min-myinnersoul

This blogger is not a beer drinker.. He is therefore completely ignorant of the niceties of beer and therefore eminently qualified to comment on developments in the beer industry. In many countries in the world, people, especially men, gulp down enormous quantities of beer. Most of it is mass produced by the beer giants of the world - Diageo, Anheuser Busch, SAB Miller, Heineken and the like, including our own home grown United Breweries. Bottled or canned beer is by far the largest selling channel for beer - the one that keeps afloat the likes of Diageo, et al. But nuanced beer drinkers consider this somewhat of a travesty in beer drinking - apparently they have no taste. Hence the onset of draught beer which is served out of cask or a keg. Go to a pub  and barmaid will pour out a pint of draught, topped with a nice head. This blogger has a partiality to buying rounds for whoever he is with - not to taste the subtleties of the draught but to ogle at the barmaid - who is invariably...

Kentucky Fried Chicken is owned, by a company with a distinctively “uncorporate” name – Yum! Brands, complete with the exclamation mark.   This blogger is a vegetarian and therefore has not really sampled its wares. But I am reliably told that its fried chicken, is fairly delicious.   But these days, alas, KFC is not sounding very yummy. The problem is in China. KFC is everywhere in China. I mean everywhere. Sometimes I wonder if the icon of Americanism in China is not McDonald’s or Coca Cola, but KFC. Every street corner seems to have one.   The Chinese were happily munching or chewing or licking, or whatever you do with fried chicken. All that changed in December of last year. CCTV, that great bastion of broadcasting   and China’s answer to Doordarshan,   aired a program that claimed that local suppliers to KFC had given its chicken excessive amounts of antibiotics.   CCTV is more renowned for informing the world that Xi Jinping had a good nig...

When Peter Brabeck-Letmathe speaks, you listen. He is the highly respected Chairman of Nestle. In his weekend interview with The Wall Street Journal published here, he speaks of the increasing danger of food insecurity in the world. Food prices shooting up, the world over, is a serious cause of concern. This blogger has moaned about it here , here and here . The traditional activist response is to bleat about the evils of globalisation. But here is a world leader giving a simple way forward for what should be done. His prescription is three fold and simple - Stop using land for growing corn for biofuel - Do not maniacally oppose technology in food cultivation, especially genetically modified crops - Let the market price water for industrial use I had no idea that this year American farmers would harvest more corn for fuel rather than for feed. This is the outcome of a subsidy policy that has encouraged bio fuel use to get away from the human addiction to petroleum. But look at the ...

On a walk the other day, I spied a shop that was a "fair price shop". There are many of them dotted around cities and towns in India. They are usually shut with a "No stock" board hanging in front. They are part of government initiatives to sell foodgrains and vegetables at "fair prices". They are not ration shops, mind you, which are designed to sell subsidised grains to the poor. These are shops where you and I can buy as well. At "fair prices". Begs the question, fair to whom ? Here's Economics 101 for the economically challenged. Prices are fixed by supply and demand. A willing seller and a willing buyer together fix the price. As long as there are many sellers and buyers and as long as there is information on what everybody is buying and selling at, the price that is so determined freely is what is a "fair" price. But to Rajalakshmi, a fair price is a low price. Nothing wrong with buyers wanting the lowest possible price, but t...

Onions in India. Cabbage & pork in South Korea. Chilli Peppers in Indonesia. Frighteningly, wheat globally. Riots have already started in Algeria , and is sure to spread. Food price inflation is hitting the world again. Millions of children will echo Oliver Twist's begging in those immortal words which are the title of this post. Are we going to see a repeat of 2008 ? This blogger is no expert on food economics. But the issue of food prices is close to his heart and he has posted on the awfulness of food price inflation here before. All inflation is bad, but food price inflation is especially awful. For it ceases to be an economic problem of supply and demand and becomes an issue of survival for half the world's population. It sparks a humanitarian crisis. And it will inevitably lead to unrest and riots. The world cannot afford inflation in the price of food. Certainly not the high double digit inflation that it is seeing. The issue is a complex one. World food supply and ...