

The AP reports on the starvation of Yemen and its terrible effects:

The spread of hunger has been the most horrific consequence of Yemen’s war since Saudi Arabia and its allies, backed by the United States, launched a campaign of airstrikes and a naval blockade a year ago. The impoverished nation of 26 million people, which imports 90 percent of its food, already had one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, but in the past year the statistics have leaped.

Having spent a couple of days glad-handing (and watching baseball) with Raul Castro in Cuba, 89-year-old Fidel Castro has come out swinging against "the empire" with a bristling 1500-word open letter recounting the history of US aggression against Cuba suggesting Obama "reflects and doesn't try to develop theories about Cuban politics." Despite all of The White House's claims of progress, Castro rages "we don't need the empire to give us any presents."

The automation of the global workplace is spreading and, as Pew recently found, 65% of Americans now believe their job will inevitably be done by robots.

In a low-growth world, every low-skill job is up for grabs by the robot/drone horde as the need to cut costs is core business for every CFO (aside from share buybacks) as minimum wage mandates have forced these cost-cutting CFOs to look for alternatives.

Via ConvergEx's Nicholas Colas,

While the world’s central banks struggle with deflation, millennials (those born between 1980 – 2000) are busy creating a world where persistently lower prices will be an economic cornerstone.  “A feature, not a bug,” as they say in the tech world.

 

How does the food we eat affect us as people? Michael Pollan’s books—The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Cooked, In Defense of Food, and others—consider the history and science behind the way we eat, and how our eating habits have changed over time. His books often lead us on a sort of journey: in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, he spends a few weeks farming with Joel Salatin, then goes on to learn how to forage for mushrooms and hunt wild boar. His journeys are usually structured around a question about food and our relationship to it: why do we farm this way?