Food For Thought

A Recent Agribusiness Convention Has Me Thinking About The Future Of American Cities ” … we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile plains. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will […]

Poke around the frozen meat section, and you may find patties with cheese or jalapeño chunks in them; they’re what the industry calls “inclusions.” Inclusions are always visible, always chunky, and they’re a great example of how relative value creates opportunities for trade. Shoppers see inclusions as a value-add. Fancy. “This comes with bacon. I […]

First, a trip around Maggie’s Farm. The Hobby Lobby tea light above is a skeuomorph. What were necessary parts of the design of an older tool – the tea candle – are represented as ornamentation in this tool to convey meaning: about how to use the tool and the setting in which it will provide […]

We all have a sense of what junk food is: Snack items or beverages like soda, but also the fare of most American quick serve restaurants (QSRs) somebody tells us is unhealthy. But, unhealthy compared to what? Are we sure that an old McDonald’s hamburger – grilled up in tallow – is less healthy than […]

Let’s jump into some problems: According to FBI data at Retail Dive, shoplifting in 23 U.S. metro areas climbed an average of 24% YOY from the first six months of 2023 to 2024. Shrink from shoplifting has caused stores to reduce hours and contributed to store closings, which reduces worker’s incomes. Closings drive customers to online […]

In the previous post, we used a quasi-dialectical model to follow coffee through the Second Wave, showing how the market attempted to keep the First Wave’s industrial coffee by further industrializing it with various forms of flavoring. We then saw how Third Wave Coffee attempted to sweep the palate clean by ditching the flavoring, while […]

In the previous post, I traced the general history of coffee as a product from its discovery in a Zeroth Wave of Coffee through the First Wave, a condition of industrial production meant to solve Zeroth Wave Coffee’s supply and distribution weaknesses. At the end, I described First Wave Coffee’s Market Weakness: That early industrialization […]

Connoisseurs break coffee’s development and cultural significance into three “waves.” I’m going to use something a little like Hegelian dialectics to show how coffee has evolved and where it is going. I add a preliminary zeroth wave and continue through to a prediction about a fourth wave based on how each wave creates a market […]