Dow raises prices 20%, WD-50 next?

Yesterday afternoon, Dow Chemical announced it's raising prices for all its products 20% on June 1st. So does this mean more expensive meals across the country from Alinea and Moto to Minibar to Tailor and WD-50 making molecular gastronomy that much more inaccessible?

From CNN:

Dow Chemical, the top U.S. chemical company, said Wednesday it will raise prices for all products as much as 20% on June 1, calling the plan essential to mitigate the effects of surging costs of energy and related raw materials. Dow has already raised its prices by about 12% over the past year on a local currency basis, although those increases were phased in instead of implemented all at once.

The pricing moves by major chemical companies underscore the particular challenges they face in an environment of rising energy costs. Chemical producers must deal with something of a double whammy from high energy costs, because they use hydrocarbons - meaning oil and natural gas - both for fuel and as key building blocks in products.

Unlike more conventional cooking, molecular gastronomy is not only afflicted by rising costs in fruit and vegetables, eggs and milk, flour and oil but the key ingredients that shape their use from sodium alginate to methylcellulose and while cost-cutting can occur in the selection of foods, the formula not so much.

As Wylie Dufresne said in a 2005 Esquire interview: "I might be the only chef in New York who has Dow Chemical as one of his purveyors." That number surely has increased in the last three years, now what can be done to keep it from dwindling back down?

Comments

[kate]

been re-reading greenblatt and gallagher and came across a chapter that made me think of you: "the potato in the materialist imagination." especially relevant lately because it's about the nexus at which food, culture, and scarcity interact. further proof that in a post-post-structuralist world nothing is not a text.

http://books.google.com/books?id=VX8VtLnNoFMC&pg=PA112&lpg=PA112&dq=the+potato+in+the+materialist+imagination+&source=web&ots=o7Vo8yVjoB&sig=Qnr5OJcHDkJpMY0eEwDvxQ2B6Kw&hl=en#PPA110,M1