How Important is Food Freedom?

Last night 60 Minutes aired an interview between Anderson Cooper and a gentleman named  Shin Dong-hyuk. Shin was born in captivity in North Korea and had never experienced life outside the prison compound much less North Korea.  Shin eventually came into contact with a prisoner who had lived on the outside and it opened his eyes to new possibilities.  I found this exchange between Cooper and Shin remarkable:

Shin: The most important thought was that a prisoner like me could eat chicken and pork if I were able to escape the barbed wires. 

Cooper: I've heard people define freedom in many ways. I've never heard anyone define it as broiled chicken. 

Shin: I still think of freedom in that way.

Cooper: Really?! That's what freedom means to you?

Shin: People can eat what they want. It could be the greatest gift from God. 

Cooper.: You were ready to die just to get a good meal?

Shin: Yes.

One might have thought it was the regular beatings or the forced witness to murder that would have motivated Shin to escape.  But the biggest driver seemed to be his desire to freely eat.  

My TEDx talk is up

If you care to watch my TEDx talk from a couple weeks back, it is now up.  I'm not sure why the organizers gave it the title they did, but the talk is really about food innovation, food prices, and the poor.

Oklahoma State University Professor Jayson Lusk researches many aspects of the economics of food health, safety and quality. Lusk points out in his TEDxOStateU talk that an ideology that blanket-rejects "unnatural" food is one that will ultimately doom us to poverty.

The News and Our Misperceptions of Risk

As news reports continue to circulate on the safety of pork and now on animal welfare and fracking, it is useful to step back and consider how we humans perceive and respond to risk.    

I happened to have recently picked back up Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow, and he summarizes some interesting research on these topics.  First on page 138 after showing results from Slovic's research that people were really bad a judging the relative risks of dying from different cases, Kahneman concludes:

The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage.  The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy.  The media do not just shape what the public is interested in but are also shaped by it . . . Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are.  The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed.

That last sentence is revealing: the key to creating a public panic is to 1) make the issue emotional and 2) repeat the message so that it is readily available in people's memory.   A few pages later (p. 142), he develops this idea further when discussing Sunstein's research:  

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action.  On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public,k which becomes aroused and worried.  This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage . . . The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by 'availability entrepreneurs,' individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news.  The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines.  Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a 'heinous cover-up.'  The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone's mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment.  The availability cascade has now reset priorities.  Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

Beware of the availability entrepreneur.  

Consumer Reports on Pork

If you haven't heard, Consumer Reports will be putting out a story after the first of the year with the headline, "What’s in that pork? We found antibiotic-resistant bacteria and traces of a veterinary drug."  The story has been picked up all over the web and reported on the nightly news.

I'm glad there are consumer watchdogs out there, but one thing I learned years ago is that Consumer Reports (you know the source to which you turn to find out which TV or automobile to buy) often gives sensationalized and one-sided accounts on many food issues.  In that vein, it is useful to see what is the "other side" of the story.

Over at Feedstuffs, Richard Raymond weighted in with a long critique of Consumer Reports account of their findings.  Here are a few of his observations:

You can find antibiotic-resistant bacteria in your navel and on your bed post. They are everywhere, including in your nose where 1 out of 50 Americans harbor Methicillin Resistant Staph aureus (MRSA), a bug they just had to mention in the report.

and

The big splash seems to be the often quoted bit about "Yersinia enterocolitica was in 69% of the tested pork samples. It infects about 100,000 Americans a year."

Want some facts you can take to the bank? 

The Centers of Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), in its own Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases January 2011 edition, states that there were only 950 "aboratory confirmed" cases of Yersinia in 2009.

The same CDC says, in its annual Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report titled 'Incidence and Trends of Infection with Pathogens Transmitted Commonly Through Food", June 10, 2011/60(22):749-755 that the incidence of Yersinia infections have declined by 52% over the last 10 years.

and

Consumer Reports also says 11% harbored enterococcus, which "can cause problems such as urinary tract infections."

Are they even remotely trying to get their readers to think that you can get a bladder infection from eating contaminated pork? I haven't been out of medicine that long to have forgotten how people get an enterococcal bladder infection, and it is not from eating pork. Trust me, I'm a doctor

and

That drug, ractopamine to be specific, causes swine to reach a leaner market weight more quickly, saving the Earth's precious resources such as land, water and feed.

It was approved after years of study by the FDA in 1999. It has been used as a feed additive in over 330 million pigs in the U.S. alone, with not one single case of a human suffering any ill effects from consuming pork.

Its safety for humans is beyond reproach. Because of this, 27 other countries have established MRLs [maximum residue levels] for ractopamine and approved its use in their swine herds. 

 and

The MRL for ractopamine established by FDA is 50 ppb in muscle. The 20% of samples that had any residue were all below 5 ppb, but Consumers Report will not tell if the residue was 1 ppb or 4 ppb. Not that it makes any difference, they are all safe.

The Need for Agricultural Research

Five agricultural economists published an article in the latest issue of Science on the effects of public and private R&D spending on agricultural research.   

Here is the summary:

Most of the increase in global agricultural production over the past half-century has come from raising crop and livestock yields rather than through area expansion. This growth in productivity is attributed largely to investments in research and innovation (1). Since around 1990, there has been a decline in the rate of growth in yield per area harvested for several important crops (2). In parallel, the rate of growth in public spending on agricultural research and development (R&D) has also fallen, which may account for declining crop yield growth and may be contributing to rising food prices (3).

To this, I would add that a deluge of books and documentaries on food have demonized precisely those research developments responsible for yield growth.  It's hard to know exactly what effect these cultural influences have had on firm and government decisions to invest in agricultural research.  

However, many in the food community haven't connected the dots.  Mark Bittman wrote just two days ago about hunger, saying:

It seems absurd to have to say it, but no one in this country should go hungry.

His answer for the problem was more government spending on food stamps and food banks.  Yet, he has repeatedly denounced modern agricultural technologies and has called for food policies that will ultimately increase food prices.  

There is the old saying that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; If you teach him how to fish, you can feed him for a lifetime.  Food stamps give people fish for the day.  Developments in agricultural R&D are the gifts that keep on giving.