Do People Want More Food Regulation? Or Less?

Over at Reason.com, Baylen Linnekin reports on the results of a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.  According to Linnekin, the poll shows little public support for food taxes and bans.  Balyen contrasts the recent survey with some previous survey work I’d done which seems to show the opposite.

A vast literature on polling and survey research shows that subtle changes in wording and response categories can result in large shifts in behavior.  Thus, it is useful to compare the two questions side-by-side. In the end, I think you’ll find much more similarity in the two studies than perhaps first meets the eye.

Here is the exact AP-NORC poll question and response categories (it was a telephone poll and you can find the script here):

Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose the following government policies?FOR EACH FAVOR OR OPPOSE: Is that strongly (favor/oppose) or somewhat (favor/oppose)?

Requiring more physical activity in schools (84%, 89%)

Providing nutritional guidelines and information to people about how to make healthy choices about diet and exercise (83%, 90%)

Funding farmers markets, bike paths and other healthy alternatives (74%, 81%)

Providing incentives to the food industry to produce healthier foods (73%, 80%)

Requiring restaurants to post calorie information on menus (70%, 78%)

Banning advertisements for unhealthy foods aimed at children (44%, 53%)

Placing a tax on the sale of unhealthy foods and drinks (31%, 40%)

Limiting the types or amounts of foods and drinks people can buy (15%, 25%)

As shown above, there were eight issues listed (in random order across respondents).  I’ve listed them in order of support.  I’ve also listed the % favoring in parentheses beside each issue, then a comma and the % favoring plus not opposed (to which I’ve added in the “neither opposed nor unopposed” to the total).

I’d hardly call this set of responses free market or libertarian.  There is ample support for requirements, subsidies, and mandates.  Given the way the question was asked, I could see a respondent perceiving the question to ask something like “rank these interventions from most favored to least favored.”  It would be interesting to know if there were strong order effects.  For example, if “taxes” came first, were they more/less supported than if they came last.  In any event, there is apparently weaker support (and less than majority support) for “fat taxes” and bans on amounts or types of foods people can buy (although, my gut feel is that if you replaced the vague “types or amounts of foods” with something specific like “transfats” or “GMOs” you might get a very different answer)

My study (published in Food Policy) phrased the questions a different way and used an online format.  I asked about preference for government action related to 10 food issues.  None of them match up perfectly with the list of eight above, but I’ll pull out two that are somewhat similar to the above. 

Each question asked:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Each question had two options that involved more government action, a status-quo option, and two options that involved less government action. 

Here are the results from one question about healthy food with % of respondents falling into each category:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Ban the use of transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy ingredients in food production (15.1%)

Increase regulations to restrict the use of transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy ingredients in food production (38.8%)

Maintain current policies on transfats and saturated fats (e.g., mandatory labeling in the supermarket)       (31.6%)

Reduce regulations on transfats and saturated fats    (2.7%)

Make no law regarding transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy food ingredients, leaving people to take responsibility for their own diet          (11.8%)

So, 53.9% wanted more regulation on this topic, 31.5% wanted the status-quo and 14.5% wanted less regulation.

Here are the results from another question I asked:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Create an agency to plan food production and distribution to improve nutritional intake (15.4%)

Use extensive taxes and subsidies to promote healthier foods           (14.2%)          

Maintain current regulations designed to promote healthier foods which include mandatory nutritional labels on foods and establishing suggested dietary intake (53.1%)     

Decrease efforts to promote healthier foods  (5.3%)

Eliminate all food health regulations; allow citizens to make their own food choices (11.9%)        

So, 29.7% wanted more regulation on this topic, 53.1% wanted the status quo, and 17.2% wanted less regulation.

In total, seven of the questions I asked about garnered majority support for government action and the most favorable related to issues that could be perceived as relating to food safety, food affordability, and animal welfare. Three issues did not garner support for more government action.  So, in my study 70% of the issues raised were such that people wanted more government action compared to the status quo or less government action. 

The AP-NORC poll asked about eight issues, and (depending on how you treat the “undecideds”), either 62.5% or 75% garnered majority support for more government action. 

So, yes, we can find a couple questions were we “free market” folks can take a bit of comfort.  However, the overall response patterns in both surveys are much more statist than I am comfortable with.  That’s one reason I decided to write The Food Police (you can also read more on my interpretation of these results here)  I’m hopeful I can bring more folks over to my way of thinking by presenting a perspective that differs from the one normally offered by many food writers.   

Better Hope Your Child Isn't Obese

Jerri Gray may spend the next fifteen years of her life in a South Carolina prison.  She is not a drug dealer or a serial rapist.  She has not robbed anyone or  committed grand theft  auto—she simply has an obese son

Those are the opening sentences of this article by Elizabeth Ralston in the Seton Hall Law Review entitled KinderLARDen Cop: Why States Must Stop Policing Parents of Obese Children

What Constitutes a Despotic Government?

What is the worst kind of despotism that can arise from a demographic government?  George Will has some interesting thoughts on these questions in a thought-provoking speech he gave last month (here are Peggy Noonan's thoughts on the speech).  In the talk, Will quotes Tocqueville, and in the process sums up a lot of what I think is wrong with the thinking of the food police (it also reminds me a bit of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal  Fascism).  

Here is Tocqueville in Democracy in America (published in French in 1835):

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.

It won't be like the old tyrannies:

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

Here is the new despotism:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

The next time you hear that the government should nudge us toward making better decisions, remember Tocqueville's warning of a government that doesn't shatter your will but rather one in which your will is "softened, bent, and guided."  What are we to make of a government that perceives its citizens as needing a shepherd?  It must be one that thinks of its citizens as sheep.  

In Food We (Dis)Trust

This blog post by Chef Michael Formichella describes one of the key outcomes he learned from some focus groups conducted among frequent consumers of grass-fed beef.  He learned that (emphasis his):

There were several notable comments passed by all three groups that I wanted to expound upon. It revolves around trust.

He hit the nail on the head with this one.  Although it is rarely discussed in this way, our modern “food wars” almost all disseminate over the issue of trust.  People (sometimes for good reason) distrust agribusinesses, and as a consequence, the technologies they develop.  This leads to calls for things like organic food – which people then distrust because it turns out that organics are not all they are often touted to be.  Much of the local food movement can, in my opinion, be explained by an effort by some to interact more closely with those they believe are more trustworthy. 

What bothers me about the folks I’ve called the food police or the food elite is that they have fostered, and even encouraged, this atmosphere of distrust to promote their own books, restaurants, and political agendas.  I do not deny that some of the distrust of modern production agriculture is deserved, but as someone who has grown up around “large” farmers and people working in agribusinesses, the caricature that is painted of them cannot withstand close scrutiny.  I strongly suspect that the guys running 5,000 acre farms are no more or less “trustworthy” than the muckraking journalists who vilify them.      

Economists don’t much talk about it, but trust is perhaps the linchpin in the engine of economic growth.  It allows specialization and development of comparative advantage.  It facilitates trade.  It creates environments in which there is some reasonable expectation that success from investments in research and technology will be rewarded.  (There is a really nice podcast between Russ Roberts and David Rose on Econ Talk on this and related issues if you want more).     

So, when I hear and read people implicitly saying “don’t trust any farmer but your local farmer” or “don’t trust anything developed by Monsanto or Cargill or ADM” or “don’t trust the research from Land Grant Universities” or “don’t trust supermarkets,” I take pause. 

You’re setting yourself up for a pretty meager existence if the only person you can trust is yourself.  Locavores are willing to extend that trust to the few people who happen to live in close proximity to them.  But, I’m hoping for more because the more people you can trust, the better your life is going to be.  I happen to believe in the power of firms trying to maintain a reputation, the power of consumers acting with their wallets and feet, the threat of litigation, and sometimes plain self interest tempered by market forces to help foster a climate of trustworthiness.  Clearly, not everyone agrees.  But, what I’d like to see is less inward-looking thinking (i.e., trust only your neighbor) and more thinking on how production agriculture can appear to be (and actually become) more trustworthy.

Mark Twain on Smoking, Drinking, etc.

A colleague alerted me to this humorous piece by Mark Twain (from an essay titled The Moral Statistician written in 1893; it was partially reprinted in the WSJ a couple weeks ago).  Apparently Twain was a bit put off by the food police of his day . . .

I don't want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see but one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime, (and which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone,) nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not  smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these little vicious enjoyments for fifty years, but then what can you do with it? -what use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul; all the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life -therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash?

It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees when the contribution box comes around; and you always pay your debts in greenbacks, and never give the revenue officers a true statement of your income. Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age?

What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unloveable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous "moral statistics?" Now I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either, but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture, last week, about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.