While the food and ag industries can use their lobbying power to dominate national ag policy, they can by no means shut down the work going on all around the country to create vital alternatives. Two news items have crossed my desk this week that remind me not to despair about recent shenanigans in Washington.
• The first one involves beer—specifically, a bubbling up of craft brewing in St. Louis, the US headquarters of global beer behemoth Anheuser-Busch InBev. According to a recent New York Times article, the number of craft breweries in the city have jumped to 11 from three in 2008, the year the Belgian conglomerate InBev bought then US-based Anheuser-Busch, maker of the iconic (and dreadful) Budweiser brand. In the suburbs surrounding St. Louis, The Times reports, there are now another dozen brewhouses.
This might sound like a frivolous thing to get excited about, but hear me out. Two massive global companies, Anheuser-Busch InBev and its rival SAB Miller, produce nearly 80 percent of the beer consumed in the US. In their business model, beer is a flavorless industrial commodity, to be churned out in a few vast factories and bottled into a dizzying array of contrived brands.
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