I am a professional internet enthusiast. I made Everybody at Once with Slavin and Molly. I also made Know Your Meme with Jamie, Ellie, and Drew. Before that I did a bunch of things in online video and art and activism and internet culture.
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For shoppers, it might seem like choices galore at the store, but most of our favorite brands are actually owned by a handful of food giants, including Kraft Heinz, General Mills, Conagra, Unilever and Delmonte.
Kraft Heinz, the result of a $63bn mega-merger in 2015, which was backed by Warren Buffett and a Brazilian private equity firm, appears 12 times in the top 4 firms for groceries, with products ranging from bacon, sour cream and coffee to frozen meat substitutes and fruit juice.
The big firms are helped by so-called category captains who represent leading brands or manufacturers and work with major retailers to decide which products get prominent spots on our supermarket shelves. And then there’s the slotting fees – payments by big-brand manufacturers for eye-catching product placement. This makes it very hard for new independent brands to get a break. And when they do get a tiny foothold, it often doesn’t last.
For example, while hipsters and old-school beer enthusiasts have contributed to a boom in local craft beers, the Belgian company Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired 17 formerly independent craft breweries between 2011 and 2020. It might not be clear to consumers from the labels, but the company owns more than 600 brands, including the mainstream favorites Budweiser, Michelob and Beck’s.
Another source of confusion is private labels – supermarkets’ own brands, of which little is known about the producer – which appeared in the top four of 77% of the groceries we looked at. For frozen fruits like the mixed berries used for smoothies and desserts, private labels account for 66% of the market share, as well as 56% of refrigerated whole milk and 54% of eggs sales.
There is a moment at the end of the film’s second act when the artist David Choe, a friend of Bourdain’s, is reading aloud an e-mail Bourdain had sent him: “Dude, this is a crazy thing to ask, but I’m curious” Choe begins reading, and then the voice fades into Bourdain’s own: “… and my life is sort of shit now. You are successful, and I am successful, and I’m wondering: Are you happy?” I asked Neville how on earth he’d found an audio recording of Bourdain reading his own e-mail. Throughout the film, Neville and his team used stitched-together clips of Bourdain’s narration pulled from TV, radio, podcasts, and audiobooks. “But there were three quotes there I wanted his voice for that there were no recordings of,” Neville explained. So he got in touch with a software company, gave it about a dozen hours of recordings, and, he said, “I created an A.I. model of his voice.” In a world of computer simulations and deepfakes, a dead man’s voice speaking his own words of despair is hardly the most dystopian application of the technology. But the seamlessness of the effect is eerie. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville said. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”
love that this caused so much controversy the thread needed to be locked. over chicken sandwich
gang this does not even scratch the surface
Someone posted a picture of a piece of chicken between two hamburger buns titled “Chicken Burger” to /r/food. Another user commented “Chicken Sandwich” on the post, and was slapped with a 30 day ban by the mods. When they responded to ask why, the mod said
“Correcting someone in public is public shaming, on top of being incorrect, it’s a pretty shitty comment to leave.”
So now /r/food is on lockdown after being spammed with posts titled “Chicken Sandwich” and other variations. The mod that handed the ban down pinned a post doubling down, comparing the situation to “Pride posts that always fill up with bigots” and “removing racists from posts featuring POC”, and including a link on “how to correctly, correct someone.”
because someone commented “Chicken Sandwich” on a post titled “Chicken Burger”.
Okay but this also does not scratch the surface either
It all started when the sandwich guy posted about what happened to him on r/TIFU, which led to a lot of outrage including someone in the comments saying they were also banned from r/food just for saying they had diabetes (this was later confirmed by a mod). All this anger turned into a brigade which resulted in the entire sub being flooded with almost nothing but posts about Chicken Sandwiches, now known as burgergate. The mod who initially instituted the ban then went on to compare fending off spammers to defending the capitol building during the January 6 riot.
You can see in the post that this made it into r/subredditdrama, a community which discusses ongoing drama across reddit. This particular thread in the screenshot is locked, an interesting detail for reasons that come into play later.
Someone else then goes and posts about burgergate on another sub, r/iamveryculinary , which is dedicated to making fun of food related snobbery and drama. This does not go over well, as it turns out that one of the mods of r/food is also a mod of r/iamveryculinary. This mod then proceeds to get slapfights in the comments, which notably includes her saying she would “rain fiery hell upon” anyone who posts chicken sandwiches in r/food, and complaining that she’s so focused on moderating burgergate that she has no time to spend with her kids. People then beg her to forget the chicken sandwich drama and take care of her children. I would love to give you some more details about this incident or tell you the other side, but I can’t since she deleted all the comments of the people she was arguing with so most of what we have left is just the things she herself said.
Someone then goes on to post about the r/iamveryculinary drama on r/subredditdrama again. This post immediately gets deleted completely, because it turns out that the r/food mod who also moderates r/iamveryculinary also moderates r/subredditdrama. More people beg the mod to stop caring about the drama and spend time with her kids.
The whole thing eventually gets posted to r/subredditdramadrama , a meta sub where people discuss drama that goes down in r/subredditdrama.
Another post is then made to r/subredditdramadrama, where the sandwich guy who was initially banned posts his conversation with the mod that banned him. Up until this point, the original mod had been arguing that the permanent ban wasn’t because of the chicken sandwich comment (which was only a 30 day ban), but because he had been rude to the mods when asking why. Screenshots show sandwich guy simply asking why he was banned and then apologizing for the chicken sandwich comment, only to be smugly told by the mod that he needs to “educate himself”, who also insinuates that he’s a weirdo and calls his comment shitty. Don’t miss this mod showing up in the comments of these screenshots and arguing with everyone else over them.
So basically the whole thing was one innocuous comment about a chicken sandwich which quickly spiralled into a multi-sub meltdown that has lasted for about two days now. Chicken sandwich guy has not, as far as I know, been unbanned as of yet.
my reblog got deleted. so here.
Chimken Samdwuitch.
In the past, calculating the social cost of carbon typically meant estimating how climate change would slow worldwide economic growth. Computer models split the world into at most a dozen or so regions and then averaged the predicted effects of climate change to get the impact on global GDP over time. It was at best a crude number.
Over the last several years, economists, data scientists, and climate scientists have worked together to create far more detailed and localized maps of impacts by examining how temperatures, sea levels, and precipitation patterns have historically affected things like mortality, crop yields, violence, and labor productivity. This data can then be plugged into increasingly sophisticated climate models to see what happens as the planet continues to warm.
The wealth of high-resolution data makes a far more precise number possible—at least in theory. Hsiang is co-director of the Climate Impact Lab, a team of some 35 scientists from institutions including the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Rutgers, and the Rhodium Group, an economic research organization. Their goal is to come up with a number by looking at about 24,000 different regions and adding together the diverse effects that each will experience over the coming hundreds of years in health, human behavior, and economic activity.
It’s a huge technical and computational challenge, and it will take a few years to come up with a single number. But along the way, the efforts to better understand localized damages are creating a nuanced and disturbing picture of our future.
mightofmerchants