Philobiblon

So much around today on how the relationship between humans and animals is horribly awry, a weird mixture of brutality and sentimentality. The Guardian reports on the £2 chicken – cheaper, by weight, than bread, and considerably less healthy – both for the birds, with their terribly short, caged life in an area the size of an A4 sheet, and its consumers, with the huge amount of fat its carcass contains.

Meanwhile in Australia there is what sounds like a hopeless plan to relocate kangaroos overrunning a military base, while not far away farmers, or shooters employed by farmers, will be slaughtering such animals for human and animal food (not necessarily a bad thing – if Australian farmers were to switch to free-range roo husbandry rather than destructive sheep and cattle grazing it would do a great deal to help the much-battered environment).

The money being spent on the military base animals might be spent on a considerably more useful animal welfare cause. Maybe even trying – even if it is probably hopeless – to save the tigers of India.

But Fortnum & Mason is stopping selling foie gras, so that is something, even if not perhaps a something deserving a whole news story of its own.

All of this – of course – in the shadow of another foot and mouth outbreak in England – certain to have originated in imported meat through one route or another.

You get 100 dead in a Congo train crash, and 10 or so dead in a US bridge collapse.

No, I’m not making a point about the disparity of coverage – I’m sure you’ve all noticed that already, and there was video of the bridge (won’t be long I bet before there is of such incidents in Africa, and it will be interesting to see what that does to news values).

What interests me is what almost certainly lies behind the two incidents, whatever individual faults and mistakes directly caused them: crumbling infrastructure.

Surely even most American conservatives think that building and overseeing the maintenance of roads is government business, yet they are reluctant to put money into it. Apparently the governor here vetoed a big transport bill in 2005.

And you know that if you buy a whole heap of socks at the same time, they all tend to wear out at the same time. What happens if this also occurs with bridges, at a time when the US economy is shakey at best?

More and more, everywhere I look, I’m seeing stories about rising prices for basic foodstuffs – today it is milk in Germany. It sounds like it has been kept unnaturally low, but still it is interesting the reason being given – Chinese demand.

Bring together droughts in Australia, eastern Europe and America, floods in north west Europe, meaning falls in supply;an explosion of biofuels; and that Chinese demand, you’ve got a potential recipe for very serious food price inflation – or as it is being called agflation.