Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
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Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#2Someone is facing a ham shortage?
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#3It is already very expensive outside Spain.
A similar, more affordable ham is Jamón Serrano.
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#4The salient part was that it takes five acres per swine. They only have two hinds each... And they can only raise them in two areas of Spain. Seems production is pretty constrained by resources (in this case land with oak trees). That combined with 48-mo curing makes it hard to scale up.
And we used to complain about almond production consuming too many resources (water) per output...
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#5Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that American movies have had to be more generic in their themes and dialog to be easier to translate/localize for the Chinese. Ghostbusters and Deadpool were not eligible for China's market because of their supernatural and otherwise offensive content, so it's not hard to believe that moviemakers will have to work harder to justify such content [2].
As an American, seeing these examples is still kind of amusing to me in a karmic way. I assume whatever annoyance or alienation I feel is just a small bit of how the rest of the world has felt the past 50 years, having to regularly adapt to and adopt strange influences and demands because they were popular in America (Sorry about "Jersey Shore", high fructose corn syrup, the backlash against MSG, and the cocaine trade).
[0] https://phys.org/news/2017-05-china-blame-global-avocado-sho...
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/09/news/economy/butter-shortage...
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/did-you-catch-t...
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#6The salient part was that it takes five acres per swine. They only have two hinds each... And they can only raise them in two areas of Spain. Seems production is pretty constrained by resources (in this case land with oak trees). That combined with 48-mo curing makes it hard to scale up. And we used to complain about almond production consuming too many resources (water) per output...
Isn't lower density animal production a good thing?
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#7Someone is facing a ham shortage?
A shortage of one very specific, high end, type of ham, yes. Similar to "wagyu beef"...brand/status/scarcity.
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#8The salient part was that it takes five acres per swine. They only have two hinds each... And they can only raise them in two areas of Spain. Seems production is pretty constrained by resources (in this case land with oak trees). That combined with 48-mo curing makes it hard to scale up. And we used to complain about almond production consuming too many resources (water) per output...
Isn't lower density animal production a good thing?
Well, moderation, as they say. In this case vast amounts of land are used to produce little product. Not sure how efficient it is. It suffers from "scalability" which kinda results in scarcity and then perception.
I understand wanting free range --but this is an artificial diet constrained to grasses and acorns --swine usually are omnivorous and would eat more, but this ham requires only those two --so they must dedicate lots of land to each hog.
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#9Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that A…
Only 20 foreign movies are allowed into China per year. Unless part of the movie takes place in China.
Lots of movies have a special cut, just for that reason.
Re: Spaniards face ham shortage as Chinese market gets taste for jamón ibérico
#10Besides this ham, evidently Chinese demand has been blamed for the global shortage of avocados [0] and the lack of butter in France [1]. I've personally most noticed the effect when it comes to wide-release movies, in which the heroes manage to find some reason to end up for a brief scene in China, or to use Chinese brand products -- Civil War, Transformers, and Robocop come to mind. There's also the suspicion that A…
They also are responsible for a shortage of baby milk powder and baby food from Germany, the Chinese buying all markets empty. At least that was in the news a few years ago