Quinoa and a Proposal

Seeing a salad bar after touring Dublin, I made this connection.

If you haven't heard of quinoa, then you don't live in any modern society. Quinoa, the seeds of a plant in the goosefoot family, is a nutritionally dense food that has  "all the essential amino acids, trace elements, and vitamins" necessary for human life, and, most importantly for white women, "contains no gluten" (hey if you like quinoa, you might try lamb's quarters as well!).

So, because quinoa is the perfect food for folks who wear lululemon tights and athletic shirts, and who pull their ponytails through the adjustable band of their ball caps, naturally it means that quinoa production has escalated, and some quinoa producers are doing well. In fact, quinoa has become one of the world's monocultures, up there with corn and soy. Side effects obviously occur, among them the fact that quinoa producers no longer eat much quinoa, and because quinoa has to be produced at high altitude, and grows best in llama poop, the production has its downsides.

This brings me to a piece of economic/agricultural analysis published a while back by one Jonathan Swift. At the time he was seeing an oversupply of agricultural products in Ireland, and proposing a new market for them in the United Kingdom. He worked out the numbers, creating appropriate reserves for breeding, excesses for marketing, and appropriate compensation for the producers of this agricultural excess.

This excess obviously no longer applies in Ireland, because its excess capacity was reduced by a third due to exogenous inputs from 1840-1850. But there is no doubt access to protein-rich, non-glutinous, and certainly lean feed stock might be available from other suppliers today. I'm thinking Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.