Abundance and Choice

I just returned from a foray into last minute food shopping for the Thanksgiving table and I am astonished at the exanding variety of choice almost everywhere in the fresh food category. In the turkey aisle there were probably 15 distinctly different choices this year from organic to frozen to fresh to injected to stuffed to stuffed with hen and duck. There was smoked turkey and turkey parts of every discription including tails in a separate pack. Yum Yum.

I started in the produce section and there were eight or nine different types of lettuce with a couple of varieties in little greenhouse boxes with roots still on them growing, five to seven types of mushrooms (some looked like the ones we were told to avoid when out hunting morrells as kids). Not just the white button ones and portabellos but all kinds of strange looking fungi.

There was white and green asparagus, seven or eight types of apples, five or six types of tomatoes and even a large assortment of onions and leeks and boilers etc. etc. Every color of the rainbow was represented in the bell pepper category. There was something there called salsify which I wouldn't begin to know what to do with right beside regular looking eggplant and ones that looked like cucumbers.

Dispite the run up in feed ingredient prices, the meat case was filled with very reasonably priced offerings of beef and pork, all a spectacular example of ingenuity, freedom and choice coupled with a strong focus on efficiency in the marketing and production channel to both deliver messages about demand and to serve it up in spades.

There are a lot of things all of us in the food industry could do a little better, but this is the week we focus on what we do better than anyone else in the world. The offerings put on the tables all across this country as there because a small percentage of men and women in the United States and in other countries chose to dedicate themselves to production agriculture and in doing so, they freed tens of millions to pursue every other kind of value-creating activity. Thats a lot to be grateful for.