Assorted Links

• Parke Wilde put up some interesting, interactive graphs showing how US farm support policies have changed over time.  Do you think they've been going up or going down?  You may be surprised at the answer.

• Not all processed food is unhealthy

• Is Obama Kowtowing to Anti-Biotech Activists?

• California banned it, but it appears that The Foie Gras Black Market Has Begun

Assorted Links

• Bad news: Agriculture ranks low on list of top innovators (only Monsanto makes the list)

• Obesity is not a public health problem (or maybe it is? I must say that I was amused to see that this last link claims that behavioral economics holds the secret to “solving” obesity)

• More evidence that calorie labels are unlikely to be very effective

• Sometimes, old wives' tales are true

• I find it hard to take some of this writing seriously, but here is an interesting take on obesity “informed by feminist poststructuralist theory” which argues, among other things that:

Obesity science qualifies as ‘state science,’ to use Foucault’s term: it is a tangled web of government lobbies, academia and its research sponsors, service industries from the human genome sciences to multinational pharmaceutical and agribusiness complexes, the legal-juridical complex, and the insurance industry. Obesity science and its hegemonic norms have instituted a hidden political agenda through the very language and technologies deployed in the name of ‘truth.’ Obesity science and its dominant discourse act as a ‘fascist structure’

Assorted Links

• The editor of Food Safety News weighs in on my recent WSJ Op-Ed.

• The debate on Mandatory Country of Origin labeling of meat products heats up because of some research by my colleagues and me.

• The journal Agricultural and Applied Economic Perspectives just released a new issue with several interesting papers.  Here are some excerpts of a few of the papers.

• Poudel et al.

Our major findings are as follows: (1) if dietary requirements do not increase by more than 20% from the current level, crop yields from current cropland must increase by more than 57% just to meet dietary demand

• Crespi et al.

Exercising short-run oligopsony power is inimical to the long-run interests of buyers in these settings because below-competitive returns will lead to the exodus of resources from input production. Policy proposals grounded in the presumed linkage between concentration, competition, and market power may well be misguided and detrimental to the objectives that proponents seek to advance.

• Taylor et al.

Since U.S. domestic workers are unwilling to do farm work and the United States can feasibly import farm workers from only a few countries in close geographic proximity, the agricultural industry will eventually need to adjust production to use less labor. The decline in foreign labor supply to farms in the United States ultimately will need to be accompanied by farm labor conservation, switching to less labor intensive crops and technologies, and labor management practices that match fewer workers with more farm jobs.

Assorted Links

• George Will on the Food Police

• I previously asked what gay marriage has to do with caged chickens.  Now, we can ask what GMO labeling has to do with Obama vs. Romney

• When foodie political correctness defies common sense

• The economics of food deserts

• Does the UK need an “obesity law”?

Assorted Links

• Perhaps eating meat is not as risky as once thought (though it still doesn’t seem like the relative risks are based on outcomes from randomized controlled trials)

• Donuts with liquor filling!

• A critique of paternalism

• Exploring Health and Environmental Costs of Food: Workshop Summary (this is a National Academies workshop I participated in a few months ago, and it could potentially have some impact on policy debates about food).