Authors: Jayson Lusk
The Food Police (24 page)
I have the privilege of working in an outstanding academic community of agricultural economists, and I am thankful to Jon Biermacher, Keith Coble, Eric DeVuyst, Andreas Drichoutis, Fabrice Etilé, Darren Hudson, John Lee, Stéphan Marette, Lanier Nalley, Rudy Nayga, and Steve Sexton, among others who I have probably forgotten to mention, who read various chapters and provided valuable feedback and criticism. I am also grateful for the feedback I received from people who attended the seminars I presented on behavioral economics at the University of Wisconsin; Texas A&M University; a preconference workshop on behavioral and experimental economics, food, and health at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association; and at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research. There has probably
been no bigger influence on my thinking about food, politics, and economics than Bailey Norwood. For all his offbeat questions, philosophizing, and good-natured arguments, I will be forever grateful. Without his constant encouragement, I surely would have given up on this project.
Thanks to Stéphan Marette and the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) for being gracious sabbatical hosts and to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for additional financial support. Oklahoma State University (OSU) kindly gave me the time away, and for that, I am grateful. The views expressed in this book are entirely mine and are not those of INRA, OECD, or OSU.
I will probably never know what possessed my agent, Mel Berger, to take on the project of someone virtually unknown outside the circle of a couple thousand academic economists. But I am grateful to him for taking the risk and providing feedback on early drafts of this work. Finally, thanks to Sean Desmond at Crown Forum for his excellent editorial advice and to Paul Lamb and the marketing team for their support.
Author’s note:
All URLs provided herein were last accessed on April 5, 2012.
HAPTER
1: A S
KEPTICAL
F
OODIE
1.
The FDA required mandatory labeling of trans fats in 2003, and cities such as New York and Philadelphia subsequently banned the use of trans fats in restaurants. Earlier, in 2002, Kraft reformulated Oreos in response to a lawsuit filed by a San Francisco lawyer.
2.
In a testimony to the unintended consequences, it appears that McDonald’s found a way around the ban by selling the toys rather than giving them away. Now, in San Francisco, the only way to get a Happy Meal is to buy a toy. The quote is from S. Bernstein, “San Francisco Bans Happy Meals,”
Los Angeles Times
, November 2, 2010.
3.
michellemalkin.com/2010/11/03/san-francisco-bans-happy-meals/
.
4.
Barry Popkin,
The World Is Fat
(New York: Avery/Penguin USA, 2008), pp. 162–63. The 100 percent figure comes from Popkin’s statement, “If a one-dollar can of Pepsi or Coke costs two dollars instead, we would find—as we have for cigarettes—a significant reduction in soft drink consumption.”
5.
From Bill Moyers’s TV show on November 28, 2008,
www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11282008/transcript1.html
.
6.
www.agweb.com/article/house_approves_legislation_that_puts_gipsa_on_hold/
.
7.
Mark Bittman, “Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables,”
New York Times
, July 23, 2011. A printed version appeared on July 24, 2011, on page SR1 of the New York edition with the headline “Bad Food? Tax It.”
8.
For a fuller discussion on this issue, see my coauthored book
Compassion by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
9.
Kim Severson,
Spoon Fed
(New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin USA, 2010), pp. 67–68.
10.
M. Muskal, “Obama Signs Child Nutrition Bill, Championed by the First Lady,”
Los Angeles Times
, December 13, 2010.
11.
www.cnsnews.com/news/article/nyc-mayor-bloomberg-government-s-highest-duty-push-healthy-foods
.
12.
Health Affairs
29, no. 3 (2010): 342.
13.
Powell et al.,
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
110 (2010): 847.
14.
K. Dun Gifford quoted in Craig Lambert, “The Way We Eat Now,”
Harvard Magazine
, May/June 2004, p. 99.
15.
For example, see Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin, 2006).
16.
Jonah Goldberg,
Liberal Fascism
(New York: Doubleday, 2007).
17.
Ludwig von Mises,
Human Action
(Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2008; originally published in 1954), p. 10.
18.
D. Cutler, E. Glaeser, and J. Shapiro, “Why Have Americans Become More Obese,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
17 (2003): 93–118.
19.
www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/Table_97/2008table97.htm
.
20.
www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/CPIFoodAndExpenditures/Data/Expenditures_tables/table8.htm
.
21.
Ibid.
22.
Statistics on number of restaurants and female labor force participation are in: I. Rashad, M. Grossman, and S. Chou, “An Economic Estimation of Body Mass Index and Obesity in Adults,”
Eastern Economic Journal
32 (2006): 133–48.
23.
The statistic is the percentage change in the average per capita consumption over the years 1970 to 1979 to the average per capita consumption over the years 2000 to 2009. See
www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption/FoodAvailspreadsheets.htm#vegtot
.
24.
The statistic is the percentage change in the average per capita
consumption over the years 1970 to 1979 to the average per capita consumption over the years 2000–2009.
http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/foodconsumption/FoodAvailspreadsheets.htm#frtot
.
25.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Preliminary FoodNet Data on the Incidence of Infection with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food—10 states, 2009,”
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
59 (2010): 418–22. The 25 percent figure comes from calculating the total incidences for all bacteria reported for 2009 in Table 1 and using the data reported below Figure 1 to calculate total 1996–98 incidence rates, and then computing the percentage change in total incidence from 1996–98 to 2009.
26.
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus10.pdf#022
;
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf
;
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_04.pdf
.
27.
The last twenty years refers to the period 1990–2010,
usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/htrcp/htrcp-04-26-2011.pdf
; more evidence of growth in agricultural productivity can be found at
www.ers.usda.gov/Data/AgProductivity/
.
28.
Half as much active ingredient per acre planted; at least up to 1995, which was the last year given in the report,
www.ers.usda.gov/publications/arei/ah712/AH7123-2.pdf
.
29.
The corn statistic is derived from figure 8 and the quote is from page 1 in J. Fernandez-Cornejo et al., “Assessing Recent Trends in Pesticide Use in U.S. Agriculture,” selected paper presented at the 2009 Meetings of the AAEA, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 2009.
30.
Statistics are computed from USDA data available at
www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FarmIncome/Data/Constant-dollar-table.xls
.
31.
www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/wellbeing/farmhouseincome.htm
;
www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/WellBeing/Gallery/PerCapitaDisposablePersonalIncome3483.htm
.
32.
“Past two decades” refers to the period 1992–2009,
www.ers.usda.gov/amberwaves/june10/Indicators/InTheLongRun.htm
.
33.
Chapter 2, “Profiling Food Consumption in America,” in
Agricultural Fact Book, 2001–2002
, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Office of Communications, March 2003.
HAPTER
2: T
HE
P
RICE
OF
P
IETY
1.
CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, July/August 1998, U.S. edition,
www.cspinet.org/nah/7_98eat.htm
.
2.
Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A National History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 2.
3.
Stated in a TED talk entitled “Mark Bittman on What’s Wrong with What We Eat,”
www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat.html
.
4.
An estimated twenty excess cancer deaths are caused each year in the United States from the use of agricultural pesticides; three hundred deaths are from drowning in the bathtub. See Bjørn Lomborg,
The Skeptical Environmentalist
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 245. There are more than thirty thousand deaths from automobile accidents each year. See
www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr59/nvsr59_04.pdf
.
5.
The statements in this paragraph are based on the findings from the following studies: J. F. M. Swinnen, P. Squicciarini, and T. Vandemoortele, “The Food Crisis, Mass Media, and the Political Economy of Policy Analysis and Communication,”
European Review of Agricultural Economics
38 (2001): 409–26; S. Mullainathan and A. Sheifer, “The Market for News,”
American Economic Review
95 (2005): 1031–53; J. J. McCluskey and J. F. M. Swinnen, “Political Economy of the Media and Consumer Perceptions of Biotechnology,”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
86 (2004): 1230–37.
6.
See R. S. Taylor et al., “Dietary Salt for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials,”
American Journal of Hypertension
24 (2011): 843–53; K. Stolarz-Skrzypek et al., “Fatal and Nonfatal Outcomes, Incidence of Hypertension, and Blood Pressure Changes in Relation to Urinary Sodium Excretion,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
305 (2011): 1777–85;
www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=its-time-to-end-the-war-on-salt
.
7.
intelligencesquaredus.org/wp-content/uploads/Organic-041310.pdf
.
8.
Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, p. 318.
9.
The quote is from George Naylor, in ibid., p. 55.
10.
Stan Cox,
Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine
(London: Pluto, 2008).
11.
M. Nestle,
Food Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 4.
12.
www.thenation.com/article/163403/food-movement-its-power-and-possibilities
.
13.
A. Lotti,
Agricultural and Human Values
27 (2010): 71.
14.
press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_speechs2.html
.
15.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 130–31.
16.
See A. Bourdain,
Medium Raw
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), pp. 62–63.
17.
The quote is by Rahm Emanuel, made in November 2008.
18.
A. Coleman-Jensen et al., “Household Food Security in the United States in 2010,” United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Economic Research Report Number 125, September 2011.
19.
John Steinbeck,
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
(New York: Penguin Books, 1980), p. 83.
20.
Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, pp. 63 and 64.
21.
The statement was made at a November 13, 2002, meeting of the American Public Health Association.
22.
“Food Crisis,”
New York Times
, February 24, 2011. The article appeared in print on February 25, 2011, on page A26 of the New York edition.
23.
Mark Bittman, “Don’t End Agricultural Subsidies. Fix Them,”
New York Times
, March 2, 2011. To be clear, these authors argue that food is too cheap because of negative externalities associated with modern food production. I address this issue in chapter 7.
24.
V. Shiva, “Resisting the Corporate Theft of Seeds,”
The Nation
, October 3, 2011.
25.
J. M. Beddow, P. G. Pardey, and J. M. Alston, “The Shifting Global Patterns of Agricultural Productivity,”
Choices
(2009, 4th quarter).
26.
L. Aron, “Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong,”
Foreign Policy
, July/August, 2011.
27.
David Horowitz,
The Politics of Bad Faith
(New York: Touchstone Books, 2000).
28.
George W. Breslauer,
Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 249.
29.
Thomas Sowell,
Intellectuals and Society
(New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 118.
30.
www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/the-inequality-map.html?_r=1
.
HAPTER
3: F
ROM
C
OPS
TO
R
OBBERS
1.
F. A. Hayek,
The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 57.
2.
J. Thirsk,
Alternative Agriculture: A History from the Black Death to the Present Day
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
3.
Quotes are from “William Bradford, of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1621,” The Founders’ Constitution,
press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s1.html
.
4.
Adam Smith,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
, 1776, available online at
www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html
.
5.
J. E. McWilliams,
A Revolution in Eating
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 320.
6.
These data are from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. See also
inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfarm4.htm
.
7.
A fascinating account of this history is in D. Okrent,
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
(New York: Scribner, 2010).
8.
www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/06/okrent_on_prohi.html
.
9.
See chap. 31 in Upton Sinclair’s
The Jungle
.
10.
This quote can be found in the preface of the edition of
The Jungle
published by Simon & Schuster in 2004.
11.
C. E. Ward, “Assessing Competition in the U.S. Beef Packing Industry,”
Choices
25, no. 2 (2nd quarter): 2010.
12.
A. M. Azzam and J. R. Schroeter, “The Tradeoff Between Oligopsony Power and Cost Efficiency in Horizontal Consolidation: An Example from Beef Packing,”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
77 (1995): 825–36.
13.
According to USDA data compiled by the Livestock Marketing Information Center: /
www.lmic.info/
. The statistics refer to the change in average monthly real prices in 1970 to the average monthly real prices in 2011.
14.
J. M. Alston, M. A. Andersen, J. S. James, and P. G. Pardey, “The Economic Returns to U.S. Public Agricultural Research,”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
93 (2011): 1257–77.
15.
Ibid. W. E. Huffman and R. E. Evenson, “Do Formula or Competitive Grant Funds Have Greater Impacts on State Agricultural Productivity?”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
88 (2006): 783–98.
16.
See, for example, C. B. Moss, “Valuing State-Level Funding for Research: Results for Florida,”
Journal of Agricultural and Applied Economics
38 (2006): 169–83. More generally, see J. M. Alston et al.,
Persistence Pays: U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth and the Benefits from Public R&D Spending
(New York: Springer, 2009), or J. M. Alston, G. W. Norton, and P. G. Pardey,
Science Under Scarcity
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995; CAB International, 1998).
17.
This calculation is in R. Roberts,
The Price of Everything
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
18.
Based on data reported at:
www.ers.usda.gov/Data/AgProductivity/table01.xls
. The data ended in 2009, which is the endpoint I use to compare against 1950. The land use figure reported in the following sentence is also derived from the same data set.
19.
www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0317_0111_ZO.html
.
20.
See R. L. Paarlberg,
Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), or J. Goldberg,
Liberal Fascism
(New York: Broadway Books, 2007).
21.
D. Hannan,
The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010), p. xvi.
22.
S. Nasar,
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 24.
