Cargill

choi

(1) David Whitford with Doris Burke, Cargill: Inside the quiet giant that rules the food business. Fortune, Nov 7, 2011 (cover date).
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/24/ ... s.fortune/index.htm

Quote:

"If Cargill were public, it would have ranked No 18 on this year's Fortune 500, between AIG and IBM.

"Cargill headquarters [is] in Wayzata, Minn, just west of Minneapolis * * * William Wallace Cargill, the second son of a Scottish sea captain, started with a single warehouse in Conover, Iowa, in 1865. Conover is a ghost town now, but Cargill still deals heavily in grain.

"The company owns and operates nearly 1,000 river barges and charters 350 oceangoing vessels that call on some 6,000 ports globally, ranking it among the world's biggest bulk shippers of commodities. 'In one sense, you can think of Cargill as just a big transportation company,' says Wally Falcon, deputy director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University. 'Their game is: extremely efficient, high volumes, low margins, and just being smarter and quicker than anybody else.'  Sometimes the same ship that picks up a load of soybeans at Cargill's deepwater Amazon port in Santarem, Brazil, after unloading in Shanghai, will carry coal from Australia to Japan before rinsing out its holds and returning to Brazil for more beans. In fact, Cargill's ocean-transport business moves more coal and iron ore for third parties than it does foodstuffs, oils, and animal feeds for itself, by a factor of two. 'From places of surplus,' to quote the Cargill mantra, 'to places of need.'

"One business Cargill is not in, curiously, is farming. * * * 'Farming is not their business. Grain handling and grain trading -- trading the produce -- is their business.'




Note:
(a) The phrase "keep a weather eye on" used in both the first and last paragraphs of the article.

keep a weather eye on. Wikitionary, last modified on Jan 26, 2009.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:keep_a_weather_eye_open
("Perhaps this phrase is hard to understand unless you have used it in the nautical setting it is derived from")
(b) Archer Daniels Midland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archer_Daniels_Midland
("In 1902, George A. Archer and John W. Daniels began a linseed crushing business [at Minneapolis]. In 1923, Archer-Daniels Linseed Company acquired Midland Linseed Products Company"; public, traded in NYSE; Headquarters Decatur, Illinois)

(i) Decatur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decatur
(Decatur is the name of many places in the United States, most of which are named for Stephen Decatur, a US Naval officer at the turn of the 19th century)
(ii) Stephen Decatur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Decatur
(1779-1820; His numerous naval victories against Britain, France and the Barbary states established the United States as a world power comparable to Britain and France)
(iii) Probably first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and also known as linseed, the flax, whose binomial name is Linum usitatissimum, is used for fiber and seed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flax
(iv)
(A) linseed (n; Middle English, from Old English līnsǣd, from līn flax + sǣd seed — more at LINEN): FLAXSEED
(B) linen (n; Middle English, from Old English līnen, from līn flax, from Latin linum flax; akin to Greek linon flax, thread):
"cloth made of flax and noted for its strength, coolness, and luster"
www.m-w.com

Please take notice that syllables "lin" in linseed and linen are pronounced differently, despite the same root.

(c) Conover, Iowa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conover,_Iowa
(a ghost town; In 1865, Cargill (now the largest privately held company in America) was first started in Conover when William Wallace Cargill left his family home in Janesville (Wisconsin) and purchased a grain flat house in Conover, Iowa. The flat house, a type of warehouse that preceded country elevators, was at the end of the McGregor & Western Railroad line)
(d) The Scottish surname Cargill is derived from Cargill, Perthshire, Scotland.

Perthshire
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perthshire
(e) The article states, "And the company recently brought to market a new no-calorie sweetener, Truvia, made from the white-flowered stevia plant, that has quickly become the No. 2-selling sugar substitute in the US."

(i) Stevia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevia
(genus; native to subtropical and tropical regions of the Amerias; The species Stevia rebaudiana is widely grown for its sweet leaves; its steviol glycoside extracts having up to 300 times the sweetness of [table] sugar[, which is sucrose 蔗糖]; section 1 History and use)
(ii) The nation's best-selling sugar substitute is Splenda, followed by Tryvia, Sweet'n Low (active ingredient: Saccharin, which is 300 times sweeter than sucrose) and Equal (active ingredient: aspartame, 180 times sweeter than sucrose)--in that order.
(A) Splenda is trade mark of sucralose.
(B) sucralose
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose
(an artificial sweetener; The majority of ingested sucralose is not broken down by the body and therefore it is non-caloric; approximately 600 times as sweet as sucrose (table sugar); section 1 History)

(f) Theobroma cacao
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao
(also cocoa tree; recent studies of Theobroma cacao genetics seem to show that the plant originated in the Amazon; According to Maya mythology, the Plumed Serpent gave cacao to the Maya after humans were created from maize by divine grandmother goddess; the section Cultivation includes 20 nations but China, US or Vietnam is not one of them)

(i) Please recall that New World did not have sugar. So the cocoa beverage they had was bitter, But when the cocoa beans and methodology of preparation was brought to Europe, Europeans added sugar. Voila, a new product was born that Indians in Americas could not recognize.
(ii) Growing Cocoa. International Cocoa Organization (ICCO), undated.
http://www.icco.org/about/growing.aspx
(section 1 Origins Of Cocoa And Its Spread Around The World explains how Cocoa spread to Africa)

(g) UTZ Certified is a certification program for agricultural products launched in 2002 which claims to be the largest coffee certifier in the world. Its Code of Conduct falls into three categories: good agricultural & business practices, social criteria, and
workers are protected by national laws and ILO conventions regarding age, working hours, pensions, working conditions, and environmental criteria.

The Story of UTZ. UTZ Certified, undated.
http://www.utzcertified.org/en/aboututzcertified/the-story-of-utz
("a Belgian-Guatemalan coffee grower and a Dutch coffee roaster, initiated the idea of the UTZ program * * * They chose the name "Utz Kapeh", which means "good coffee" in the Mayan language Quiché. An office was opened in Guatemala City in 1999. In 2002 the head office was opened in The Netherlands.")


(2) Box to the article:

Cargill's family affair
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/25/ ... f.fortune/index.htm

Note:
(a) from beyond the grave: "after a person has died"
Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ... om-beyond-the-grave
(b) The given name Kari is Norwegian form of Katherine.