My peanut butter nightmare story

In my No Free Lunch newsletter, #13, (see the previous entry on the background of that newsletter) I wrote about my peanut butter fears. It sounds a bit like today's gasoline stories, so I thought I'd share it. I was actually discussing concentration in the food industry and reported that in 1963 the 50 largest companies accounted for 42% of all food manufacturers' assets, and by 1978 it was 63.7%, and that by 2000 it could be 100% (as reported in "The U.S. food and tobacco manufacturing industries," 1980). Here was my nightmare scenario in 1981

"I don't have a crystal ball and I'm certainly no economist, but as someone who has been eating peanut butter on toast for breakfast since 1945, I'd like to share a fear of mine with you.

There was a terrible drought in the summer of 1980--bad year for many crops, particularly peanuts. If you can get peanut butter at all, you're paying dearly for it. Peanut butter is a product that can be simply made (grind up, add salt, pack in jars) by a small company and can be marketed locally because of its wide appeal. If a national firm comes out with a $1.00 off coupon on their brand of peanut butter, the smaller firms will probably be out of business in a short time. And the American shopper will fall for it, because she thinks a coupon is saving her money.

And then, my nightmare continues, OPEC countries begin buying up acreages in the south that produce our peanuts, and decide to invest some of their oil earnings in the food conglomerates that produce our peanut butter.

Soon foreign investments are in control, and cutting back on what they'll let us buy, and American shoppers are lining up at the grocery store at 5 a.m. to get a scoop of peanut butter for breakfast."

See how worrying about tomorrow spoils today? I'm still eating peanut butter, but that last paragraph does remind me of the gasoline problem. We have no control over the source of our oil, but need it for breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything else. I also didn't remember this drought, I think because we had such a bad heat wave and drought around here in 1988. So I looked it up, and here's what I found in the Monthly Weather Review, v. 109, #10 (Oct 1981)

Economic losses during the hot, dry summer of 1980 were estimated at $16 billion. Despite these substantial economic losses, analyses of historical (1895–1980) monthly temperature and precipitation data across the 48 contiguous United States indicate that conditions could easily have been worse. Much more hostile conditions have existed in the past, particularly during the 1930's and the 1950's. However, the summer of 1980 does stand out from the past two decades as an extreme anomaly across the southern and southeastern United States.

Wasn't this during the time when we were warned about the coming new ice age? Well, at least this can't be blamed on President Bush.