okmatewanker

I fully expect Jeremy Clarkson to have never baked a loaf of bread in his life.

I'll occasionally bake a loaf of bread, here in my home kitchen. I can't do it with only wheat flour, I need water, salt, sugar and oil as well. So I have to pay my municipal waterworks, a salt miner, a sugar beet farmer, a rapeseed farmer, a wheat farmer, and whatever you call a yeast maker, plus their adjacent industries (I don't by sugar beets, I buy refined granular sugar, etc) and multiple truck and train drivers who move all of those goods in their various states of manufacture around the continent.

Then I've got to bake it, I have an electric oven so now the local energy concern gets their cut. It's that, or get a gas oven and cook with natural gas (fossil fuel methane), or misuse my backyard grill and cook with fossil fuel propane, or get out my axe, fell a tree and build a fire, which is labor intensive on my part.

Sometimes, watching Jeremy's Farm, there's an amount of "I didn't think it would take this much knowledge or skill." Because jackasses like me with 40 square feet of vegetable garden and some packets of seeds from the home center manage to make food. How hard can it be to scale that up to hundreds of acres? Modern farmers need a bachelor's degree, you need to know about plants and animals and soil and all manner of shit to be a farmer. "Put seeds in ground, plants grow." Yes, but actually no.

Sometimes it's "He's still The Orangutan from Top Gear." He buys a tractor that's way too big and then struggles to drive it, lol.

A lot of times it's "I don't think rich TV man actually understands how society works, people have just done shit for him his entire life."

560% markup from raw material to finished product on the shelves. That sounds about ... fine to me? But was this a pro-capitalism/freemarkets post that I misinterpreted because this is Lemmy?

• Transporting the grain from the field to the mill.
• Milling
• Transporting flour (and at least 3 other ingredients) from the mill to the bakery
• Baking, packaging
• Transporting the bread from the bakery to the supermarket
• Running the supermarket.

Turns out there is a difference between raw wheat and bread. More news at 8.

When farmers get paid too little for their effort, making these wild comparisons isn’t helping. It seems we’re about a year away from the conclusion “I stubbed my toe. This must be capitalism’s fault.”

This is the same Jeremy Clarkson who thinks that young people should work the fields, paid for with taxes, as part of a National Service scheme, right?

What a bell end!

I'm not a farmer, I'm not a baker, I'm just a bread eater, but even I knew that 1kg was way too much wheat for a single loaf of bread. Turns out, yup. 1kg makes 2 loaves.

How does that change things? Well it means a loaf of bread contains 12.5p of flour, not 25p. So, instead of a loaf from a grocery store being about 5x as much as the price of the flour it contains, it's 10x as much.

Having said that, This isn't just a "capitalism" thing. There are many steps between the farmer selling raw wheat and a loaf of bread appearing on a store shelf. Many of them are unchanged since ancient times. I'm sure baker in the Middle Ages charged enough for his loaves of bread that he'd make a reasonable profit and that was centuries before capitalism was a thing.

In the modern world there are different facilities for every step. There's transportation which costs something at multiple stages. There's winnowing and milling the flour. There's buying and shipping the other ingredients. There's mixing the dough. There's baking the dough. There's packaging (and possibly slicing) the bread. And finally, there's the grocery store. To be useful, a grocery store basically has to be in a built-up area, which means high real-estate and related costs. It also needs to make enough margin to pay people to stock the shelves and cashiers to sell the loaves. The only truly modern part from all that that didn't exist in the Middle Ages is sales and marketing. Paying to send out emails or a flyer or whatever to advertise their items. My guess is that most of those steps operate on razor thin margins and make up for it by doing huge quantities.

Now, it's true that the system has flaws and inefficiencies. One glaring example is the lack of competition at many stages in many countries. In Canada, there are so few grocery store chains that the existing ones were able to literally fix the price of bread. So, of course when that happens both customers and farmers get squeezed.

I wonder if there ever was a "golden age of farming" when farming was a comfortable lifestyle. It seems to me that it has always been a very difficult career. If anything, it's probably at its best now under "capitalism". That isn't to say it's an easy job now, just that as difficult and stressful as it is now, it was even worse in the past.

It would be interesting though, just as an intellectual exercise, to imagine a perfectly fair world to figure out what the perfectly fair ratio is between the price of wheat and the price of a loaf of bread on the store shelf. If everybody were paid the exact same rate for their labour, and there were no excess profits generated that went to owners / landlords, how much of the final price of a loaf of bread on a store shelf should come from the raw ingredients of wheat, water, yeast, oil? How much goes to the baker? How much to the delivery drivers? How much to the shelf stockers and cashiers? Imagine it's a wood-fired oven, how much of the price of a loaf of bread goes to a lumberjack, even though their involvement in the whole process is really indirect?

Incomplete picture, need prices on the transport of the wheat, processing it into flour for bread use, transporting the flour to the bakery, bakery electric to run ovens, labor to run ovens, machines (probably) that slice and bag the bread, and trucks/drivers to distribute it to retailers, and the retailer's labor/overhead. All of that factors in the price from "wheat" to "bread," sure nobody in that chain is selling for a loss and they all make profit, but even if everyone operated at cost it's still going to be more expensive in "bread" state than "wheat" state for the simple fact that even if everyone "does it for cost" it will still add more to do more things to the product.

If he said "we sell wheat for 25p/kg and the store resells that same package of wheat for 1.40," he may have a point. Even then the point is "sell directly to end users and cut out the middle man then." Hell if buying weed has taught me one thing it's that the more people touch it the more expensive it gets, always get as close as you can to the distributor and buy in bulk.

According to Past Clarkson, if Current Clarkson can't make good money farming then Current Clarkson shouldn't be a farmer. Simple as that.

And that is because Current Clarkson is the worst farmer ... in the world.

Lemmy shitposter learns about protest.

He’s not the sharpest egg in the attic, is he?

Well Jeremy, somebody makes bread out of it.

Well he's getting there

pretty sure it doesn't take a kilogram of flour to make a loaf of bread, maybe a pound.

Lol, not discovers, just uses it a way that at this moment might serve him to further his own agenda.

It's just a business that has one "influencer" already on staff.

This dumbass was happy that government was paying him not to do anything with his land for that show he had called Clarkson's Farm or something. I wonder when it started to hurt him so he started to pay attention...

damn bread is only 1.40 there?

even the store brand enriched with sawdust bread here costs between 1.90 and 2.50

ACTUAL bread costs between 4.50 and can even be 6-7 if you buy the fancy bread

That's a rough 65 ngl.

Wait until he finds out how much we pay farmers in other countries for their goods

This is the man who punched somebody in the face when service workers went home and he was huuuungy

Honestly, I fucking like Clarkson.

Is he sometimes obnoxious? Yeah. Wrong? Definitely.

But like the role he's playing he's playing fucking amazingly. He's an entertainment person who doesn't have an entirely closed mind even though there's definitely a lot of shit in it. And he isn't overly political. Like he understands he can influence opinions a bit but he would never try to become a real politician. Would he?

I've not watched anything this person has been in, but every time I see him sharing his thoughts and opinions in publication he seems like a genuinely incurious, blathering moron.