Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

foodandwine.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 247 posts

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#211

Post by logfromblammo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38
toomuchtodo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cashew sauce serves as a cheese substitute.

> Cashew sauce serves as a cheese substitute Recently went to a plant-based pizza place. (Unknowingly.) Pizza comes out. It's a white pizza. Cashew cheese all over it. Biting into what you think is cheese and getting cashew is disgusting. Biting into a cashew, sage and roasted pepper flatbread is quite nice. The language around substitutes likely needs to evolve for mass adoption. (That or make it literally unrecogni…

I agree completely.

Saying "vegan X" for a complex vegan recipe intended to approach the experience of eating X seems like a naming failure when considering the sometimes heroic effort that went into researching the recipe.

Calling it "vegan cheese" is thus doubly unsuitable, as it disappoints everyone expecting something like real cheese, and denies the vegan innovator a distinctive, intrinsically vegan name for the creation.

Veganism should really be appealing for vegans first, and then the masses will appropriate from that culture whatever foods they like best from it. A "mac and vegan cheese" will never be able to outcompete mac and genuine cheese among the people who don't really care all that much if dairy cows are exploited or unhappy. But a "macaroni and cashew-butter sauce" might be fine if I'm not really in the mood for real cheese, or want to try something different.

I'm perfectly willing to try original vegan foods, but when they go head-to-head with vegan imitation against non-vegan genuine, I will choose the genuine food most of the time.

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#212

Post by pacerwpg »

Accujack wrote: post #199
philwelch wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, John Oliver is most definitely a comedian.

...who nonetheless has solid journalistic methods.

I believe he's the face of journalists behind the scenes who do all the heavy lifting work.

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#213

Post by cbayram »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #135

I’m constantly amazed at how cheap milk is in the grocery store. A gallon of Great Value 1% milk is $2.77 now. That seems low for what you are getting (a gallon of protein rich fluid milked from a cow and transported to you). How much profit could be left? I’ve heard that grocery stores sell milk for less than they buy it for just to get you into the store, because they know you will buy other things. I haven’t check…

“Supermarkets sell food staples such as bananas or milk at less than the cost at which they were purchased in order to draw customers to their business. These items are typically strategically placed far from the entrances of the store to enhance this effect. In the case of milk, supermarket chains often refuse to pay market rates to avoid making a loss.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#214

Post by Bartweiss »

elliekelly wrote: post #186
dmix wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been studies showing private equity does more good for dying businesses than bad. Congress attacked them heavily during the 2008 crisis and they were the first companies called in to congress to answer "tough questions". But it turns out they didn't cause the crisis and that more companies are better off after PE acquisition (ie, they got turned around for the better and created greater economic production…

The company might be better off when a PE firm is done with the "turn around" but the employees, specifically their retirement funds, are consistently and demonstrably worse.

The narrative from firms like Bain is that they use their expertise to streamline failing companies and restore profitability. In reality, it seems that the impact is mostly legal/financial, even when the PE firm isn't a de facto corporate raider.

A huge fraction of increased profitability comes from the fact that interest payments are tax deductible while dividends aren't, so LBOs artificially reduce costs. Rearranging debt obligations can break free up cash by dodging severance and retirement expenses. And the ability to recoup losses via unsustainable, high-margin practices encourages PE firms to pursue riskier turnaround approaches, then brag about their success rates while failing to acknowledge that their failures are often more damaging than gradual, non-PE-driven ones.

"Alive or dead" may be easy to measure, but the impact on people isn't binary; PE tactics for raising the survival rate largely come at the cost of worse outcomes in both cases. And the cases where PE is straightforwardly beneficial are usually the least-troubled firms, where it's acting more like investment and tax reduction.

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#215

Post by projektfu »

ppseafield wrote: post #44
Fricken wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's evidence my ancestors have been drinking milk for at least 10,000 years. It's field tested.

Dairy is the most common food allergy.

In the overall US population peanut appears to be the most common, 58% more prevalent. In children, milk is far and away more common, 220% more prevalent, but many milk allergic children outgrow the allergy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4254585/

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#216

Post by Bartweiss »

saiya-jin wrote: post #176
epc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional “defined benefit” employee pensions in the US were treated as a balance sheet line item. There wasn't a separate, fenced off, account where funds were secured. In the 1980s it became popular for “corporate raiders” (today’s “private equity”) to target companies with mediocre corporate results but well funded pensions. Because the pension obligations weren't sequestered, you could legitimately take over a…

Is this still true for majority of the US working force? As an European I find it ridiculous that your pension could be wiped out like that, and not be completely separated from employer either managed by state, or dedicated pension fund manager (what I prefer but citizens have no say in this, you have to move state to change this). Companies go bankrupt all the times, small or big. If it gets wiped out, what happens…

Does this not happen in Europe also? It's rare for US employees to lose everything, but fairly common for pensions to be reduced to (Although I just looked, and apparently Maersk's move was specific to a UK division; perhaps this is another case where UK law sits halfway between the US and Europe? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2831055/...)

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#217

Post by fmakunbound »

JTon wrote: post #184
fmakunbound wrote: post #169

I always thought it was weird to be drinking the breast milk of another species.

More or less weird than eating the flesh of another species?

Definately more weird.

Apart from humans, do any other species drink milk from another species?

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#218

Post by beerandt »

beerandt wrote: post #118
Kye wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things can seem to be on the rise when awareness and detection improve. For example: the number of known exoplanets grows by the day, but they existed before we knew about them.

>awareness and detection improve. Increase might be a better word than improve. Number of "diagnosed" cases might have gone up, but I'd argue accuracy of diagnosis has gotten much much worse. There was a recent study showing only about 1 in 10 people who claimed to be allergic to antibiotics actually had any allergic or other negative response to them.

Link to a paper on the antibiotics allergy topic:

https://www.pharmaceutical-journal.com/learning/learning-art...?

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#219

Post by bluntfang »

RobLach wrote: post #8
sp332 wrote: post #3

A counterpoint: these companies were recently bought by private equity firm KKR Co, the same company that loaded up Toys 'R Us with debt and then liquidated it. https://mobile.twitter.com/rhinosoros/status/121424602712711... This bankruptcy filling might just be negotiation in the courts to reduce pension obligations.

Given that milk consumption has only gone down 1% / year over the last 5 years, which isn't dire, I believe it.

the direness of a 5% consumption loss over 5 years really depends on margins.

Re: America's Biggest Milk Producers Are Going Bankrupt

#220

Post by eldavido »

alistairSH wrote: post #160
eldavido wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already exists. It's called a 401(k).

Not sure if serious.meme A defined benefit plan is (nominally) funded by the employer with little or no input from the employee at time of investment or distribution. A 401k is funded by the employee, with the employee managing contribution level, fund investment, and eventually distributions. They're only the same, if by same you mean "retirement plans". The details are substantially different.

A 401k is an account, funded by a mix of employer and employee contributions, that's beyond reach of bankruptcy. That part is the same.

The only bit that's different is the self-management of assets, of which many companies are happy to do, increasingly for lower and lower fees. 0.2-0.3% being common which I bet goes toe-to-toe with good pension managers.

They really aren't that different.

Post reply on HN