Food Prices Headed Up & No Horse Meat

Food Prices Headed Up & No Horse Meat plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

We food shoppers will see prices for most products going up more this year than they did in 2012. Ephraim Leibtag, USDA economist, lists some of the price hikes expected for a few of the major food categories this year. 

LEIBTAG: A lot of the categories such as beef and pork and poultry are slated in that 3 to 4% range. Fish and seafood are slightly lower at 2 1/2 to 3 1/2. On the slightly higher range we have dairy products projected at 3 1/2 to 4 1/2% as well as fresh produce 3 1/2 to 4 1/2%. And the other foods category which includes all those items that aren’t specific to one of the major protein, dairy, meat or produce products is also expected to increase 3 1/2 to 4 1/2%.

If you have been fretting that you might have inadvertently picked up some horse meat at the local Ikea, fear not. An Ikea spokesperson says that the U.S. stores have not been affected by the recall of meatballs from 21 European countries. Authorities in the Czech Republic said they had detected horse DNA in tests of packs of frozen meatballs labeled as beef and pork. Horse meat was recently found in Burger King burgers sold in the U.K and in a meat pasta sauce sold by a U.K supermarket.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Baby boomers are the new target of choice when it comes to pointing the finger of blame at who has the largest carbon footprint. Researchers are now trying to narrow down which age group in the United States has the most carbon dioxide emissions, and they have pretty much settled on baby boomers. Why? Well, because we make more money, and that apparently means that we are more likely to travel. Okay, I’ll give you that one. But we are also the ones buying hybrid and electric cars, and supporting renewable energy technology, such as wind and solar power. At the same time, many baby boomers were the “original” environmentalists, and remain far more progressive on environmental issues than the generation ahead of them. We also tend to recycle more than our parents generation, and even most twenty somethings. In fact, a report last year stated that today’s young people are less interested in the environment than baby boomers were when they were young. We can remember all too well the 1971 television ad that featured actor Iron Eyes Cody with tears running down his face as trash, launched from a passing car, landed at his feet. And we’ve been trying to correct that vision ever since.

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.