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GOURMET NEWS NOVEMBER 2015 www.gourmetnews.com NEWS & NOTES 8 Specialty food is drawing a new crowd this year. Men are stepping up purchases, less affluent shoppers are buying a wide variety of products like artisanal cheese and single- origin chocolate, and Millennials are show- ing their age at the store. These are some of the findings of new consumer research from the Specialty Food Association in conjunction with Mintel International. Specialty food con- sumers report spending one in three food dollars on specialty food, up from one in four in 2014. This comes as specialty food sales topped $100 billion for the first time in 2014 and continue to grow, according to the research. While food shopping used to be seen as a woman's work, for the first time since this research began in 2005, men have surpassed women slightly as most likely to purchase specialty food. The prized Millennial consumer is starting to get older, and those pushing 40 are spending more on meal ingredients than the snacks and treats favored by the younger set. Mil- lennials favor convenience: they shop in the broadest range of retail outlets and spend the most on takeout and ready-to- eat meals. More than half of specialty food consumers said they purchase specialty food online, and nearly a third said that they're looking for an online delivery service. Consumers with annual incomes of $75,000 are twice as likely as those earning less than $50,000 to be specialty food buy- ers, yet the less affluent are buying the same wide range of specialty foods. The core specialty food consumer is now be- tween the ages of 25 and 44 with a house- hold income greater than $75,000 and a home on the East or West Coast. Specialty food consumers spend $113 per week on food they prepare at home, up from $92 per week in 2014. Treats are trending. Consumers rank perennial specialty food favorites cheese and chocolate among their top five picks, plus ice cream and frozen desserts; coffee, and cookies, brownies, cakes and pies. Foods seen as healthy, such as tea, yogurt and kefir, and nuts, seeds, and dried fruit and vegetables, are rising in popularity. About one in three specialty food dollars are spent on products with an all-natural or organic claim. Forty three percent of those surveyed said they try specialty foods to eat foods that avoid artificial ingredients and preservatives. These findings are based on an online survey conducted in July 2015 of 1,683 adults aged 18+. The results are pub- lished in the fall issue of Specialty Food Magazine. GN Consumers Spending More on Specialty Food Joel Salatin Continued from PAGE 1 they're the likes of Colombia, Bulgaria and South Africa. On the other hand, Americans spend more on health care than do the citizens of the vast majority of other countries, according to the Global Health Observatory Data Reposi- tory. "We suggest, the weirdos, the heretics of our culture, dare to suggest that maybe we would be a healthier cul- ture if we spent more on food," Salatin said. "Think about how the experts told us to eat hydrogenated margarines instead of butter and lard. It should not be a sur- drop the price of that produce below that offered by local warehouse stores because the buying club doesn't have to pay for the brick and mortar infrastructure of a retail store. Another myth that will seem foolish in the future is that organically and naturally produced food can't actually feed the world's population. That's not a new myth, according to Salatin. In 1910, the world had run out of un- explored regions, and what happened was a worldwide fear that the planet was over- populated and would run out of food, he said. Experts thought that we were run- ning out of soil, and that meant that we were going to starve to death, he said. Out of this developed two parallel schools of thought about how to deal with the situ- ation. One school of thought said that all of life was a reconfiguration of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus. Then there was another school, the naturalist, who said that life was not fundamentally mechani- cal, it was fundamentally biological, ac- cording to Salatin. "Both sides moved forward with their approaches," he said. The process for describing aerobic com- posting was described in 1943 by Sir Al- bert Howard, but by then, the world was distracted by World War II. "What the world was wanting at that time was not compost; they needed explosives," Salatin said. Then, after World War II, the factories that had been using nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus to make explosives turned to making cheap chemical fertil- izer that farmers could use instead of composting animal manure. "Sir Albert Howard had another idea, but we were tired of shoveling," Salatin said. "It took a while for our side to develop all of the infrastructure necessary to come up to speed with the requirements of Sir Albert Howard's gift of compost." "Life is fundamentally biological not mechanical. The soil is not lifeless, inert material. The soil is the most amazing foundation of life – the foundation being invisible. When do we think about that in our lives? Nobody ever thinks about it," he said. "The orthodoxy out there is that Nature is a reluctant partner that we must subdue. What we have learned is that Nature is a benevolent lover that re- sponds to caresses and wants to bless us with abundance beyond anything we could imagine." GN prise to us that we would be a healthier culture if the government had never told us how to eat." As a nation, American farmers have de- cided to invest in drugs, capital expendi- tures and energy intensity rather than farm management strategies that require people on the ground, and that has re- sulted in declines in the number of farm- ers and in their economic and cultural status in our society as well as in increas- ing pollution. What Americans should be doing instead of reducing food costs through these strategies is to manage their food expenditures by buying high- quality fresh foods and cooking them at home rather than buying processed foods, according to Salatin. "You don't need to pay $3.99 a pound for potato chips," he said. "Just go home and slice it up and fry it, and then you've got real nutrition – especially if you fried in lard," he said. Another way to reduce food cost is to move food supplies more efficiently from farms to consumers, Salatin said. He pre- dicted that brick and mortar grocery stores are becoming obsolete, and elec- tronic aggregation and distribution like that practiced by Amazon will become the way of the future. Already, he's selling 40 percent of his farm produce through an electronic shopping cart maintained by a metropolitan buying club that's able to

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