Set your recorders to the Fox News Channel at 8pm (eastern time I think) this Sunday March 10. I'm appearing in a John Stossel special entitled "Myths, Lies and Complete Stupidity" in a segment about the Food Police.
We filmed the interview in NYC back in December, and I'm glad to hear that it is finally set to air!
Here is an early review from Kirkus, the book review magazine:
That was the tentative title of a chapter in my forthcoming book, Food Police, that ultimately wound up on the cutting room floor. I spent a good portion of the book, and have many posts here on the blog, where I defend Big Food and Big Ag. That's not because they are blameless or perfect, but because they are so often mischaracterized and are the scapegoats for many of societies perceived evils.
But, it would be a mistake to think that food freedoms are threatened only by government regulation of Big Food and Ag. In fact, one can often see the plain injustice at work when you look at the impacts of intrusive government regulations (and the crony capitalism sometimes promulgated by Big Food) on small potatoes - food trucks, farmers markets, and small operators just trying to make a buck. I chose not to focus heavily on this in the book because they represent such a small part of our overall food economy, but I'm glad to see some attention being devoted to the issue.
The American Enterprise Institute is hosting a conference title "Big government and big food vs. food trucks, foodies, and farmers markets." Here's their promo:
If you like your food local, organic, or from a truck, government regulation might be your biggest obstacle. American restaurants lobby to choke off food trucks, and federal regulation of food safety leads to more consolidation in the industry. Moreover, farmers markets struggle to survive under the heavy hand of government.
What if food safety regulation is not about limiting the germs in our dinner, but is rather about limiting competition in America’s food industry? What if federal and local rules actually protect incumbent businesses instead of consumers?
If you want to whet your appetite, I highly recommend this article from a few weeks back, entitled, Tea Party Libertarians and Small Organic Farmers Make Strange Political Bedfellows. Here are some spinets:
Laura Bledsoe didn't set out to join a political movement, she merely wanted to serve what she considered a sustainable meal.
In October 2011 she and her husband Monte decided they wanted to host what they called a "farm to fork" event in their home. They own a small farm 50 miles outside of Las Vegas.
then:
Trouble began two days before the event was to take place. They received a call from the Southern Nevada Health District Office, who wanted to know if the farmers had secured a health permit for the event. "We didn't know we needed to," Laura says.
Then a health inspector came:
The health inspector raised several concerns, but chief among them was the meat the Bledsoes were preparing to serve. Because the event was advertised as a "zero mile footprint," the meat hadn't been sent through a USDA processing plant, as is required for any meat purchased at a grocery store or restaurant, so the inspector deemed it illegal to serve.
The article tells several stories of a similar nature - check it out.
From Bloomberg.com, we learn:
At a bustling food market in downtown Caracas, armed officers belonging to President Hugo Chavez’s National Bolivarian Guard marched by boxes of lettuce and tomatoes, checking prices and storage rooms.
and
“This is the worst it’s ever been, I can’t find any eggs, rice or flour,” Noreli de Acosta, a 55-year-old housewife.
What is behind it all?
Chavez suffered his only electoral defeat in 2007 when voters narrowly rejected a referendum to change 69 articles of the constitution amid shortages of beef, milk and sugar. He subsequently accelerated the nationalization of farms and food industries. Since taking office in 1999 he’s seized more than 1,000 companies or assets.Capital controls have exacerbated shortages by limiting the amount of foreign currency Venezuelans can obtain to import goods.
Yet, rather than freeing up capital controls, here is what the socialist government is up to:
Last year the government ordered companies such as Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) and Unilver Plc (ULVR) to lower the price of shampoo, soap and other personal care products to contain inflationary pressures. Authorities regulate prices for a wide range of products including chicken, cheese and coffee.
The government blames producers and merchants for hoarding products and this week carried out televised raids of warehouses. Among goods confiscated were 9,000 tons of sugar, part of which was imported by a supplier to the local unit of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP)
Shockingly, Chavez supporters are undeterred:
At a nearby poultry store, display cabinets were half empty and one shopper complained that prices were twice what the government mandated.
Morela Tirado, a 53-year-old housewife, said such shortages are only a small inconvenience and have not undermined her support for the Chavez government.
“So you switch meat for chicken, pasta for rice, what’s the big deal? Nobody is going hungry,” said Tirado. “It’s not that there’s no food, you just don’t always get what you want.”
It's too much of a stretch to say that calls for fat taxes, large soda bans, and veggie subsidies will lead to this kind of outcome. But, I'd at least hope that situations like this in oil-rich Venezuela at least serve as a cautionary tale for those who think we can top-down engineer everyone's weight, health, and eating patterns. After all, it is hard to imagine that Chavez and his advisers thought their capital controls, import restrictions, price-caps, and confiscations would lead to such bad outcomes. These were - I'm sure - well meaning (but short sighted) plans to control the economy in one way, all the while forgetting that interventions in one area cause unexpected disruptions in another.
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.