Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Next time you reach for a cold beer on a hot summer day, you’ll have some uninvited drinking buddies: the beer barons. Two conglomerates now control 90 percent of U.S. beer production. They use their power to raise prices, squeeze out small brewers, and limit your choices at the corner store. This comes despite a thriving craft brewery culture.
True believers in high tech disruption are having a heyday trumpeting out forecasts based on the positive and inevitable transformation to be caused by a takeover of a modestly-sized food retailer, Whole Foods, by Amazon, which a short time ago had a 0.8 per cent penetration of the $800 billion US grocery market, and even less in Canada and the UK.
I believe the Internet should be available to everyone for free.
Here’s what San Francisco is now: a front row seat on the most powerful corporations on Earth and the people who run them.
While many of us hope our farmers market purchases are helping repair a broken food system, let’s face it: all the locally grown organic broccoli in the world will only get us so far. Our dollars are valuable to the farmers at the market, but the domination of the American foodscape by a few powerful corporate players continues to limit consumer choices while squeezing out small and sustainable farmers and food producers.
