Conspiracy of cheapness

I feel like I’ve joined a secret conspiracy, something that’ll probably help all the grain growers out there and hurt the livestock producers. It’s a conspiracy that, if it grows widely across the world, might save grain farms from even a depression, or at least a double dip recession.

It’s a conspiracy I’m joining against my own principles, but it’s one I’ll bet is spreading, and spreading not by coded messages, invisible ink and hidden wireless transmitters and receivers, but by that nudge-nudge, wink-wink type of unspoken conspiracy, which makes it particularly insidious. It’s a conspiracy of consumer cheapness.

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In defiance of my own belief in the effectiveness and healthfulness of low-carbohydrate diets, and of the chubbying tendencies of cereal grains and other sugars, I’ve not only reintroduced the Devil’s food – bread – into my diet in the past few months, but this past week have moved well beyond passive acceptance and gone to a full infernal embrace. My home is now the house of a bread making machine.

Already I’m producing my own whole grain bread and eating it two or three times a day, tiresomely extolling its virtues to my wife. This weekend we picked up big bags of whole wheat flour, barley flour, flax flour, soy flour. My pantry is now a cornucopia of ground cereal grains.

Why the switch? As I said, I have not given up the belief that I’ll gain weight by eating cereal grains. But I’ve become much cheaper with my consumer dollar recently, probably due to both the fact that I now have two little girls draining our family budget and the fact that economic times are looking bad and cutting some expenses seems to make sense. We’ve been trying to cut the monthly food bill, and our meat and expensive vegetable consumption is getting slashed. What takes its place? Well, after this long lead-up if you don’t guess that the answer is ‘bread,’ there’s no helping you. Bread, rice, pasta. Those cheap staples I had spurned.

Now, if I’m the only one in North America who’s making this big switch, then it means nothing. But if millions of little nobodies like me do the same thing, you’ve got a significant shift in marketplace demand. Remember what happened a few years ago when low-carb diets caught on? Meat prices rose for a couple of years, and crop prices went down. Relative meat demand in North America grew and relative grain demand fell. When the popularity of low-carb diets fell, meat demand relatively declined and grain demand relatively grew.

So what happens now if, instead of a diet driving a big swing in demand away from wheat, a drive to save money on the food bill pushes people towards grains and away from meat? Obviously meat production causes grain consumption by animals, so there’s a partial compensation for any such demand shift, but the grains prairie farmers produce tend to be high quality human foods, much more so than the grains – corn and soybeans – that American farmers favour and which are mainly fed to animals. Even in the worst economic circumstances governments and churches make sure people can eat grain – ever heard of the ‘bread line’? – so grains in general have about the strongest demand base of the commodities, and bread quality wheat (CWRS come on down!) is the strongest of those.

The prairies are unfortunate that they are too cold to grow many of the high-yielding crops that bring in so much money in the U.S. Midwest. But they are the perfect place to grow red spring wheat. King Wheat could become a pretty cool crop if the world’s economic problems continue and bread becomes a bigger part of the advanced world’s diet. There’s even an attempt being made to give a Canadian brand to flour, to make it seem like a premium product. I was surprised when I picked up the big bag of Robin Hood whole grain flour this weekend at Safeway and saw the CWB label/logo on the bag. Even though I’d actually covered a CWB branding event a few months ago – the unveiling of a line of CWB-branded pastas – it was jarring to actually end up with the stuff as a consumer. I’m as jaded as the next journalist, and can tend to treat ‘branding’ and other such packaging talk with a fair degree of skepticism, but I must admit I felt rather proud later that day as I poured scoops of the stuff into my new breakmaker that I was definitely using grain grown by prairie farmers.

So tonight, as I’m eating half as much steak as I’d like to eat, I’ll be compensating my stomach with prairie-based bread. And if enough other cheapo consumers do the same thing, demand for prairie grains will stay strong, regardless of the economy.