Sad day and bad day for food security when Nocton knocked on the head
Although there didn’t actually appear to be much of a upside for cake firms if it had gone ahead, I can’t help feeling downbeat at the news that the Nocton dairy project in Lincolnshire has been knocked on the head.
The timing is particularly ironic, coming hot on the heels of the World Economic Forum’s report ‘Realizing a New Vision for Agriculture: A roadmap for stakeholders’, in which the executive summary states: “The Time to Act Is Now: Committing to 20/20/20. The New Vision for Agriculture strives to harness the power of agriculture to drive food security, environmental sustainability and economic opportunity. Its aspirations are high, not least of which are to increase production by 20% while decreasing emissions by 20% and reducing the prevalence of rural poverty by 20% every decade.” It’s a good bet that Nocton would have ticked at least the first two of these boxes, but now we’ll never know.
On the other hand, maybe I’m misguided. Perhaps we should be rejoicing that a beacon unit the size of 29 typical customers, which probably wouldn’t use a single nut of dairy cake or even one teatcup of blend, is now not going to demonstrate to other milk producers how a cake firm is not longer a necessary aspect of their business model. And at least they won’t be buying any TMR machines, nor showing off to others how to make best use of them. Peevish? Of course, but clouds and silver linings and all that… yet still I’m downbeat.
Eggs teach delicious lesson about unknown unknowns
More cheerily, some genuine good news could be found in the Daily Hate Mail recently that eggs really are the new superfood (as mentioned from time to time before in this feature, dating back to November 2005).[1] Even better news now, which is what justifies re-visiting the topic, is that it isn’t just our understanding of eggs’ nutritional properties that have improved, but that “eggs have become more nutritious over the past decade”, says the DHM.
For what appears to be a clever trick of smoke and mirrors, the British egg industry should be applauded for using genuinely new data from the renowned United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to portray eggs here as “healthier than ever, say experts” as the DHM sub-heading puts it.
According to an American Egg Board press release distributed by the PR Newswire service, the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has reviewed the nutrient composition of standard large eggs and found the cholesterol level to be 14% lower than when measured previously in 2002.[2] Over the same period, the vitamin D component has risen by 64%.
An explanation suggested by the AEB is that reduced cholesterol in eggs could be related to better poultry nutrition. In the Daily Mail report, deputy chairman of the British Egg Industry Council (BEIC) Andrew Joret endorses this, saying “we believe the reduction is due to changes in the feeds used in British plants since the Nineties when the use of bone meal was banned.” In nit-picking frame of mind, I have not managed to find a direct link between the USDA findings and either British eggs or the bone meal hypothesis, hence the smoke and mirrors jibe. But as a PR practitioner for some of the time, I plead guilty to breaching the Holy Bible’s ‘let he without sin cast the first stone’ (St John, 8:7). Sorry.
Giving credit where it’s due, the British egg industry is clearly doing a lot of things right. In the last quarter of 2010, sales rose by 5% compared with 2009. In the whole of 2010, the egg market grew by 1.6% in volume and 2.6% in value, turning around “decades of year-on-year declines”, according to the BEIC.[3] It says both value and volume growth are being driven by free range eggs, while caged egg sales have also stabilised. In such circumstances, we can forgive BEIC chief executive Mark Williams for allowing an oleaginous PR man (it wasn’t me, honest) to make up this nice example of corporate puff: “The egg industry is a shining example of a sector that has not accepted its lot, but has taken control of its future.” And so say all of us. Indeed, note to CAP reform negotiators: Surely it is no coincidence that the egg sector has always had to stand on its own two feet and compete in a free market.
Meanwhile, how many of us foresaw at the time of the meat and bone meal (MBM) withdrawal from layer diets that such a potentially monumental gain might arise? The importance of this lesson right now, of course, is that high raw material prices put formulations in the spotlight and make ways of reducing costs particularly attractive. But beware the law of unintended, unforeseen or even unforeseeable consequences, which warns that “an intervention in a complex system always creates unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. Akin to Murphy's law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.”[4]
The man credited with inventing this law, sociologist Robert K Merton, listed five possible causes of unanticipated consequences:
§ Ignorance (it is impossible to anticipate everything, thereby leading to incomplete analysis)
§ Error (incorrect analysis of the problem or following habits that worked in the past but may not apply to the current situation)
§ Immediate interests, which may override long-term interests
§ Basic values may require or prohibit certain actions even if the long-term result might be unfavourable (these long-term consequences may eventually cause changes in basic values)
§ Self-defeating prophecy (fear of some consequence drives people to find solutions before the problem occurs, thus the non-occurrence of the problem is unanticipated).
In addition to these, it is said there is also something called ‘the relevance paradox’, in which decision makers think they know their areas of ignorance about an issue, and obtain information to address it; but they neglect other areas of ignorance, because an absence of information makes its relevance not obvious. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put this famously and rather more succinctly as “unknown unknowns”.[5] (See reference for the longer quote, it’s exquisite).
Then, just when I’m running out of material, into my inbox drops the excellent AgriTrade News weekly e-newsletter. It reports that prominent British MP Neil Parish, a farmer and former chair of the European Parliament's Agriculture committee, has said Europe should review the post-BSE ban on meat and bonemeal (MBM), to be fair with the proviso that there should be no intra-species use of the material.[6]
He was speaking at the National Office of Animal Health's Feeding the World conference in London and, with such delicious timing, called the continuing MBM ban “a huge waste of protein”. Of course, the unfortunate Mr Parish wasn’t to know that he ought to know, but didn’t, how a 14% reduction in the cholesterol content of eggs and a 64% increase in bone-protecting, osteoporosis-preventing vitamin D was being linked to the withdrawal of MBM from poultry rations. If this was a conversation between us, the next gambit would be, “So who’s going to tell the BEIC, you or me?” But as it’s not, I’ll probably beat you to it.
Back down to earth in the day-to-day decision making of a busy UK feed mill, one practical upshot from all this is how it demonstrates the importance of being extra vigilant for unknown unknowns when considering whether to adopt new or different feed ingredients. Regardless of whether New Ingredient X is a macro- or micro-ingredient, maybe a bit more digging than usual into the supplier’s or manufacturer’s R&D is warranted, just to make sure that they’ve looked hard enough and long enough for unknown unknowns before bringing it to market. Otherwise, how do you differentiate between a genuine nutritional breakthrough and the next variant of snake oil?
Hats off to British egg industry
Inspired by all this good news to enjoy a two-egg omelette for breakfast this morning, I am grateful that a bare cupboard prompted a quick visit to the local Co-op where evidence of the egg industry’s innovative marketing was on full view. In plain grey ‘simply value’ packaging were 10 Class A ‘free range eggs of different sizes’ for £1.99. Yes please.
Or you could have a very pretty little pack of four organic eggs (bottom left in picture), for £1.25. There were also Happy Eggs, an Oakland brand, and the bright green packs with a prominent Union Flag on the top containing the Co-op brand of graded eggs in medium and large sizes.
Among even this moderate amount of choice was a variety of prices, quantities, sizes and brands of the product. Cynics might say this is a ‘confuse and rule’ marketing policy because it makes it impossible for shoppers to fix an easy pence-per-egg benchmark in their heads. But contrast this with the shambles that is milk marketing, which helps us all understand and remember four-pints-for-99p.
References
[1] Sophie Borland, 14 Feb 2011. Scramble back to eggs! Daily Mail.
[2] American Egg Board, 8 Feb 2011. New study shows large eggs are 14 percent lower in cholesterol & 64 percent higher in vitamin D. PR Newswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eggs-are-now-naturally-lower-in-cholesterol-115547959.html viewed 16 Feb 2011.
[3] BEIC, viewed 16 Feb 2011. Egg sales rocket. http://www.nutritionandeggs.co.uk/press_releases/view/321.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences, viewed 16 Feb 2011.
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_unknowns, viewed 16 Feb 2011: “……statement was made by Rumsfeld on February 12, 2002 at a press briefing where he addressed the absence of evidence linking the government of Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. ‘[T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.’ “
[6] AgriTrade News, 18 Feb 2011. MEP calls for more GM protein and MBM in Europe. Vol 4, No 6.
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