The Food Police (27 page)
Authors: Jayson Lusk
HAPTER
9: T
HE
L
OCAVORE’S
D
ILEMMA
1.
D. Brown, “Caterers Find Eco-Standards Tough to Chew,”
Denver Post
, May 19, 2008,
www.denverpost.com/lifestyles/ci_9305736
.
2.
Time
, March 13, 2007.
3.
M. Pollan, “Farmer in Chief,”
New York Times
, October 9, 2008.
4.
Kim Severson,
Spoon Fed
(New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin USA, 2010), pp. 67–68.
5.
Ibid., p. 69.
6.
J. E. McWilliams,
Just Food
(New York: Back Bay Books/Hachette, 2009), p. 30.
7.
Bill Moyers Journal
, November 28, 2008, interview with Michael Pollan, at
www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11282008/transcript1.html
.
8.
S. Nasar,
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 392.
9.
For changes in agricultural productivity and labor usage, see
www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EB9/eb9.pdf
.
10.
See data in table 7 of E. K. Mafoua and F. Hossain, “Scope and Scale Economies for Multi-Product Farms: Firm-Level Panel Data Analysis,” selected paper presented at the American Agricultural Economics Association Meeting, Chicago, August 5–8, 2001.
11.
Figure comes from author’s calculation using the fourth column of results in table 7 in R. Mosheim and C. A. Knox Lovell, “Scale Economies and Inefficiency of U.S. Dairy Farms,”
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
91 (2009): 777–94.
12.
V. Postrel, “No Free Locavore Lunch,”
Wall Street Journal
, September 25, 2010,
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503972940124574.html
; for evidence on the higher prices of local, see J. Biermacher et al., “Economic Challenges of Small-Scale Vegetable Production and Retailing in Rural Communities: An Example from Rural Oklahoma,”
Journal of Food Distribution Research
37 (2007): 1–13.
13.
For just one example of the claim, see J. Rickardson, “5 Ridiculous Myths People Use to Trash Local Food—and Why They’re Wrong,”
Alternet.com
, November 18, 2011,
www.alternet.org/food/153121/5_ridiculous_myths_people_use_to_trash_local_food_—_and_why_they’re_wrong?page=entir
.
14.
Michael Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
(New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 222.
15.
G. Edwards-Jones et al., “Testing the Assertion That ‘Local Food Is Best’: The Challenges of an Evidence Based Approach,”
Trends in Food Science and Technology
19 (2008): 265–74.
16.
C. Saunders, A. Barber, and G. Taylor, “Food Miles—Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry,” Lincoln University, Agribusiness and Economics Research Unit, Research report no. 285, July 2006.
17.
See M. F. Teisl, “Environmental Concerns in Food Consumption,” in
Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Food Consumption and Policy
, J. L. Lusk, J. Roosen, and J. F. Shogren, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and the references therein.
18.
Ibid., p. 850.
19.
E. Engelhaupt, “Do Food Miles Matter?”
Environmental Science and Technology
42 (2008): 3482.
20.
D. Coley, M. Howard, and M. Winter, “Local Food, Food Miles and Carbon Emissions: A Comparison of Farm Shop and Mass Distribution Approaches,”
Food Policy
34 (2009): 150–55.
21.
articles.boston.com/2011-06-16/bostonglobe/29666344_1_greenhouse-gas-carbon-emissions-local-food
.
22.
Biermacher et al., “Economic Challenges of Small-Scale Vegetable Production and Retailing in Rural Communities.”
23.
M. Bittman, “Local Food: No Elitist Plot,”
nytimes.com
, November 1, 2011,
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/local-food-no-elitist-plot/
.
24.
C. Price, “The Locavore’s Dilemma: What to Do with the Kale, Turnips, and Parsley That Overwhelm Your CSA Bin,”
Slate.com
, June 8, 2010,
www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/recycled/2010/06/the_locavores_dilemma.html
.
25.
J. C. Rickman et al., “Nutritional Comparison of Fresh, Frozen and Canned Fruits and Vegetables, Part 1. Vitamins C and B and Phenolic Compounds,”
Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture
87 (2007): 930–44; J. C. Rickman et al., “Nutritional
Comparison of Fresh, Frozen, and Canned Fruits and Vegetables, Part 2. Vitamin A and Carotenoids, Vitamin E, Minerals and Fiber,”
Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture
87 (2007): 1185–96; D. J. Favell, “A Comparison of the Vitamin C Content of Fresh and Frozen Vegetables,”
Food Chemistry
62 (1998): 59–64.
26.
L. S. Drescher et al., “A New Index to Measure Healthy Food Diversity Better Reflects a Healthy Diet Than Traditional Measures,”
Journal of Nutrition
137 (2007): 647–51.
27.
E.g., see
www.peachstand.com/
.
28.
Severson,
Spoon Fed
, p. 75.
29.
Pollan,
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
, p. 252.
30.
Ibid., p. 253.
31.
Ibid., p. 260.
32.
J. Rickardson, “5 Ridiculous Myths People Use to Trash Local Food—and Why They’re Wrong.”
33.
www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/science/30tierney.html?pagewanted=all
.
HAPTER
10: T
HE
F
UTURE
OF
F
OOD
1.
A. C. Heller,
Ayn Rand and the World She Made
(New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009), p. 395.
2.
Charles Mackay,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
, 1841.
3.
Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
4.
Controlling population growth sounds like a good idea when it involves other people somewhere across the globe, but it doesn’t sound so good when it moves closer to home. Who, after all, gets to decide the number of people who inhabit Earth? The reality is that population is endogenously determined with food prices and income, and—in a sense—it is somewhat self-regulating. Many of the arguments surrounding population control are eerily similar to those surrounding the eugenics movement of a century ago.
5.
Walter Williams,
Liberty versus the Tyranny of Socialism: Controversial Essays
(Stanford, CA: Hoover Press, 2008), p. 78.
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR
J
AYSON
L
USK
is the most prolific academic food economist of the past decade, publishing more than one hundred articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on topics related to consumer behavior and food marketing and policy. After serving on the faculty at Mississippi State University and Purdue University, and a stint as visiting researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, he is currently a professor and the Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the agricultural economics department at Oklahoma State University. Lusk earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Kansas State University in 2000 and a B.S. in food technology from Texas Tech University in 1997, where he was named Outstanding Student in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.
Lusk has served on the editorial councils of seven top academic journals, including the
American Journal of Agricultural Economics
and the
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management
. He has served on the executive committees of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations, won numerous research awards, and given lectures at more than thirty universities in the United States and abroad.
In 2007, Lusk coauthored a book on consumer research methods published by Cambridge University Press and coauthored an undergraduate textbook on agricultural marketing and price analysis. In 2011, he released a coauthored book on the economics of farm animal welfare published by Oxford University Press and he coedited the
Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Food Consumption and Policy
.
Jayson lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma, with his wife and their two sons.
