How surveys can mislead

Beef Magazine recently ran a story about changing consumer attitudes.  The story discussed the results of a nationwide survey which asked the question: "How has your attitude about the following issues changed during the past few years?"  Here is a screenshot showing the results  

So, according to the survey, 29%+35%=64% of consumers are today more concerned about antibiotics than they were a few months ago.  In fact, the figure suggests that more than half of the respondents are more concerned today about antibiotics, hormones, GMOs, animal handling, and farmer values.   

I would submit that these findings are almost entirely a result of the way the question is asked.  Are you more concerned about issue X today?  Well, of course, any reasonable, caring person is today more concerned about X.  Indeed, why would you even be asking me about X unless I should be more concerned?

More generally, drawing inferences from such questions shows the danger of taking a "snapshot" as the truth.  To illustrate, let's compare how the above snapshot looks compared to the trends that come up in the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) I've been conducting for eight months.  

In that survey, I ask over 1,000 consumers each month a question, "How concerned are you that the following pose a health hazard in the food that you eat in the next two weeks?"  where the five-point response scale ranges from "very unconcerned" to "very concerned".  

I pulled out responses to the four issues that most closely match the survey above and plotted the change over time (I created an index where the responses in each month are relative to the response back in May which was set equal to 100).  If people are generally more concerned about these issues today compared to six months ago, it isn't obvious to me from the graph below.

So, a word of caution: you can't take every survey result at face value.  These sorts of comparisons show exactly why our Food Demand Survey is valuable: it replaces a snapshot with a trend. 

My Visit to BPI

I had the opportunity today to visit Beef Products Incorporated (BPI) in South Dakota.  If you’re unfamiliar with BPI, they are the manufacturers of lean fine textured beef (LFTB) (more popularly and derogatorily known as “pink slime”).  I learned a lot and came away from the tour both impressed and depressed.

I’ve been in a lot of food plants, but BPI’s was one of the most technologically advanced, food-safety focused plant I’ve seen.  There is a deep irony in the fact that a company that proactively invested millions in preventative measures to prevent food safety problems found themselves in the limelight for faux safety reasons.  It wasn’t an actual sickness or recall or outbreak, it was a sensational news story that tarnished their reputation.  That’s what I find depressing.  Here is a family-owned business started by an entrepreneur trying do things right.  Prevent waste, make more affordable food, make safer food.  And they’re made out to be a villain.  For what?

 Here are some things I learned:

 1)      LFTB is beef.  That’s all. I suppose that’s why the meat-industry created a website called beefisbeef.com. But seeing it made a huge impact on me. There is no bone that goes into the process.  You could quite plainly see big tasty-looking strips of beef and roasts going into the process; it simply isn’t worth the packer’s time to carve away all the fat which is why BPI gets it.  So, big beef hunks go in one end and out the other end come three products: tallow, cartilage (which is the only waste), and LFTB.

2)      Much has been made of BPI’s use of ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens.  But, I didn’t realize that BPI also makes LFTB without ammonium hydroxide, depending on their customer’s wishes.  I also found the graphic on their web site interesting, which compares the amount of ammonia in a beef patty with LFTB to the other parts of the burger.

3)      At no point in the process did I see anything that remotely resembled the pictures one sees on the internet.  LFTB is a little pink but that’s because it is completely frozen.  When it is thawed, it looked almost identical to package of ground beef you see on the grocery store shelf.

4)      BPI and others have done numerous taste tests with LFTB.  In blind taste tests, people almost always prefer ground beef that incorporates up to about 25% LFTB.  Burgers with LFTB taste better.  Who knew?    

5)      Cargill made a lot of news a couple weeks ago with their announcement to label their version of LFTB.  I was surprised to hear that BPI has been doing it for over a year!  But, here’s the thing.  BPI doesn’t sell directly to retail, so it isn’t as simple as telling BPI they should label because – number 1 the USDA controls what they can put on their label – and number 2, they can’t control what the retailer puts on their label. 

6)      The removal of LFTB from the market caused a spike in the price of lean ground beef and an increase in supply of fattier 73% lean ground beef.  Beyond the adverse price impacts on consumers, what are the health impacts of increased saturated fat consumption? 

7)      For all the talk about the need for more transparency in the food system, I was surprised to learn how untransparent were some food activists in misrepresenting their purposes and intentions when seeking information from BPI.

 I don’t necessarily mean to cheerlead for BPI.  I’m sure they have their faults.  But seeing the people up close and personal who were affected by all the media hype was, quite frankly, tragic. 

 Surely there is a good journalist who could find a story in that.    

Is Meat Production Wasteful?

About a month ago, The Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) put out a report on Animal Feed vs. Human Food.  I just got around to reading it and it has some interesting calculations and statistics.

The report addresses the common claim that livestock production is wasteful because crops that could be fed to humans (e.g., corn, soy) instead go to animals.  For example, here is an old quote from David Pimentel, a former Cornell Professor:

If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million

For another example, here is PETA:

It takes up to 13 pounds of grain to produce just 1 pound of meat

I think one of the most colorful ways I've heard this criticism expressed is that eating meat is like going to the grocery store and buying 13 (or 6 or 3 depending on which source you read) boxes of corn flakes and throwing 12 down the garbage.

This discussion misses at least three important issues.  First, many animals (particularly cattle) eat things we humans can't - mainly grass and hay.  Second, one needs to look at more than just calories in and calories out because there are other nutrients - particularly protein - that our body needs.  I'll get to the third issue in moment.

Jude Capper had some interesting graphs in her presentation of the CAST report that directly address the first two issues.  The graphs focus on the input-output relationship between human-edible protein and calories.

The above graph shows that dairy and suckler beef (that's their name for grass fed beef I believe) generate more protein than they consume from human-edible sources.  

The next graph shows the results for calories (or energy as it is titled).  They report that dairy produces about twice as many calories as it takes in from human-edible sources

Still, even these statistics suggest that it is "wasteful" to consume certain types of meat and animal products because they yield less energy or protein than they consume.

That brings me around to the third reasons why some these comparisons are a bit misleading: they focus only on costs and ignore benefits. Here is what I had to say about that a few months ago:

One fact that is often forgotten in meat debates is that it isn't sufficient to look at the amount of energy (or crops) expended to get beef.  We also have to look at what we get.  Most people really like the taste of meat.   

Almost no one looks at their iPad and asks, "how much more energy went into producing this than my old Apple II." The iPad is so much better than the Apple II.  We'd be willing to accept more energy use to have a better computer.  Likewise a nice T-bone is so much better than a head of broccoli.  I'm willing to accept more energy use to have a T-bone than a head of broccoli.    

Now, if my T-bone consumption is imposing costs on others, let's talk about that.  But, here the focus would be on the issues causing the externality (e.g., CO2) not on meat per se.  

How safe is the poultry you buy?

All told, Mr. Millman and his mother, Ann Marks, gathered 213 samples of chicken drumsticks from supermarkets, butcher shops and specialty stores in the New York area.

Now they and several scientists have published a study based on the project in the journal F1000 Research. The results were surprising.

Almost twice as many of the kosher chicken samples tested positive for antibiotic-resistant E. coli as did the those from conventionally raised birds. And even the samples from organically raised chickens and those raised without antibiotics did not significantly differ from the conventional ones.

That's from this post in the NYT.   

But, as the story reminds us, don't forget that:

The contamination does not mean the chicken is dangerous to eat. Generally, poultry is safe if handled carefully and cooked to an internal temperature of 165 degrees Fahrenheit, according to guidelines from the Agriculture Department

.

 

What caused the rise of "factory farms"?

An interesting insight into one of the key factors that precipitated  the development of "factory farms" from Maureen Ogle's forthcoming book In Meat We Trust: 

World War II also drained American agriculture of its labor supply, a fact that, as we'll see later, would have a profound impact on the way farmers raised livestock. Even before the United States entered the war, factories had geared up to supply warring countries with materiel, and men and women decamped from the farm for jobs those factories provided. In Georgia alone, between 1937 and 1941, 30 percent of agricultural workers left farm for factory. The shortage worsened after the United States declared war in late 1941. Everywhere in rural America, from dairy farms to cattle-feeding operations, from corn belt hog lots to rural Georgia chicken coops, labor vanished. When labor cannot be found, humans make a logical decision: they replace it with machinery. Americans had a long-standing tradition of doing so. For most of the nineteenth century, for example, the country suffered chronic shortages of labor that fostered a national passion for mechanization and automation. So, too, in the 1940s. Factory farming already had plenty of support both in and out of agriculture, and World War II affirmed that enthusiasm. Nowhere was this more true than in the broiler industry

The argument reminds me of an episode described by Joan Thirsk in her book Alternative Agriculture: A History: From the Black Death to the Present Day.  The severe labor shortage caused by the black death was, according to Thirsk, a big factor motivating change in the agricultural sector in the 14th century.  

It is amazing how an exogenous shock like plague or war can change perspectives on the relative risk and benefits of new food and farm technologies.