Food and Prices in the New Year

In My Kitchen January 2025

Kitchen prep and its rewards…Shared with Sherry at Sherry’s Pickings…

Ingredients for lamb chops au poivre, a New York Times recipe.

A nice red wine was good with this dish, which I made using a New York Times recipe.

Len made this dinner, using another NYT recipe.
About half the meals depicted here are his, and about half are mine.

First pizza of 2025…

The second pizza — different cheese.

A recipe from Ottolenghi’s Flavor.

The famous Roman dish cacio e pepe was the subject of scientific research by 8 Italian physicists.
The conclusions of the study supported the method of Ottolengi but did not mention him.

Ottolenghi and his pasta.

A very delicious chicken dish: another from the New York Times

Sauce Grenobloise contains lemon, capers, and butter. Its origin is in Grenoble, France.
The sauce is traditionally served with trout or other mild fish.

Len’s rye bread topped with broiled steak and mushroom sauce.

I love Len’s rye bread and convinced him to bake two more loaves.
This time the accompanying dinner is meatballs, fruit salad, vegetable salad, and savory sour cream sauce.
The meatballs were a new product: chilled and ready to cook from Trader Joe’s.

For Lunar New Year: Fish-Fragrant Eggplant, smashed cucumbers, and buckwheat noodles.

On the Fridge: Magnets, Of Course

Bird magnets again this month.

I now have bird magnets on the side of the fridge, not just on the front.

Birds shared with Eileen’s Critters

All photos © 2024 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Food Prices

This week: egg prices ranged from $3.49 to $6.99 a dozen, with the highest price being charged for pasture-raised organic eggs. (In 2020, the average price of eggs was around $1 per dozen.)

In kitchen news this month, the ever-rising cost of food is a central topic, especially as the campaign promises of our new overlords — promises that food prices would be reduced — were almost immediately acknowledged as a lie. Prices for many foods, especially produce, are likely to take another jump in US supermarkets if tariffs are levied on Mexican imports. Specifically: “The United States imported $9.9 billion worth of vegetables and more than $11 billion worth of fruit and frozen juices from Mexico last year.” (source)

Especially noted in recent discussions of food costs is the globally increasing price of cocoa and all chocolate products. I have a way to compare prices from the past with current prices for the same items; specifically, amazon keeps a record of my purchases, including orders from Whole Foods. Thus I can see what I paid in the past and compare to the price they are charging now for the same items. For example: Pepperidge Farm Milano chocolate cookies ordered from amazon have gone from $7.32 for three bags in 2020 to $10.50 for the same product at amazon.com this week.

From Investopia, I found a discussion about international commodity prices for cocoa. To quote their “takeaway” points about cocoa prices at the end of 2024:

• Global cocoa prices have surged to almost $12,000 per metric ton, an increase of 88% in just three months.
• While production is expected to increase by 11% this year, it won't be enough to rebuild depleted inventories.
• Chocolate makers typically respond to rising prices by reducing bar sizes, adding fillers, and using more artificial flavors. (source)

Prices of tropical and sub-tropical commodities like chocolate, coffee, bananas, and olive oil have been rising because of climate change affecting the areas where these products grow. Crop yields for wheat, rice, soy, potatoes, and feed crops are also being negatively affected by climate change.

The rapid increase in the price of eggs is due to a widespread outbreak of bird flu, which is infecting large numbers of chicken farms. This may be relevant only in the US, see this article in the NYT — "Egg prices are high." Locally, here in Michigan, the cost of eggs is also increasing because a new state law took effect on January 1 that requires large-scale egg producers to install cage-free housing with nest boxes, perches, and other animal welfare measures.

This week 365 brand olive oil is $15.99.
The record of my order from 2020 shows a price of $12.99. 

If you prefer to see a chart, here’s the US Bureau of Labor Statistics presentation of the average price of ground beef over the past 30 years in the US. Current price: the highest in history.

Shared with Deb at Readerbuzz.

Agrotourism

 On Sunday, we spent the entire day birding a long winding road to a tiny town called Brasso Seco. We had a lunch of local foods — taro, fish, chicken, and other food, and heard a brief lecture about chocolate. When I have time, I may write more. Here are a few photos — no birds today! (Update: This wasn’t clear: we saw and took photos of many birds on Sunday, but I decided not to post their photos until a later date.)

I loved the mural in the outdoor veranda where we ate lunch and heard about chocolate production.

Chicken roasting on a grill under banana leaves to keep the heat in.

The grill.

When we arrived, people from the neighborhood were watching the process.

Len said the chicken was good. I had fried fish, taro served three ways, and black beans.

Cocoa pods, beans, and the roaster where they are processed.

Among many things we heard about chocolate processing, this was the coloring agent:
Roukou, which is also called annato. 

A local shop makes and sells chocolate bars from this locally grown cocoa.
It was totally delicious. Unfortunately it’s very impractical to bring it home.

All photos © 2024 mae sander

Ecuador Chocolate, Sugar, and Coffee

 

Delicious treat and interesting agricultural product.

During our trip on the Lindblad-National Geographic Endeavor II last week (August 17-24), we found the housekeeping extraordinary — our room was cleaned two or three times each day, and during dinner, our bed was “turned down” and a tiny wrapped chocolate placed on each of our pillows. Wow! Ecuadorian chocolate is the world’s best, they say. We found it delicious, especially in the fantastic cakes and candy that we ate.

Growing and Processing Cocoa

Besides eating quite a few delicacies made from Ecuadorian chocolate, and enjoying Ecuadorian coffee every day, we also enjoyed a visit to a very small and low-tech farm where chocolate was produced along with sugar, coffee, and a few other things. The rather primitive technology used here began around 60 years ago when the original owner started the farm. He and his family are still running it, and he described how things are done — one of the ship’s guides translated his explanations.

I’m sure the cultivation methods and food processing used on the mainland of Ecuador is much more sophisticated. There’s something very special about life in the Galapagos, which has a very small population and limited land for agriculture.

After the cocoa beans are extracted from the pods, there are many steps to the final production of chocolate — we saw only part of the process.

Another low-tech part of the process: melting the chocolate with sugar and coffee to create a
special product that can be used to make a beverage. These men are members of the extended family
that still runs the farm after two generations.

Low-tech Sugar Refining

The man in the blue shirt is the founder of the farm, who has worked there for around 60 years.
Just as I was about to take another photo, the beam came around and hit my leg… OUCH!

Sugar-cane juice can be made into coarse sugar or used in the chocolate-coffee mixture.

Q. What else can you do with sugar cane juice? 

A. Ferment it and make moonshine or rum.

Processing Coffee Beans

Coffee beans must be hulled, aged, fermented, and subject to a number of processing steps.

While shaking this open container, the person roasting the beans must watch carefully to get them just right.

A very interesting farm

Besides coffee, sugar, and cocoa, the farm produces torch ginger, bananas, and other plants.
It also has a few pigs and chickens. We totally enjoyed our visit.

Blog post and photos © 2024 mae sander

In My Kitchen and Thoughts on Chocolate, April, 2024

What’s New?

Using my new dragon bowl for fruit, for candy, and for leeks vinaigrette.

Using a new set of little bowls for tomatoes, artichokes, mushrooms, and grated cheese— to go on pasta.
They were perfectly designed for this use: mis en place.

Cooking in April

Preparation for making stir-fried pork.

Salad and roasted peppers.

My kitchen this month has been busy, as we have had a few invited guests to share meals. I’ve just selected a few of the foods that Len and I cooked or prepared. I’ve posted already about our Passover food, our first outdoor cooking, and some of the things we ate elsewhere. I’m sharing these food images with a group of bloggers who post kitchen thought each month at Sherry’s blog in her link-up called “In My Kitchen.” Now for some thoughts about the possible fate of one of my favorite foods!

Climate Change Is Coming for the Chocolate Supply

Cocoa pods growing on the trunk of a cocoa tree. The beans in these pods must undergo considerable
processing — fermentation, drying, roasting, and conching — before they become cocoa or chocolate.
(Tree is in Matthaei Botanical Gardens, Ann Arbor.)

Climate change and its effect on farming is often in the news, but reading about it seems very distant and maybe not even urgent. If you love chocolate as much as I do, you’ll see one issue as more pressing; specifically, rising chocolate prices due to supply disruption. Ultimately, the problems with the global chocolate supply are caused by poor growing conditions in the tropical areas where cocoa is produced. Recently, these areas have had bad weather — temperatures are high or rainfall is too little or too much, leading to stressed or diseased trees, lower harvests, higher prices, and instability of processors.

Many factors prevent the logical response; that is, the expansion of cocoa farms. The main obstacle is that it takes years to grow new productive trees. Expansion is limited because chocolate can grow only in a narrow area within 20 degrees of the Equator.

According to the trade association World Wide Chocolate (article here), many people “have no idea how difficult cocoa ‘the commodity’ is to grow, procure, process and ultimately apply to different applications and create all of those wonderful chocolate products we’ve come to love.” This article uses two West African countries and their difficulties as examples — the challenges to poor third-world farmers are much more profound than one would guess, and rising prices don’t generally mean that the impoverished farm workers receive more for their labor. As an article in yesterday’s Guardian explains: “Nine in 10 west African growers are smallholders, while the confectionery market is dominated by huge players: Oxfam notes that Lindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé raked in nearly $4bn in profits from chocolate sales last year, while Hershey’s confectionery profits totalled $2bn.” (link)

But the problems of growers and injustices to workers are just one area of many. More detail about the many difficulties of farmers and processors in Africa appeared in an article in Reuters in March titled “African cocoa plants run out of beans as global chocolate crisis deepens” (link). It’s complicated, involving pre-set prices from farmers who are experiencing very poor harvests. Opportunistic dealers step in and disrupt the expected supplies to the local processing plants:

“In normal times, the market is heavily regulated - traders and processors purchase beans from local dealers up to a year in advance at pre-agreed prices. Local regulators then set lower farmgate prices that farmers can charge for beans. However, in times of shortage like this year, the system breaks down - local dealers often pay farmers a premium to the farmgate price to secure beans. The dealers then sell the beans on the spot market at higher prices instead of delivering them at pre-agreed prices. As global traders rush to purchase those beans at any price to meet their obligations with the chocolate firms, local processors are often left short of beans.”

Chocolate candy production requires more than just cocoa. The Wells Fargo Investment service (article here) summarizes the situation:  “To some extent, chocolate’s escalating cost can be understood by looking at the overall rise in product manufacturing costs, with the Producer Price Index (PPI) for Food Manufacturing increasing 28% since January 2020. This rising inflationary environment has increased the cost of labor, processing, manufacturing, packaging, and transportation. Higher raw material costs for two of chocolate’s crucial ingredients - sugar and cocoa - are also included in this overall cost increase.”

In an article in this month’s Atlantic, titled “Chocolate Might Never Be the Same,” author Yasmin Tayag  wrote:

“By one estimate, retail prices for chocolate rose by 10 percent just last year. And now this is the third year in a row of poor cocoa harvests in West Africa, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown. Late last month, amid fears of a worsening shortage, cocoa prices soared past $10,000 per metric ton, up from about $4000 in January. To shoulder the costs, chocolate companies are gearing up to further hike the price of their treats in the coming months. Prices might not fall back down from there. Chocolate as we know it may never be the same.”

This week’s Guardian article cites even more increase in prices: “Soaring prices for cocoa beans recently hit a record $12,000 a tonne: roughly four times last year’s price. Many think they will go higher.” Issues of sustainability and fairness to workers are not easy to address. For an extremely detailed study of these issues related to global chocolate production and processing, see the recent report from Oxfam (link).

Chocolate candy seems to me to embody a whole range of cultural and economic concerns for our time. Exploitation of third-world agricultural and processing workers, including child labor abuses and even slave labor are of great concern. Chocolate plantations, which must be in the tropics, are especially affected by climate change. All chocolate is a highly processed food and an economic commodity handled by huge corporations. Consumers of luxury goods such as high-end chocolate candy provide a giant contrast with the extreme poverty of the producers. 

So many issues! As I thought about this, it occurred to me that the expression “first-world problems” is a good description for people who are inconvenienced by high candy prices — in contrast to impoverished and exploited third-world farmers and their children who are paid a pittance for the produce for which they labor.

I’ve written about this before, including a post earlier this week. For my post on chocolate cultivation issues see “Cocoa: Who cultivates it? Who processes it? Where does it come from?” and “Chocolate: Food of the Gods.” For more history see “Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures.” 

In 2021, this bag of Hershey Nuggets cost $8.98.
It now costs typically $12.58 (though a terrific sale price has been in effect).
I’ve been buying this and other chocolates quite often.

Blog post and photos © 2024 mae sander.

Shared with Sherry’s In My Kitchen.