Food Prices

The Original Deer-Camp MRE: The Lost Art of Canning Venison

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Before freezers and generators, Michigan hunters had another way to make November’s deer feed the family all winter: the Mason jar. Pressure-canned venison may be the original deer-camp MRE—simple, shelf-stable, already cooked, and requiring no refrigeration. It’s a nearly forgotten skill worth bringing back.

Snark: Just Eat the Bugs: Washington’s Brilliant Solution to the American Beef Problem

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Perhaps we’ve been looking at America’s beef crisis all wrong. Beef is expensive. The cattle herd is historically small. Drought hammered ranchers. Feed got expensive. Equipment got expensive. Interest got expensive. Land got expensive. Mexican cattle imports were disrupted because a flesh-eating parasite decided to make a comeback. Obviously, the solution is simple. Eat bugs. …

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The Lie We Tell Ourselves About Food—and the Chemical Trick Keeping Billions Alive

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We like to pretend food comes from virtue. Hard work, sunshine, maybe a red barn and a guy in overalls. Reality check: your dinner exists because of industrial chemistry, fossil fuels, and a process that forces atmospheric nitrogen to behave like it’s being interrogated in a back room. At the center of this quiet miracle—and quiet dependency—is the Haber-Bosch process. It doesn’t get headlines. It doesn’t trend. But it’s arguably one of the most important inventions in human history, because it broke the natural limits on how much food we can produce. Without it, the global population wouldn’t look anything like it does today.