Daily Bread

A Japanese bluefin tuna was sold at auction Monday for more than $100,000, which drew predictable "wacky story of the day" treatment in the media.

Late in some (but not all) news accounts of the sale, we learn that bluefin tuna is an endangered species because it is, as the Monterrey Bay Aquarium puts it "severely overfished" and hence "should be avoided."

But that doesn't stop seafood brokers from seeking the highest quality bluefin in hopes of fetching ridiculously high prices (is any fish really worth $370 a pound wholesale?). Nor does it stop owners of sushi bars from paying those ridiculously high prices in order to not only make a big premium on sales of toro or hon maguro, but also to get lots of publicity.

Two rival sushi-bar owners, one from Hong Kong and one from Japan, agreed to split the fish. They paid $104,400 for the 282-pound bluefin at auction in Tokyo in what the AP called a "peaceful settlement."

The price is about 10 times the average market value for bluefin, and much higher than the average $25 a pound that tuna in general goes for.

"It was the best tuna of the day, but the price shot up because of the shortage of domestic bluefin," said Takashi Yoshida, a market official, who told the AP that bad weather at the end of December was the proximate reason for the high price.

But wretched excess is the underlying reason, and is the cause of the very overfishing that causes prices to continuously rise.

"Premium fish - sometimes sliced up while the customers watch - also have advertising value, underscoring a restaurant's quality, like a rare wine," the AP says.

But wine isn't endangered. The bluefin, on the other hand, is protected, sort of, by agreements among international conservation groups to cut catch quotas by 20 percent to 22,000 tons.

That might help, but it also means that prices will continue to climb, which will provide incentives for fishers to keep fishing.

And it will provide sushi restaurants to keep selling the fish, and well-heeled patrons to keep eating it. Toro is tasty, no doubt, but rich people don't buy it for the flavor - they buy it because it's so expensive.

Did Tyson Foods' lenders force the company's chairman and CEO, Richard Bond, to resign in return for renegotiating the company's debt?

It's a good bet, though nobody's saying so. Tyson, which announced Bond's departure on Monday morning, didn't comment on the question when asked by the Wall Street Journal.

The chicken business is beset with a massive oversupply problem, and in recent months, analysts and investors (and lenders?) had been pleading with Bond to cut poultry production. But Bond refused, preferring to take short-term losses in order to gain market share from weaker competitors, even as costs continued to rise. He didn't say that, though: What he said was that there really wasn't an oversupply issue.

Aside from that lie, Bond's strategy could be seen as a good one. Last month, Pilgrim's Pride, the country's largest poultry processor, filed for bankruptcy protection, and its CEO resigned.

But at the same time, Tyson was forced to put up nearly all its assets as collateral in return for more flexibility from its lenders on repayments on a $1 billion revolving loan.

It is thanks to Bond, however, that Tyson isn't in the same position as Pilgrim's, which sells nothing but poultry. He became CEO in 2003 and heavily diversified the company's product lines. Sales of beef, pork, and packaged meat products have helped offset the company's massive losses on chicken.

Leland Tollett, Tyson's former chairman and CEO, will head the company as it seeks to replace Bond.

A War of Letters has broken out between the ethanol-loving Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and the ethanol-hating Grocery Manufacturers Association. Most recently, Grassley wrote to the GMA demanding to know when the food industry is going to lower prices now that input costs like farm commodities and energy have fallen so far, so fast.

The answer, of course, is that food companies will keep their prices as high as they can for as long as they can. When consumer demand falls to a certain point, prices will come down.

Grassley's hectoring (PDF), of course, actually has little to do with his concern over high food prices and everything to do with protecting his pet industry: corn-based ethanol, which just now is having serious trouble despite all of the government's efforts to prop it up.

The letter-writing began last May, when Grassley, sounding disturbingly like ragemonger Bill O'Reilly, accused the GMA of conducting a "smear campaign" against ethanol.

Corn-based ethanol tends to make food prices rise - by how much is the subject of much debate, but basic economic laws dictate that it is so. The GMA has been wildly overstating the effect in a typically disingenuous multimillion-dollar public-relations campaign that aims to cut back federal ethanol mandates. The newspaper Roll Call in May had outed (pdf) the GMA as the campaign's puppetmaster.

So Grassley decided to wildly overstate them right back, repeating his typically disingenuous pro-ethanol talking points, and adding a new, somewhat weird twist: he characterized the ethanol industry, which receives billions of dollars of government support, as a put-upon victim.

Ethanol, he wrote, was "being made the scapegoat for a whole variety of problems.  Never before have the virtuous benefits of ethanol and renewable fuels been so questioned and criticized."

Poor, poor ethanol. Even weirder, Grassley wrote that until the GMA started being mean to ethanol in 2008, he had never heard a peep of complaint. "For all these years," he wrote, "we've hardly heard anything negative about these policies." Actually, for all those years, Grassley was successfully championing legislation to bestow massive government subsidies on ethanol, and drawing plenty of complaints for it.

In his latest letter to the GMA, Grassley pleaded for "intellectual honesty regarding ethanol and its role in the economy." You first, Senator.

A second federal class-action lawsuit has been filed against Perdue Farms, accusing the chicken processor of stuffing extra giblets into the cavities of its birds as a way to not only save waste-disposal costs but to make a bit of extra money in the process.

The latest suit was filed Monday in federal court in Chicago on behalf of Yesenia Nieto, identified only as an "Illinois resident." According to the Chicago Sun-Times, when Nieto "gets a bird that has more necks and gizzards, hearts and livers stuffed into its carcass than it carried while living, she gets really bothered."

Upon returning from shopping at a Jewel store (or as it's called in Chicago, "over by da Jewels"), Nieto noticed that her newly purchased bird "contained an extra bag of giblets stuffed into the body cavity."

It's not yet clear how the suit is related to one filed earlier this month in New Jersey, which, using similar language to the Chicago-based suit, accused Perdue of "tricking customers into paying the regular per-pound price" for chickens and reaping "millions of dollars in improper charges."

"But aren't gizzards the best part?" wondered the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog. "Clearly these people have never tasted a good chicken giblet gravy."

Perdue apparently agrees, even if most people don't really want an extra heart in their bird. Spokeswaoman Julie DeYoung told the Law Blog that, while she couldn't comment on the lawsuit, "I can tell you the majority of our giblets complaints are about MISSING giblets."

For the headline on its article about the British retail giant Tesco, BusinessWeek chose a hyperbolic quote from a retail consultant who said the chain is "Wal-Mart's worst nightmare."

At least for now, Tesco represents more of a mildly disturbing, recurring dream. Globally, Tesco has long been a major competitor to Wal-Mart, and it's growing fast. In several markets, such as Britain, it overwhelms Wal-Mart. In the U.S., though, Tesco is still just a blip on Wal-Mart's radar, though one that Wal-Mart is keeping its eye on.

The British chain entered the U.S. market just over a year ago, with its Fresh & Easy stores - 10,000-square-foot convenience shops that it has been opening in Nevada, California and Arizona. Wal-Mart has answered with its Marketside stores. BusinessWeek describes this as Wal-Mart being "on the defensive," but the limited tests of Marketside stores seems more like a warning: try to outdo us on our home turf, Wal-Mart is saying, and we will crush you.

Having established Wal-Mart's "nightmare" scenario, and accurately describing Tesco's global growth (it's expected to replace France's Carrefour as the world's No. 2 retailer in a few years) BusinessWeek finally gets around to describing Tesco's U.S. efforts in a less breathless way. Cracking the U.S. market "is proving tougher than Tesco anticipated," the article says. It will have 200 Fresh & Easy stores this time next year, which is 50 fewer and 10 months later than it had planned.

Given the increase in cases of food-borne illnesses in recent years, you might think that the can-do Obama administration is going to take swift action, adequately funding the Food and Drug Administration and removing it as much as possible from the vicissitudes of politics.

But you'd be wrong. All that might happen, but thanks to the recession and two wars, reforming the FDA will be "on the back burner," the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

Even leading proponents of reform say so. The FDA, and hence the safety of our food supply, "will have to wait its turn," said Sen. Richard Durbin, a longtime advocate of stronger food laws and a friend of Obama.

In the meantime, the Times reports, the federal government will continue to rely on the food industry to regulate itself. And we see where that's gotten us: tainted peanut butter, disease-ridden spinach, sick-making peppers, contaminated pet food imported from China. (Never mind the outbreaks of disease carried by meat and poultry, which, along with dairy products, are regulated by the Department of Agriculture.)

In many of the recent cases, the FDA embarrassed itself and did all kinds of harm as it fumbled around trying to find out why people were getting sick. The American tomato industry lost lots of business after it was fingered as the culprit for a salmonella outbreak this year until the FDA realized that Mexican jalapeno peppers were actually to blame.

"Independent reviews by the Government Accountability Office and others found the agency lacked even basic information technology capabilities to analyze data and assess risks," the Times reported. And one Democratic congresswoman called the agency "dysfunctional."

What is needed is a complete overhaul of the food-safety system. One idea being floated is to create a new agency that would do the jobs that the FDA and USDA (theoretically) perform separately. This would not only streamline the system, but it would go a long way toward removing political considerations from food-safety regulations. Part of the USDA's mandate is to "promote" American agriculture, a function that, to put it mildly, tends to counteract its watchdog role.

And the FDA is so busy evaluating drugs and medical devices that its food-safety function is severely compromised.  

Such massive change, however, seems far off when even its proponents are calling for patience.