Open Thread

Re Quinoa and other food/grain commodities, all foods are rising due to world market conditions — this includes really odd ball climate conditions (now we have a very aggressive La Nina world weather pattern responsible for dryness/fires last year in Russia, floods in Australia, our brutally hot summer and super cold winter, dryness in South America…) So supply has been affected. Demand for all grains are going up due to increased demand from emerging economies (eating more meat which involves more cattle consumption of grains), lower dollar (US and EU have differing approaches to quantitative easing and inflation) since most international trading is done in dollars. The flip side of this is that raw commodity producers are getting more income and investment and growth, i.e. poverty going down in Brazil for example and to the extent that producers participate in markets they benefit from higher commodity prices. Look at currencies in Canada (oil), Australia (sugar, metals, gold, cotton, wheat, etc., Brazil….

Lol, Dave, did you just try to make bank off quinoa?

It’s waaay more nutritious than potatoes.

quinoa doesn’t seem to be something that’s traded on commodities markets globally. It’s a substitute for potatoes. Suspect the price has risen in line with grains but no reason for it to be any more expensive than anything else.

Mostly just in Peru & Bolivia

Lech, lupus is a collection of autoimmune diseases, every person’s manifestation of the illness is slightly different. 90% of lupus sufferers (and auto-immune sufferers in general) are women and that is because they have the most delicate immune systems. (Women need to be able to accomodate alien DNA within them, i.e. pregnancy and so the immune system is more calibrated and complex than men’s). And often pregancy is difficult for them.
And the real killer is that sometimes it takes a long time to properly diagnose the illness. In my sister’s case, I used to quietly think that my sister was becoming quite the hypocondriac — she was always getting something. And when she really WENT FOR IT and found one of the top gastroenterologists (sp?) to check her for a recurrent condition, he said recognized that she needed additional testing and she was then diagnosed properly.