Support for Prop 37 Dips Below 50%

According to the results of the latest poll by the California Business Roundtable and Pepperdine University, support for the GMO mandatory labeling dipped below 50% for the first time.

This graph from their consecutive polls is remarkable:

I'm not sure I've ever seen so dramatic a change in support for an issue in so short a period of time.  

I should note that the high level of support we found in our study conducted in late September is not inconsistent with the above polls once undecideds are factored in.  

My understanding is that a new wave of "YES 37" commercials has hit the airwaves in recent days.  Hard to know what effect they'll have but our research suggested that positive ads were not nearly as effective as negative.    

It will be interesting to see how it turns out on November 6.  I am frankly shocked it is so close.  

Neuroeconomics of Food Choice

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece last week on the need for more neuroeconomic research.  

While I am a bit unsure of where the field is heading (and in some cases it is over-hyped), I do think there are fascinating things to be learned.   That's one of the reasons why I'm involved in a project with researchers at KSU, UMKC, and KU-med, where we are studying how people make choices between foods produced with controversial technologies while observing their brain responses via fMRI.  The ability of plant and food scientists to innovate depends on people's acceptance of technologies, and I'm hopeful that we can provide insight into this matter.

Right now we have 50 observations collected (which is actually quite a large sample size for an fMRI study), and we are in the process of writing up several papers.  So stay tuned for our findings.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with the optimistic closing sentences from the Chronicle article related to whether economist shoulds be spending their time on neuro-imaging: 

The only way to find out, he says, is to do it. And if it works, if a model of a mental process improves an economist's ability to predict what people will do, "then I think neuroeconomics could be very big."

Local Food = Rich People Food

I previously mentioned  some work showing that the local food phenomena was primarily an urban preoccupation.  Now, Feedstuffs reports on the following findings:

An Indiana University study that looked at consumers who buy locally grown and produced foods through farmers markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs found that the venues largely attract a "privileged" class of shoppers.

The study authors interpret their findings to imply:

a need for broadening local food opportunities beyond the privileged, higher-income consumer through alternative payment plans and strategic efforts that make fresh foods accessible to a diversity of people.

I don't quite understand this logic.  If I did a study on the market for automobiles, I'd no doubt find that consumers who buy BMWs and Mercedes represent a "privileged class of shoppers."  But, would this then imply that we need to broad support for buying (i.e., use taxpayer money to subsidize purchases of)  BMWs and Mercedes beyond privileged  higher-income consumers?  

I think it's great that richer people can find opportunities to express their demand for foods with unique characteristics.  But, I don't know why we should expect this to be the norm for everyone.   If your goal is to find inexpensive, healthy food without spending a lot of time shopping and coordinating with others, local foods is unlikely to be an attractive option.  

If you want to expand demand for local food, the answer isn't "alternative payment plans" or "strategic efforts" but rather to make poor people richer so that they want (and can afford) the things local foods provide.  Of course, no one quite knows how to make poor people richer but this is the fundamental issue at stake - not whether we should try to force certain foods on people who have other, more pressing worries in life.  

How Big Food Responds to Big Government

People who advocate for bans on large sodas, taxes on sugar and fat, and  mandatory calorie labels in restaurants often forget that food companies don't just sit idly by and follow the intentions of the policy makers.  Rather, firms (and even consumers) strategically respond to a new food environment - often in unanticipated ways.  

On that note, here is a paper that just appeared in the European Review of Agricultural Economics by four French researchers.   

They argue that:

. . . it is important to take into account the fact that food consumption decisions involve many dimensions related to price, taste, product convenience, health issues, etc. A consumer has to manage a trade-off between several product characteristics. Similarly, the firms have to deal with these multiple dimensions of food consumption in order to compete on a market in which the nutritional quality is just one of many criteria considered by consumers. The analysis of the economic effects of nutritional regulation must not neglect all of these dimensions as changes in the other (nonnutritional) product characteristics may be a response to nutritional policies which affects the welfare and the economic efficiency of nutritional regulation.

and

our results show that nutritional regulations may induce changes in consumers’ decisions and the product quality choices by firms, but they may also affect the competitive game. In an imperfect competition setting, firms react not only by adjusting price and product quality, but also by modifying the product variety available on the market and hence the level of substitutability between food products. This situation can lead to adverse effects from a public health perspective. Indeed, we show that if the tax rate is not well adjusted according to the quality threshold imposed to avoid taxation, it is possible to observe economic distortions that are not compensated by increased health benefits.

The Presidental Election and Food Policy

Over at Reason.com, Balyen Linnekin wrote a column last week where he shared his perspectives on the

ten important federal food-policy issues the presidential candidates should be discussing but have ignored until now.

Yesterday, he put up another post: 

my goal for this week's follow-up column would be to go beyond my own ideas by presenting one idea each from 10 leading food scholars, attorneys, authors, advocates, and others about important food-policy issues they'd  like to see discussed in the presidential campaign and implemented in the future.

Here were my thoughts, which Balyen included in his post (I'm number 6).

The government-funded school lunch program is a bureaucratic nightmare that attempts to do too much: prop up agricultural prices, provide calories to poor under-nourished children, slim the waistlines of the obese, and it forces schools to follow complex rules subject to annual audit. The government subsidizes the price of foods sold from selected distributors and it re-reimburses schools for certain types of students. Why not take these same funds and provide block-grants to schools and let local school boards make their own decisions outside the complex government formula system? We allow charter schools. Why not charter lunchrooms?

Number 7 was also on school lunches.  Check out the other 8 ideas.