Truffle Media Update Topics

"You rarely see lard on menus. There aren't shelves and shelves of it in every supermarket. In this country, we've sort of lost touch with the once beloved pig fat. On today's podcast, we ask — who killed lard?" This is a great post on how marketing can change people's behavior toward food and how it is produced.

Agriculture is entering a new era – Agriculture 3.0. This new era is not “right” where Agriculture 2.0 was “wrong” any more than the small family farms were “wrong” and the larger farms that replaced them were “right”. Change doesn’t take time for value judgments. But any old timer who lived through the transitions of farming from the 1940s to the 1970s can probably tell you that along the way there was lots of pain and resistance as the old accepted approaches to doing things was replaced by the “new paradigm”. The shift to Agriculture 3.0 will be driven by two big picture changes that are just taking hold:

Milk consumption has been on a steady decline. Today, the average person in the United States drinks 9 fewer gallons of milk on an annual basis than he or she did in the early 1970s. Despite the trend, producers, restaurants and marketers have found a way to make milk more appealing, and that is through flavored milk — traditional chocolate and some not-so-traditional flavors like coffee, orange and root beer.

Great refresh on how social media should work - Be social and helpful!

At a time when consumers are increasingly interested in local food movements, where their food comes from and what's in it, McDonald's is highlighting some of its growers. On Jan. 2, the world's largest restaurant chain by sales will launch a campaign featuring four of its U.S. beef and produce suppliers. "We thought putting a face on the quality of the food story would be a unique way to approach this," said U.S. Chief Marketing Officer Neil Golden. "We acknowledge that there are questions about where our food comes from. I believe we've got an opportunity to accentuate that part of our story."

Over the past two years, the Department of Agriculture's monthly forecasts of how much farmers will harvest have been off the mark to a greater degree than any other two consecutive years in the last 15, according to a Journal analysis of government data. This year's early-season forecasts also appear to have been way off.

Warren Seely shares how and why he builds working model tractors with Legos.

Over the weekend the Farm Bill Hackathon brought together (in person and virtually) 120 designers, data scientists, developers, marketing professionals, food policy experts, and USDA employees, to “hack” one of the most important pieces of legislation in the U.S. – the Farm Bill. Over the course of 12 hours, 5 graphics and 4 tools were produced, addressing issues as diverse as support to new farmers, the effect of subsidies on global hunger and how to crowdsource Meatless Mondays.