FERN’s Friday Feed: Cold comfort
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How to get rich by peeping inside people’s fridges
Wired
“As the founder and managing partner of Trinetra, a London-based investment firm, [Tassos] Stassopoulos has pioneered an unusual strategy: peeking inside refrigerators in homes around the world in order to predict the future—and monetize those insights,” writes Nicola Twilley. “By the time of his refrigeration revelation in 2009, Stassopoulos had already gained a reputation for his maverick process: Where other investors typically relied on market data and forecasts from big consumer-products companies to deduce what people in, say, India might start purchasing in the future, Stassopoulos spent days traveling around the country, asking them himself. He found the ethnographic process fascinating and threw himself into it, visiting informal settlements and working-class neighborhoods to chat with people for hours—but he still wasn’t getting the information he wanted. ‘The problem is that I was asking people, “OK, assume you get a salary increase. How will your diet change?” They’d all say, “I wouldn’t change anything,”’ Stassopoulos explained. ‘But we know that as people get richer, their diets change.’”
What your grocery cart says about you
The New York Times
“Grocery runs have changed a lot in recent years. Prices have soared and packages have shrunk. The pandemic normalized the presence of in-store shoppers for services like Instacart and Amazon Grocery. Consumers are spoiled — and perhaps paralyzed — by a staggering array of choices. To better understand our relationship to the food we buy, we asked readers to send us their grocery receipts for the month of April, and selected 27 people from across the United States to focus on,” write Priya Krishna, Tanya Sichynsky, and Aliza Aufrichtig. “Some shopped nearly every day, others only a few times a month. Some relied on frozen meals, while others sought out the freshest produce. In combing through their receipts — 283 of them, totaling more than $18,500 — we saw how identity, income and geography inform what makes it into the cart.”
U.S. dairies bet on beef
Ambrook Research
“Jim Van Patter’s operation in Wisconsin is flush with cash but losing money on milk. At best, the 2700-head dairy he manages in Wisconsin, Nehl’s Bros. Farms, has been breaking even on its central product since milk prices bottomed out in 2023,” writes Donavyn Coffey. “But Van Patter, like many U.S. dairies, is keeping things afloat thanks to an unlikely buyer — the beef industry. Five years ago Van Patter exclusively raised, managed, and sold dairy animals. But today half the calves born at Nehl’s Bros. Farms — about 1500 animals — are part beef. The Holstein-Angus crossbreeds are known in the industry as beef-on-dairy and the drought-depleted beef industry is buying them up for a whopping $800 per animal, nearly seven times the value of a dairy calf.”
Farmers and EU face off over Ireland’s largest carbon store
Grist
“For over a thousand years, turf has been one of a few dependable fuel sources in Ireland, a country with no natural sources of oil and limited natural gas. Turfing has thus become a tenet of Irish culture — but it is increasingly being challenged,” writes Dawn Attride. “In 2022, the Irish government banned the commercial sale of turf, but it still allows those who have historically enjoyed turf-cutting rights … to cut for their personal use … Bogs, otherwise known as peatlands, are the largest carbon store in Ireland and the most effective carbon sinks on Earth … Peatlands absorb and store twice as much carbon as all of the world’s forests combined.”
How Big Data will entrench monopolies across the grocery supply chain
The American Prospect
“No other time in human history has delivered as many food options to the masses as the supermarket has. A great logistical project involving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from numerous countries on nearly every continent on Earth has brought this abundance to your little town,” writes Jarod Facundo. “But then you remember that time when contaminated wheat gluten at a single manufacturing plant in Wangdien, China, caused a recall of almost 100 pet food brands, including 17 of the top 20 sold. Or a few years ago, when a strike of just 1,400 Kellogg’s workers at four plants led to a national cereal shortage … Moments like these reveal the truth about the seemingly endless set of options. Your supermarket choices actually narrow to a handful of suppliers making different brands whose prices are tightly coordinated … What you end up learning … is that the supermarket, this tribute to human ingenuity, is actually a battlefield, a war between some of the biggest companies on the planet. And you are the guinea pig for their experiments.”