Latest Developments in US Customs
I attended this dinner meeting of the Supply Chain & Logistics organization -- the speaker was Eric Couture, the Assistant Attaché of the US Customs and Border Protection Agency assigned to Canada. He was a pretty funny guy, and a Canadian, who became an American, after serving two tours of duty in Vietnam. His presentations were more of an interest to exporters than importers, but you can infer a lot from an importer perspective. He mentioned many, many times, the fact that the US Customs Officers carry guns, have a Navy, an Air Force, and what not -- his message -- all US agencies now have security as their first priority. Check out his presentations in Powerpoint format, on C-TPAT, ACI and BTA.
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
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