(4) James Tarmy, The Shoelace Crisis. As diets change and drought drags on, cattle--and their hides--are getting more expensive. That’s got Auburn Leather in a bind. (one of the four feature stories).
www.bloomberg.com/news/features/ ... ng-american-leather
Quote:
(a) “There used to be more leather lacemakers in America, until the exodus of manufacturing to China in the 1990s. Howlett alone survived the purge [so, the 152-year-old Auburn Leather makes leather shoelaces in Kentucky, ships them via air to China where leather shoes are produced, and the final products are shipped back to US]
(b) “Leather has always been a byproduct of the meat industry, and as Americans’ beef consumption grew over the 20th century, the leather industry grew with it. The past three decades, though, have seen a decline of about 28 percent in Americans’ appetite for beef, and the supply of hides has dwindled accordingly. At the same time, drought in the Midwest has pushed up feed prices. The result is that America has fewer and more expensive cows. Meanwhile, the world’s consumers still want leather goods.
(c) “A typical steer weighs from 1,300 to 1,400 pounds. Its carcass yields about 850 pounds of meat, which sells wholesale for an average of $2,300, according to the US Department of Agriculture. The hide sells for about $100, making it a mere 4.3 percent of the value of the animal. * * * Leather in all its forms [as raw material]—the aspirational $10,000 Hermès bag, the $6,000 upgrade package in a Mercedes, the $120 New Balance sneaker—is the wrapper [not worth much; cheap] around what will become someone else’s Big Mac.
“For thousands of years, this byproduct was vegetable-tanned: The skins would soak in natural tannins for several weeks until they pickled to the texture of what we think of as leather. There’s an equally long history of people using tanned leather for apparel, but until the Industrial Revolution, the material was used sparingly. As a rule, the only people clothed in hide were people surrounded by cattle. American Indians had a surfeit of bison and wore leather apparel for centuries. In Western society, leather didn’t go mainstream until after World War I, and it was only in the 1950s that ‘leather became much more available,’ says Michelle Finamore, a curator of fashion arts at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
“This was the result of America’s embrace of factory farming. By the mid-1970s, there were 140 million head of cattle in the US—more than one cow for every woman in the country. Cattle totals began to decrease in the 1980s, as ranchers got better at making their cows fatter faster, and Americans started reevaluating red meat. In 1985 there were almost 110 million head of cattle, according to the USDA, and the average American ate 79 pounds of beef a year. By 2009 the cattle population had dropped 32 percent, and Americans consumed just 61 pounds of beef each.
Note:
(a) Lisa "Howlett’s company, Auburn Leather, in Auburn, Ky"
Auburn, Kentucky
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auburn,_Kentucky
(The city's "name was changed in the 1860s to honor [City of] Auburn, New York")
(b) cattle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle
(section 3 Terminology: A castrated male is called a steer in the United States; older steers are often called bullocks in other parts of the world, but in North America this term refers to a young bull) |
发表于 5-31-2015 17:52:51
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