Planet Money - Two food and drink indicators

Episode Date: December 6, 2023

Today on the show, we have two episodes from our daily podcast, The Indicator, about things we spend a lot of time thinking about this time of year: food and drink. First up, we explore how changes in economic conditions led to one of the U.K.'s iconic (and affordable) staple foods becoming a luxury.Then, the story of one Indigenous woman whose small business went head-to-head with Coca-Cola over a trademark dispute.Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org This is Planet Money from NPR. This time of year, a lot of us spend a lot of time thinking about food, making food, eating food, especially the kind of food that makes you feel good. You know, the holiday dishes that you love, the ones that are fatty, salty, starchy, filling, you know, comfort foods.

Yeah, comfort foods are often dishes with humble origins. They're usually made of inexpensive staple ingredients, and they're easy to make or cheap to buy. In the UK, maybe the most iconic comfort food is also something a lot of people consider Britain's national dish, fish and chips. That is, for the uninitiated, battered and deep white fish with fries. It does make me wonder why they don't call it fish and fries, because it is kind of catchy also. It's not that catchy. Plus, fries are French, and you know, we don't hold with the French in Britain. Okay, okay, fair enough. But the important question here is, Paddy, how do you actually like to eat your fish and chips? Well, I'm actually pretty traditional. I like cod with a sprinkling of salt and vinegar on the chips, although sometimes I do go a little wild with a squirt of Thousand Island dressing. You know what? I don't like to yuck anybody's yum. Well, how about you?

I can get down with a little tartar sauce action. Yep. Tartar sauce. Traditional. Yep. Yeah. Well, fish and chips is kind of a staple in the UK, or it has been in the past. But the aftermath of the pandemic and raging inflation is really changing that. Fish is now expensive. Thanks to rising energy prices and interest rates, the cost of running a fish and chip shop is soaring. And those costs, of course,

are being passed on to customers. The result? Fewer people are buying fish and chips, and fish and chip shops all over the UK are closing. And this means that one of Britain's favourite foods is fast turning from a staple into a luxury. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. And I'm Paddy Hirsch. Today on the show, we've got two episodes from the show that I co-host, The Indicator, both about food and drinks. I mean, tis the season, right?

So first up, we have got the economic pressures on Britain's fish and chips shops. And after that, the story of an indigenous drink maker in Colombia who decided to take on one of the biggest beverage makers in the world. Mike Peska of The Gist calls the new podcast Landslide compelling and eye-opening. A must-listen, says podcast the newsletter about Landslide. The New Yorker writes, terrific. The state of the union is not good. Landslide, the story of how a party and the nation shifted to the right. Part of the NPR network. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. By any measure, fish and chips are an integral part of the British culinary landscape.

22% of Brits visit a fish and chip shop every week, and Brits spend roughly $1.5 billion on fish and chips every year. That's a lot of potatoes. And there are more than 10,000 fish and chip shops in the UK. The vast majority are independently owned, and most are these takeout joints where you just kind of take your meal out wrapped up in paper. Yeah, the British call these places fish bars. And they often have these cute names like the Friar Tuck or the Oh My Cod. Or in the case of the one around

the corner from my mum's house in Bournemouth, Chips Ahoy. Perry Godfrey is the owner. The shop's been a fish and chip shop for nearly 70 years now. When I took it over, it was very run down. And we've built it up in the last 22 years. And thankfully, we're very successful. And we keep going from day to day and keep improving, hopefully. Hopefully. Perry says the fish and chip business is coming under some intense pressure right now. Economy at the moment, the prices are ranked up. Oil, just to open up per day, it cost me £50 just in oil. Fish, fish has doubled over the last five, six years.

Energy, of course, we know all about energy. Packaging is another cost. Fish and chip shops are these small businesses that operate on razor sharp margins in an intensely competitive environment. But over the last few years, the cost of every part of the fish and chip shops owner's business has soared. Yeah, and there are a lot of factors to point a finger at here. There's the war in Ukraine, which drove up the cost of vegetable oil and also the fuel to heat that oil. And the UK government has also raised interest rates, which has translated into higher rents and more expensive loans. Yeah, whatever the reason, over the last couple of years, all of that pressure has sunk dozens of fish bars all over the UK.

Perry says he's been able to weather the storm for a variety of reasons. His is a family business, and he's been able to pivot to making a lot of his own products, like coleslaw, that he used to buy. By far the biggest, though, is that he doesn't have to pay rent. I'm a lot luckier than most shops. I'm lucky to have the freehold of the building, which means I haven't got to pay a leasehold. Most shops do pay lease and you have to pay rent. And unfortunately, that price has got to go on to the menu board. Yeah. In some shops, the price on the menu board has risen to eye-popping levels,

though not at Chips Ahoy just yet. Perry has managed to keep the cost of a medium cod and chips to just under eight pounds, which is around 10 bucks. But I've seen fish and chip shops charging a lot more than that. In at least one case, double that amount, more than $20 a head. And that's for a meal that's traditionally been a staple of the British diet, eaten by people on low incomes. If you go back 25, 30 years, you know, fish and chips were very, very cheap. Yeah, this is Duncan Weldon. He's the Britain economics writer at The Economist newspaper. And no judgment, he likes curry sauce on his chips.

That sounds all right to me. If you compare the cost of fish and chips to something like the cheapest meals at a branch of McDonald's, they were very, very comparable in price 20 years ago. Whereas now, you're saying you're spending two and a half, three times as much on buying your lunch at a fish and chip shop compared to a McDonald's. That takes it from being a staple to being essentially a luxury item. I have a friend who has a saying, it's as cheap as chips. I mean, but that's not the case anymore. Yeah, you know, cheap as chips, a bit of a misnomer nowadays.

Fish and chips used to be so essential to the British diet that during the First World War, the government made safeguarding supplies of fish and chips a priority. And during the Second World War, it was one of the few foods not restricted by rationing. These days, though, the government is not so inclined to provide that same degree of support. Fish and chip shops are besieged by competition. Their supply lines are not being guaranteed or subsidised. Brexit hasn't helped. The two types of fish that the Brits prefer dipped in batter and fried are cod and haddock, most of which are fished outside of British waters these days and have to be imported.

We catch a lot of mackerel in British waters, but the British people have never particularly liked mackerel. And, you know, importing and exporting fish has become a lot harder after Brexit because of all of the sort of checks on fresh produce. And as the cost of cod and haddock has risen and been passed on to the consumer, those British consumers have actually sought out cheaper alternatives to fish and chips. The big thing you see on high streets now, which have really grown over the last couple of decades, is sort of cheap fried chicken or, you know, something not copyrighted. It's partially to do with the fact it's much quicker to cook. It's partially to do with the fact that chicken is just a very cheap, easy to source item. Whereas, you know, fish is becoming more expensive. More expensive to the point that it's now bordering on a luxury.

And this story of a staple becoming a luxury is not a new one. It happened to oysters in New York in the 1800s, And this story of a staple becoming a luxury is not a new one. It happened to oysters in New York in the 1800s, to sushi in Japan, to caviar, brisket, lobster. You just named it like all the delicious foods. What's going on here? I'm just trying to make the point here that economics often drives long-term changes in diet and taste. And that right now the UK is going through a big change with this staple, fish and chips. Duncan Weldon sees it too. My takeaway is that, you know, we are past the world in which you would expect every British town and every village of any sort of size to have a fish and chip shop. We're going to see far fewer than we used to. You know, they're going the way of

banks, post offices and pubs, which used to think of just the absolute staples of the high street, which are now becoming increasingly rare. It's a big change in the fabric of small-town village British life. Now, before people go out and start panic-buying fried fish and chips, this does not mean that the fish and chip shops are going to disappear like overnight altogether. No, no, the dish is still hugely popular in the UK and the restaurants are kind of part of the fabric of the community in a way that fast food chain joints are absolutely not. In Bournemouth, Perry Godfrey says the customers who visit his fish and chip shop certainly see things that way. They want to come in, they like a bit of a chat and that's the atmosphere we provide.

You know, you take some notice, interest in their lives. So it's not just a food product. It's all, you feel like a social worker sometimes because there are people with problems out there. That's probably why I joined my job. He's not exaggerating. You know, I sat outside Chip's Ahoy for about 15 minutes on a Friday evening

and watched more than 40 customers brave the pouring rain to get their fish and chip fix and to chat to Perry as he handled their orders. You know, they were all crammed into the place, laughing and swapping stories. It was like they were out for a night at the pub. And Perry, he looked as though he knew every one of them by name. Coming up after the break, my Indicator co-hosts Darian Woods and Waylon Wong tell us about a woman who received a cease and desist letter from one of the biggest beverage companies in the world. And then she decided to fight back. When Fabiola Pinaque read the letter back in 2021, she was livid.

I wanted to kill them, but of course you can't. They're very far away, they're very big, and there's nowhere to find them. The letter that got Fabiola so riled up was from the Coca-Cola company. It was a cease and desist letter. It said that her company had infringed Coca-Cola's trademark and they had 10 days to pull their drinks from the market or risk legal action. The product in question was a beer infused with the coca leaf. In Colombia, where Fabiola lives, pola is a common word for beer.

So her coca beer was called, naturally enough, Coca-Pola. This is a common story. A corporate giant like Coca-Cola gets into a trademark dispute with a smaller company that's been using a particular word. Or it even appropriates a name that's been used by another culture for a very long time. What's fascinating about this story is how Fabiola fought back. I was very angry because they had been in the market for 100 years. I'm sorry. This has been in my life forever,

and I'm a descendant of a thousand-year tradition of people using the coca leaf. Fabiola is a member of the Nasa people, who are indigenous to the southwest of Colombia. And as a kid, Fabiola remembers her grandparents chewing on the coca leaf. Fabiola remembers her grandparents chewing on the coca leaf. For me, the coca leaf has been one of the fundamental elements of the NASA people's culture. For more than 8,000 years, the coca leaf has helped Andean people with altitude sickness, suppressed hunger, provided calcium, and given moderate energy boosts.

Of course, coca can also be processed to make cocaine. So the coca leaf has an ambiguous status in Colombia. On the one hand, chewing raw coca is legal in indigenous Colombian territories. On the other hand, the Colombian government has waged battles against coca. Up until several years ago, it welcomed U.S. support in spraying enormous amounts of pesticides from plains in order to destroy illicit coca plantations. This harmed both locals and wildlife, and it was part of the global war on drugs. But it's worth knowing that the raw coca leaf, as used traditionally, is really mild, like a kombucha compared to a bottle of rum. Yet even so, global government efforts to eradicate cocaine brought stigma to the coca leaf over the last half century or so. I watched my grandparents stop chewing coca leaves

and they hid it, only using it for rituals. And Fabiola was seeing more than just the use of the coca leaf disappearing. To her, it was symbolic of the threats to her entire culture. And so after going to university, Fabiola decided to start a business that would make coca products. She called it Cocanassa. The idea would be that people would be able to buy her products, like coca tea, and realize it's a fairly mild stimulant. It's not like pure cocaine at all. It's about as psychoactive as a cup of Earl Grey tea. But selling coca products outside of the indigenous territories put her in a bit of a legal grey area, with the Colombian government flip-flopping between tolerating and

stamping out her products there. Fabiola was even once detained for a few hours for carrying toasted coca leaves in a bus terminal. She was released without charges. Despite these obstacles, she grew the company to about 20 employees, and it became well-known in Colombia. And then in late 2021, Fabiola receives that cease and desist letter on behalf of a company with 80,000 employees, Coca-Cola, a company long associated with the United States and all its global powers. And you can see, at least on the surface, why Coke might be writing this complaint. Coca-Cola, Coca-Pola, pretty similar names.

Jennifer Jenkins is a professor at Duke University who teaches trademark law. Trademarks confer limited exclusive rights over words, over symbols, over devices to brands so that I can see Coca-Cola on a bottle and know that I'm getting the drink that I'm trying to buy from the same entity that produced that delicious carbonated beverage in the past. So that's good for me. And you're not getting paid by Coca-Cola to say that. Let's be clear. Exactly. Avoiding confusion in the marketplace is the number one purpose of trademarks. And it gives companies an incentive to produce a consistent level of quality because they know their work won't be undermined by a competitor pretending to be them.

And so here we have the valuable trademark rights of this company coming into conflict with another culture because, you know, words have significance and meaning in multiple cultures. Certainly the word coca will mean something different to indigenous communities in countries like Colombia, where the coca leaf is sacred, and the term coca is also sacred. So this case is a clash of values, clarity to the consumer versus the rights of indigenous people, like Fabiola, two words they've used for generations. Manuel Chavarriaga is a Colombian trademark attorney. He wasn't involved directly in this case, but he says that Colombia has a precedent here. In 2012, a similar case was before Colombia's Supreme Court, its constitutional court. The constitutional court says coca is just a generic term.

So coca can be used by anyone in the market, although in other countries or in other languages might be a very distinctive term. For us, it's not. Adding to this ruling, Manuel says there's a bunch more arguments that Fabiola could use in defense of Coca-Cola. Colombia's constitution ensures indigenous territories have the right to make their own laws.

In 2000, Colombia agreed, along with Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Peru, that new trademarks from indigenous cultures couldn't be filed without those communities' permission. This all bolstered Fabiola's case. But Manuel says when Fabiola got that cease and desist letter from Coca-Cola, it was by no means guaranteed what the outcome would be if it went to court. Coca-Cola, with tens of billions of dollars worth of annual sales, could afford some pretty good

lawyers, which is what makes Fabiola's next decision all the more jaw-dropping. What we did was that we wrote a letter on the same terms and gave them 10 days. They gave us 10 days. We turned it back around and wrote the same letter back to them and gave them 10 days to respond on who gave them permission. Who allowed Coca-Cola to use coca in their name? The letter threatened to ban Coca-Cola from indigenous territories if they persisted. And yeah, that would be a tiny share of Coca-Cola's global sales. But Coca-Cola does have half a billion consumers in Latin America who would learn about this. We reached out to Coca-Cola and its lawyers, but we didn't receive an answer.

In the end, Coca-Cola didn't answer Fabiola either. Both Coca-Cola and Coca-Cola are still on shop shelves in Colombia. It's kind of a stalemate, which the Colombian trademark lawyer Manuel Chavarriaga says might actually be the best solution for both Coke and Fabiola's company, Coca-Nasa. Coca-Nasa just quietly continues doing what they were doing. And the legal system in Colombia doesn't have to take a stand. Everyone's benefiting from the gray zone. Because in the end, there's one thing that can be even stronger than the law for multinational corporations, public relations.

It's just bad PR. It's just bad PR. You see the articles and all of them are talking about Coca-Cola attacking the indigenous population in Colombia. And then the indigenous used a very good PR response. You might think you are right and even the law could back you up, but you just don't risk your publicity that way. Your reputation could be harmed by this. As for Fabiola, she says she's concerned Coca-Cola could come after her again. She's trying to prepare herself if that happens.

But still, she is defiant. They persecuted us to get us to disappear from the market. But we have not disappeared. We have remained, and here we are. Aquí estamos. On the next episode of Planet Money, a story about the pager, a device that most people stopped using decades ago. But to this day, the pager is still the way

many doctors are contacted in an emergency. We push it out, and we hope people receive it. We have no way of knowing. So a classic thing is like, I never got the page, you know. Where were you? Never got the page. And you're like, what happened to the paging system, you know? Or was it, you know, was your pager on?

So why is it so hard for doctors to let go of their pagers? That's on the next Planet Money. These episodes were produced by Corey Bridges and Brittany Cronin with help from Robin Lavies. It was engineering from Sina Lafredo. Malia Agudelo translated. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Cake and Cannon. I'm Adrian Ma. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.