Let Them Eat Ramen

Over at NPR, Eliza Barclay wrote an interesting story on Ramen noodles.  I shudder to think how much of my nutritional intake in college and grad school came from Ramen noodles.  Little did I know they might have such global importance.

Underpinning Barclay's story is the provocative question: Can Ramen noodles solve the problem of global hunger?

When I was recently on Fox and Friends talking about the cheapest-most nutritious food in human history, it appears the a better candidate might have been Ramen noodles rather than the McDouble.  Here is the NPR piece:

it's the multinational noodle companies' conquest of countries like Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, Brazil and Mexico that really interests the anthropologists: Frederick Errington of Trinity College, Tatsuro Fujikura of Kyoto University and Deborah Gewertz of Amherst College. And it's here that they make one of their most intriguing arguments: Instant noodles do good by alleviating the hunger of millions of people around the world. These supercheap, superpalatable noodles, they write, help the low-wage workers in rich and poor countries alike hang on when the going gets tough.

I also found this passage interesting:

The authors say that "real food" advocates like journalist Michael Pollan, who wring their hands over rising consumption of industrial food like ramen, raise important questions about its perils. But the authors also call ramen a "virtually unstoppable" phenomenon. And they foresee a world of 9 billion people "in which the affluent will be presented with too many food choices and [will be] called upon to use their survival skills to choose wisely, and in which the poor will have to use their survival skills to get by on cheap food" like ramen.

"I'd love to take Michael Pollan to a squatter settlement and have him deal with poor, hungry people in such circumstances, who have no choice of going back home to grow subsistence crops or be part of a regional food system," says Gewertz. "Subsistence agriculture is hard, dirty and hot work. People want out of it. It's not to be over romanticized."

Did I say after a decade-long hiatus from Ramen, they're back in our house - my kids love it!

McDouble: The Cheapest, Most Nutritious Food in Human History?

That provocative claim was originally made bay a commentor at the Freakonomics blog. Freakonomics co-author, Stephen Dubner, turned the claim into an interesting podcast for NPR. Then Kyle Smith wrote an editorial on the topic for the New York Post celebrating the McDouble.  The Wall Street Journal picked up the story, and predictably, a number of outlets offered a counter-response.  It seems the story has gone viral.

If you care to hear my thoughts on the subject, I had to opportunity to briefly expound on it a bit this morning on Fox and Friends.  

The one thing I didn't say is that it is not necessarily true that more nutritious food is always more expensive.  The USDA published a report on this issue a few months ago. Basically, it comes down to how you measure it.  If you measure the cost of nutrition as the price per calorie, then lettuce is going to look really expensive because lettuce doesn't provide many calories.  But, if you measure the cost as the price per gram (or pound), then fruits and veggies don't look so costly compared to other foods.        

Some people point out that it is more expensive to order a salad than a McDouble at McDonald's.  Doesn't that prove it is more expensive to eat healthy?  Well, first, a McDonald's salad is not necessarily better for you.  It's important to actually look at the nutritional content of salads at McDonald's; you can easily eat more calories by ordering a salad - especially if you add chicken or use salad dressing.  But, even if the salad is more nutritious, it is likely more expensive because there is more volume to the salad than the burger (i.e., there are more oz in the serving of salad than burger) so you're getting more with the salad; also, there is the extra storage costs required with the bulkier packaging, not to mention the costs associated with keeping salads fresh and dealing with spoilage and waste.   

Finally, on this point, Adam Drewnowski - who was done a lot of research on this topic - sent me this recently published paper, where he calculated the cost of various fruits and veggies according to a nutrient score.  I pulled out the second figure from the paper and reproduced it below.  If I'm not mistaken, it looks like there is a positive correlation here: the higher the nutrient score, the more affordable the food is. 

One take-away from the figure: if you want inexpensive nutrients, eat sweet potatoes!

Most overpriced items in the grocery store

Yesterday I received a phone call from a producer for a major cable news station asking if I'd be willing to come on a show and talk about this story that appeared in Business Insider entitled: "5 Of The Most Overpriced Items In The Grocery Store".

After reading the story, I gave the following response to the producer (slightly edited here for the blog).  Although it would have been nice to have a little air time, I'm happy to report that they decided not to run with the story, at least as it was originally premised.

The story equates “overpriced” with the “percent markup”, which is pretty shaky.  There are a lot of good reasons why the percent mark-up may vary across products that has little to do with being “overpriced”.  For example, differences in demand for convenience and other characteristics, differences in costs of packaging, storage, transportation, etc. will cause differences in the percent markup.  

Nonetheless, let’s play along.

1) Bottled water.  On the surface, it does seem crazy that there is a 4000% mark-up for bottled water.  But, part of the reason for the high percent is that the price of water is REALLY cheap to begin with (so the percent will look very high though the actual dollar mark-up in absolute terms is small).  More importantly, how valuable is convenience to you?  A lot of people are willing to pay an extra buck to have more convenient water and not have to fiddle with refilling and refrigerating a re-usable water bottle.  Who am I to say that an extra $0.50 or $1 isn’t worth it to the person whose paying for it?  If it were really the case that bottle water sellers were ripping us off, why doesn’t some entrepreneur enter the market and start selling cheaper bottled water and corner the market?  The fact is that most of the cost is in the packaging, transportation, etc.  When you buy bottled water, you’re paying for packaging and convenience.

The same arguments apply even more forcefully for pre-cut produce.  Who cares if pre-cut carrots and onions are marked up 40%?  I’m not having to do the work!  That’s an extra $1-$2 I’m definitely willing to pay.  And if someone else can figure out a way to do it for less than 40%, you can bet they’d have my business.  Competition – in the long run- will eventually drive down prices to their approximate costs. 

2)   In general, I would characterize something as “overpriced” if people have mis-perceptions; if they believe they’re getting something from a product that they’re not actually receiving.  Two of the examples in the story potentially fit that criteria: name-brand spices and brand-name cereal.  One way to know whether you’re being fooled by marketing is to do a blind taste test.  It is often the case that our brain is more powerful in influencing how we think something tastes than our tongues.  So, with a neutral friend, try it out: can you REALLY taste the difference?  If not, you may be over-paying.

3)  In this light, there are a number of products that many people have “incorrect” beliefs relative to what scientific studies say – thus, they may be paying a premium for characteristics that they’re not actually recieving.  One example is food with a "natural" claim. A “natural” label is pretty vacuous, and I've previously touched on those issues here and here.  Another example is organic food.  People believe a lot of things about organic foods that just aren't true: that they’re pesticide free, that they support small farms, that they are more nutritious, etc.  I’m not saying there are NO benefits to organic, only fewer benefits than most believe.  A lot of the same arguments apply to local foods.  Chapters 5 and 9 in The Food Police have all the details and citations.

Role of technology in the global economic importance and viability of animal protein production

That mouthful is the name of an article I wrote for the journal Animal Frontiers.     

Here are a few excerpts: 

Walk in almost any Department of Animal Science in the U.S. and one is likely to find a few black and white photos of stern, cowboy-hat wearing animal husbandry students from the early part of the last century. The remarkable thing about those photos is not the now unfashionable clothes but rather the champion cattle the students were proudly displaying for posterity. Today, one can scarcely find a bovine as fat and squatty as those that were once so esteemed. Pondering the difference between the prized cattle in those black and white photos and almost any old steer in a modern feedlot provides a stark illustration of the role of technology in shaping animal production over the past century

and

The direst of the Malthusian predictions have failed to materialize. Although the population of the world has grown dramatically over the past three centuries (and is expected to grow further still), the rate of growth has slowed, and in some developed countries has even begun to fall. While people of Malthus’s day probably could not have envisioned modern birth control methods, the most pessimistic interpreters of Malthus’s model almost certainly underestimated the impacts of productivity-increasing technological change.

I used a number of approaches to calculate the economic value of the productivity gains that have occurred in meat production in the past 40 years.  Here are the results of one approach applied to beef cattle:

if we applied the same genetics and technology used in 1970 to a cow herd the size of the one at present, we would expect to experience only $24.8 billion in farm value produced. The remaining $37.16 - $24.80 = $12.36 billion in value actually observed (or about 33% of current total value) is a result of factors (e.g., genetics, technology) that gave rise to improved productivity

Locally-produced as compost the solution to global warming?

Gary Paul Nabhan published an op-ed yesterday in the NYT on global warming, agriculture, and farm policy.  Some of his suggestions, such as reducing regs and restrictions on "gray water" might have some merit (assuming food safety risks can be adequately handled) but most of his suggestions presume government is the only answer.

First, let's look at his premise that global warming will invariably lead to a "coming food crisis".  In actuality, a warming planet will produce some winners and some losers, and may be net-plus for agriculture.  It is possible that farmers in Arizona, where Nabhan resides, will lose from higher temperatures, but there likely to be other locations, like Canada, where agriculture benefits.  There is a lively debate among economists, fought out in the pages of the American Economic Review over precisely this issue (see the papers here or here suggesting climate change will benefit US agriculture or here, here, or here suggesting the reverse).  It would have been nice to see some discussion on this issue rather than simply claiming a disaster is coming.

Where things really go off base, however, are in the policy prescriptions.  Here are a few with some brief comments. 

First, he says about his strategies that: 

The problem is that several agribusiness advocacy organizations have done their best to block any federal effort to promote them

I'm not sure exactly what "blocks" these groups have but in the way of Nabhan's ideas, but more generally several farmer groups like the idea of carbon trading because they'd get paid for sequestration.   

His first policy is to: 

promote the use of locally produced compost to increase the moisture-holding capacity of fields, orchards and vineyards.

I'm not sure why the compost needs to be local if it is really so beneficial.  It is also unclear why farmers wouldn't source these materials now if they improved yield and limited chances of loss. I suspect if research showed these techniques could improve the moisture-holding capacity of soils, there wouldn't need to be much promotion or subsidy for farmers to adopt.

Then, we are told: 

the farm bill should include funds from the Strikeforce Initiative of the Department of Agriculture to help farmers transition to forms of perennial agriculture — initially focusing on edible tree crops and perennial grass pastures 

However, if the problem is that conventional crops are not as profitable in a warming environment, there needn't be a Strikeforce Initiative or top-town planning; farmers will willingly seek out those alternatives they can grow most profitably given altered weather conditions.

Then, we have another crisis: 

We also need to address the looming seed crisis. Because of recent episodes of drought, fire and floods, we are facing the largest shortfall in the availability of native grass, forage legume, tree and shrub seeds in American history

and

the National Plant Germplasm System, the Department of Agriculture’s national reserve of crop seeds, should be charged with evaluating hundreds of thousands of seed collections for drought and heat tolerance, as well as other climatic adaptations — and given the financing to do so.

Don't you think Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, and other seed producers have a HUGE incentive to store and develop crop varieties that are likely to be more profitable in a warmer climate?  I'm not exactly sure what is described here as a "seed crisis" that profit-making seed companies (and University breeders) aren't already thinking about.  Moreover, if the problem is really so dire as Nabhan suggest, why doesn't he suggest using all methods - including biotechnology - to increase drought resistance of crop varieties?  

The answer to that last question, I think, says it all.  I suspect Nabhan doesn't support use of biotechnology to solve the problem he sets up because his issue isn't really with the global warming effects on crop production per se, but rather it seems he sees an opportunity to re-engineer a food system to his liking using subsidies, regulations, and Strikeforce Initiatives, without giving much thought into the effects of such a system on global hunger and the price consumers pay for food.  It is all together fanciful to imagine the food system he proposes as bring down food prices, which, ironically, Nabhan, sets up as being the problem he aims to solve.