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This is seriously bad news for Christmas pudding fans!

The BBC wrote:Britain - the world's biggest importer of dried fruit - has seen the price of raisins and sultanas rise by 42% since September, leading suppliers have said.

They blame falling numbers of raisins in California for pushing up prices.

Bakeries say increases are unlikely to affect the cost of hot cross buns - but an industry analyst warned this year's Christmas puddings could be hit.

Pull your fingers out, Californian fruit farmers!

This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

On the subject of American history; have fun finding out where the term "Banana Republic" came from. Similarly, the state of the Palm Oil industry today is atrocious. Like, worse than corn bad.

...Hmn, re-reading my post, it'll seem really weird without looking into this stuff.

If fruit supplies dry up, isn't that going to put quite a wrinkle in salads and boxed lunches?

I certainly won't be grapeful if it happens.

I don't want to in-sultana all the xmas pudding fans, but it sounds like they are just wine-ing about their currant situation.

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

As a gun toting right wing American, you won't find much argument from me regarding Californians*.




*It's a joke people.

I love raisins. This makes me shrivel in horror for a core component of my snack mix!

Not really something I would have expected there to be a shortage of XD

Every grape used to make a raisin is a grape not used in wine making. Stop that!

Also, with a raisin shortage, there are now fewer chances of me mistaking a perfectly dreadful raisin cookie for a wonderful chocolate chip cookie.

feth you raisins, the doppelganger of the cookie industry.

 kronk wrote:
Every grape used to make a raisin is a grape not used in wine making. Stop that!

Don't worry, wine grapes are very different to raisin grapes. Much higher sugar levels in wine grapes. If you made wine from eating grapes it would be low in alcohol and no one wants that.

Another dreadful thought -- this may threaten the supply of dead fly biscuits!

If you think this is scary, look at the potential threat the banana is facing.

 kronk wrote:
Every grape used to make a raisin is a grape not used in wine making. Stop that!

Why can't it be both?

 feeder wrote:

 kronk wrote:
Every grape used to make a raisin is a grape not used in wine making. Stop that!

Why can't it be both?

Yuck. Bile Flavored Wine Cooler is the greatest description of anything, though.

 kronk wrote:
Every grape used to make a raisin is a grape not used in wine making. Stop that!

Also, with a raisin shortage, there are now fewer chances of me mistaking a perfectly dreadful raisin cookie for a wonderful chocolate chip cookie.

feth you raisins, the doppelganger of the cookie industry.

you have it backwards. grapes should only be used for 2 things, wine and oatmeal raisin cookies.

oatmeal raisin cookies>chocolate chip

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
If you think this is scary, look at the potential threat the banana is facing.

You mean "facing again."

Y' ever wonder why "banana flavoured" candy tastes little like currently cultivated bananas?
That flavour was developed when another strain was the dominant cultivated one and that strain is now extinct because of a banana blight.

There's a reason the most common breed these days is the cavendish. It was resistant to that old blight. Unfortunately, there's now a banana blight that will affect cavendish strains.

It's the problem with monocultures.

Raisins are just awful. You used to find them in boil in the bag curries.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

The problem in California is water. Like. They have none.

I love making puns. Especially terrible ones. But nothing I can post here will hold a candle to the punny perfection of the thread title, so I must abstain.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

The problem in California is water. Like. They have none.

We have plenty of water good sir, the Pacific is quite large you know!

The true enemy of fruit is beef. The amount of land beef requires to produce food is like 7000% higher than that of fruits and veg - meaning that's less land you have available to grow fruit. Then you factor in the 20% of global warming beef is responsible for - which is making California even drier - bye bye raisins. That and Cashews - cashews for some reason require a lot of water to grow but are the most profitable thing to grow. So Cashew farmers are turning up everywhere and stealing all the water for everyone else to grow less profitable things. Many might just be moving on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I love making puns. Especially terrible ones. But nothing I can post here will hold a candle to the punny perfection of the thread title, so I must abstain.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

The problem in California is water. Like. They have none.

We have plenty of water good sir, the Pacific is quite large you know!

How effective are desalization plants? I really have no idea - from what I know they are too expensive and transporting water from sea level onto the land requires so much energy that it can't be effective. I believe Californias are mostly digging for their water? No?

 Steve steveson wrote:
Don't worry, wine grapes are very different to raisin grapes. Much higher sugar levels in wine grapes. If you made wine from eating grapes it would be low in alcohol and no one wants that.

Sultana grapes are the most common grape used to make raisins. In fact in a lot of countries they aren't called raisins, but sultanas.

Sultanas are also used to make a particular kind of wine - I think in Turkey, somewhere around there, it's a very light white. But in lots of places, including Australia and California, basically where both raisins and wine are made, you get some grape fraud, where sultana grapes are used because they're cheap, and then they just add more sugar during the process. It's passed off as Chardonnay.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:
How effective are desalization plants? I really have no idea - from what I know they are too expensive and transporting water from sea level onto the land requires so much energy that it can't be effective. I believe Californias are mostly digging for their water? No?

They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.

The tech does scale down though, so they're quite good for really isolated projects that need a lot of water. A lot of frakking operations run small desal plants. But for large scale agriculture or supplying a city, the cost is crazy.

 Xenomancers wrote:
The true enemy of fruit is beef. The amount of land beef requires to produce food is like 7000% higher than that of fruits and veg - meaning that's less land you have available to grow fruit. Then you factor in the 20% of global warming beef is responsible for - which is making California even drier - bye bye raisins. That and Cashews - cashews for some reason require a lot of water to grow but are the most profitable thing to grow. So Cashew farmers are turning up everywhere and stealing all the water for everyone else to grow less profitable things. Many might just be moving on.

Errrrmmmm. Not quite right.

Grain-fed beef is woefully land inefficient. However, grass-fed beef is fine since cattle can graze on land that is 100% unfit for any kind of agriculture. This applies to any other domestic herbivore too.

Of course the US has so much agricultural land in general that we can afford to devote so much of it to producing meat and feed for the meat, and still leave much of the land unused. The idea that meat production is somehow starving the world is nonsense. People starve because they can't get access to food, not that there is a lack of ability to make food. So hand wringing over inefficiencies regarding food production is misguided.

As for global warming, blaming cattle farming is a bit disingenuous. Remember that as little as a few hundred years ago, and certainly during the last ice age, there were massive herds of herbivores that dominated the plains areas of the planet in numbers easily dwarfing cattle ranching today. Those herds certainly would have been producing comparable amounts of methane.

 Grey Templar wrote:
As for global warming, blaming cattle farming is a bit disingenuous. Remember that as little as a few hundred years ago, and certainly during the last ice age, there were massive herds of herbivores that dominated the plains areas of the planet in numbers easily dwarfing cattle ranching today. Those herds certainly would have been producing comparable amounts of methane.

No, because not all large herbivores produce the same levels of methane. Cows are particularly bad, and grain feds cows even more so.

 sebster wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
As for global warming, blaming cattle farming is a bit disingenuous. Remember that as little as a few hundred years ago, and certainly during the last ice age, there were massive herds of herbivores that dominated the plains areas of the planet in numbers easily dwarfing cattle ranching today. Those herds certainly would have been producing comparable amounts of methane.

No, because not all large herbivores produce the same levels of methane. Cows are particularly bad, and grain feds cows even more so.

Of course. However population estimates give us very comparable numbers of similar herbivores. Currently, there are around 1.4 billion cattle in the world.

North American Bison for example in terms of their digestive tract are very similar to cattle, and estimates put their numbers alone in North America at around 60 million pre-1800. A single nearly identical species on a single continent, and we're already at 42% of the modern cow population. Throw in dozens of other bovine species, both living and extinct, plus many other species of large herbivores and you'll easily dwarf modern cattle populations. And with greater populations, you're going to be looking at roughly comparable methane generation. And of course, that population estimate for bison is with native americans hunting them. Prior to humans arriving in north america there were likely many more bison, plus all the other species that got hunted to extinction.

One on one, none of them might equal a cow's methane generation. But since they'll outnumber modern cattle populations several times over when you combine them all together...

 Grey Templar wrote:
Currently, there are around 1.4 billion cattle in the world.

North American Bison for example in terms of their digestive tract are very similar to cattle, and estimates put their numbers alone in North America at around 60 million pre-1800. A single nearly identical species on a single continent, and we're already at 42% of the modern cow population.

The maths, it burns. 60 million is 42% of 1.8 billion? It's 3.3%

Anyhow, the rest is also wrong. No matter how fast and loose you play with numbers, you aren't getting 1.8 billion large herbivores across the planet without humans controlling the environment to make it happen. It's simply a non-argument. And even if you bang your head on the concrete then squint real hard to believe there were 1.8 billion large herbivores on the planet at some point before now, you're still dealing with the reality that cows emit more methane than other large herbivores.

 sebster wrote:


They're expensive to build and stupidly expensive to run. Australia built a pile of them about a decade ago and most got mothballed almost immediately.

It all depends on where are you getting your energy from, and the relative abundance of other sources of water.

In the Gulf countries and islands with little rainfall desalination plants are very common. In Spain desalination is keeping the most intensive agriculture even in severe drought and Morocco is building a massive desalination plant in Agadir (their most important export farming region) and will be solar powered.

Desalination is not going to help you if you want to grow corn or wheat or grapes, but for high-yield items it's a very plausible solution.

 chromedog wrote:

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
If you think this is scary, look at the potential threat the banana is facing.

You mean "facing again."

Y' ever wonder why "banana flavoured" candy tastes little like currently cultivated bananas?
That flavour was developed when another strain was the dominant cultivated one and that strain is now extinct because of a banana blight.

There's a reason the most common breed these days is the cavendish. It was resistant to that old blight. Unfortunately, there's now a banana blight that will affect cavendish strains.

It's the problem with monocultures.

Why are you lecturing us on the merits of sex while California is propping up the slave trade by forcing Brits to buy from less savoury plantations?!

 Xenomancers wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I love making puns. Especially terrible ones. But nothing I can post here will hold a candle to the punny perfection of the thread title, so I must abstain.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
This reminds me of a class I just took about African History, and we were covering slavery. I watched a documentary on modern day slavery, and Britain is one of the worse culprits in propping up slavery in Africa today.

Basically in terms of how Brits just eat more chocolate then everyone else in the world. If I recall correctly, 60% of the planets cocoa is harvested by slave labor.

Speaking of slaves, that seems like a good solution? Why don't we enslave California and force them to produce more raisins? Problem solved!

The problem in California is water. Like. They have none.

We have plenty of water good sir, the Pacific is quite large you know!

How effective are desalization plants? I really have no idea - from what I know they are too expensive and transporting water from sea level onto the land requires so much energy that it can't be effective. I believe Californias are mostly digging for their water? No?

It's about as effective as my sarcasm.