How will tariffs affect your dinner?
Constructed languages, memory loss, and risk (Issue #314)
This month, President Trump imposed 10% tariffs on all foreign-made goods, and has been escalating a trade war with China, threatening tariffs up to 150 percent. As these tariffs take hold, it’s impossible not to wonder how higher prices will affect every part of our daily lives. I’ve already begun panic-ordering loose leaf tea, one of my greatest daily pleasures, and am considering a new practice of hoarding olive oil. Critic Soleil Ho recently predicted that tariffs will make restaurants more boring: as international ingredients become more expensive, and operating costs skyrocket, smaller-scale restaurants cooking international food will feel the most pressure, and meat and potatoes will likely proliferate.
For many of us, higher restaurant prices will increase the number of meals we prepare at home. Or, as Dim Nikov writes on Tastyble: “When Tariffs Eat Away at Your Wallet, Cook Like Grandma.” Grandma cooking, for Nikov, means leaning on cheap staples like legumes, bread, and frozen vegetables, while getting scrappy in other aspects of cooking: making stock from what you have, learning to pickle and preserve. If the pandemic turned us all into home cooks, this potential recession may turn us into thrifty cooks. As a dinner party evangelist, I’ve already started hosting friends for cheap dinners, like beans over fried toast. For those of us cutting down our restaurant spending, it’s a pleasure to share a meal together, even if it’s not “fancy.”
While international foods will certainly become more expensive, these tariffs are likely to affect all groceries (even foods “made in the U.S.” often use internationally-sourced ingredients and/or materials). According to Yale University’s Budget Lab, grocery prices are likely to rise across the board by 2.8%, with higher increases for fresh produce. Smaller distributors and grocers are more likely to be affected quickly, according to CNN; larger producers and retailers, like Kraft or Walmart, will have an easier time absorbing the shocks. Smaller and specialty producers, who often focus more on ingredient quality — like Diaspora Co. spices and Fly By Jing Chili Crisp, whose founders have been posting updates throughout the last few weeks — have already taken the biggest hits.
So: Are you panic-ordering a new blender? Hoarding fancy beans? Joining your local CSA? Or cutting costs elsewhere so that you can keep your weekly sushi date?
We’re also reading
- Linguist Tom Scullin asks an important (though maybe slightly pedantic?) question: what makes something a “language” — and are “conlangs” (constructed languages, like Dothraki) real languages? A real language, Scullin argues, must be lived. So sure, if you live in a community of people walking around speaking to each other in Dothraki, it’s a language.
- Stephanie Dionne spent the summer of 1998 in a psych ward where she met Jonathan Cott — author, journalist, music critic, and one of the OG writers at Rolling Stone — whose memory was eventually erased by the treatments he received there. (Cott wrote a book about this.) She wrote a three-part series on Medium about the experience. Reflecting on it, she writes: “To remember — even the worst of things — is still a gift.”
- Randall H. Duckett, who suffers from chronic pain, with an analogy for listening to your body (instead of trying to suppress it): ignoring pain and its consequences is like “trying to hold a beach ball under the ocean.” You’ll be much happier if you allow the ball to rise to the surface and float.
🎲 A dose of practical wisdom
“I had to take risks to become ‘lucky.’” — Daniel Rizea, One Key Lesson I Learned After Becoming a Google Exec
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Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis
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