Class war has been out of action for two days – fighting the battle on the local front...well, producing the second issue of my local community action group’s publication The Lukes Laner, writing, edition, laying out, doing graphics etc and placing it with a printer…and, as ever, attending incessant meetings and forums and making bureaucrats look incompetent. Amongst one of the projects we have got off the ground here, at last, is to provide a fresh fruit and vegetable outlet, operating from the CA one day a week. Basically you place an order (for a box of veg or fruit) and pick it up two days later. Good stuff too, cheaper than the supermarkets, largely grown locally, and just what is needed on a deprived housing estate suffering high levels of obesity; for if you want a fresh apple, a carrot, cabbage, then its a friggin' four mile round trip.
Still, been checking up on the blogs of fellow comrades. Darren, waxing lyrical over the cult of the personality made me smile inwardly. I always loved his tongue-in-cheek humour and miss the times we’d spend sleepless nights exchanging anecdotes, jokes and working together at No 52.
”So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine cents—and actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyone’s ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now there’s cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. It’s made out of the cereal material. It’s extruded.
”… every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to make—and because, you know, food really isn’t designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen...
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