Artificial Meat

​I was interviewed recently for this piece on artificial meat that appeared a couple days ago in a major online French publication.  I'm not fluent enough in French to competently comment on the content of the article, but I found one line of questioning by the journalist, Yannick Demoustier,  quite perceptive.  

He noted the demand for meat substitutes and artificial meat was motivated by many factors including animal welfare and environmental concerns.  Many (though not all) of the folks trying to reduce meat consumption are also motivated by a "return to nature" phenomena - seeking to avoid "artificial" food. ​  

The journalists asked how these folks will react to meat made in a lab with the latest scientific technologies.  The choice pits desires for "naturalness" against desires for "sustainability" and highlights the fact that these two are not the same.  I don't think we know much about this trade-off and it is a great question for future research.

Can Labeling Actually Harm Consumers?

That was the question asked in a recent study Stephan Marette and I just published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization.  ​The answer is "maybe."  

Traditional economic models assume that more information (as long as it is accurate) can only help consumers (so long as the cost of providing the information isn't higher than the benefit).  After all, if a consumer doesn't find the information useful, it can simply be ignored.  ​

But, this model assumes consumers are perfectly informed about all controversial issues they confront and that they can fully pay attention to all these competing issues.​

What we show in our paper is that when consumers' attentions are limited (as they almost certainly are), that providing information (even if it is accurate) can - in some cases - actually make the consumer worse off.  How?  Because more information about one topic (like whether foods are made with genetically engineered ingredients) might distract consumers from paying attention from other important topics (like the number of carbs in the food) which has a bigger impact on long-term health.  ​

Here is the paper abstract:​

Information and labeling are popular food policy instruments because of their presumed positive influence on consumer welfare. In a one-good case with unlimited attention, we show consumer welfare is always improved with the provision of accurate information. However, in a two-good case with limited attention, we show that consumer welfare is not always improved with the provision of accurate information. When attention is constrained, welfare may fall with information provision policies irrespective of their costs. The results suggest information and labeling polices may sometimes be counterproductive when attention is limited.

Effects of Biotechnology on Corn Yields

In relative terms, this suggests that the presence of GM technology may have led to corn yield gains 1.4–1.5 times higher than would have been achieved with traditional crop breeding techniques alone.

​That's from the article The Contribution of Genetic Modification to Changes in Corn Yield in the United States by Elizabeth Nolan and Paulo Santos in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

Uninteded Consequences of Mandatory Labeling

In light of the impending vote on Prop 37, which would require mandatory labeling of GE food in California, I found this post from David Henderson ​back in July about a previous mandatory labeling initiative in California to be quite telling:

I went on line a few days ago to order some vitamins. One of the items I ordered was Green Tea Complex. When I tried to place the order, I got a message in red saying that I couldn't order Green Tea Complex. So I deleted that item and the order went through. Today I went to the local GNC to buy the item I had bought many times before. It was on the shelf and so I picked up two. I told the salesman that I hadn't been able to order it on line. He explained that there is one Green Tea Complex for California and one for the other 49 states. I asked why. He said it was because the ones sold in the California have the Proposition 65 warning that the item contains ingredients that may cause cancer. (If I recall correctly, this Proposition, passed in 1986, was the first one I ever got to vote against, after I had become a U.S. citizen earlier that year.)

"Do you think the ingredients are any different?" I asked him. He answered that he didn't think so and that the only difference was probably the absence of the warning on the non-California bottle.

Why the Cities are Not Likely the Farms of the Future

This piece in the Wall Street Journal​ argues:

The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world—a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest environmental problems along the way.

​There some problems with this line of reasoning.  Here are just a few:

• As pointed out by Harvard professor Ed Glaeser last year, some of the biggest environmental problems comes from commuters driving into the city.  Diverting potential living space to crop-growing space keeps some people out in the suburbs who would otherwise live in town.  The environmental costs of their commutes is likely much higher than any environmental benefits from local food.
• More generally, there are very high opportunity costs to land in the city.  In non-economic terms: land in the city is really valuable because there are many alternative uses for it.  ​While I have no issue if a city-based farm is sufficiently profitable  to out-compete all the other alternative uses for the land, it is much more difficult to argue that such activities are deserving of public praise or funding.  
• As we pointed out in a piece last year, ​transportation accounts for a relatively small portion of the environmental impacts of food production (and the overall cost of food for that matter).  The implication of this insight is that production costs (and emissions) are often lower if you produce food where it can be most efficiently grown and then ship it to where it is consumed.  
• Using greenhouses to grow produce (such as tomatoes) in northern climates (e.g., New York, Chicago, Boston) is likely to produce many more carbon emissions than ​growing produce in the naturally warm environments like Florida and shipping north (see this review).

Here is a nice review of the existing research on the topic.  The authors say:​

Thus, advocacy for ‘local’ food suggests that it is generally better overall to consume local food than food  produced ‘non-locally’. However, a priori reasoning would question the universality of such claims, as every location is local to someone, but all locations are non-local to most people. 

​and

We conclude that food miles are a poor indicator of the environmental and ethical impacts of food production. 

​