No Need to Fear the Horse Meat Burger

Today, the Oklahoman (the largest newspaper in the state), ​ran an editorial I wrote on the European horse meat scandal.  I also touched on the consequences of the end of horse slaughter in the US.  Here are a few snippets:

An expanding European horse meat scandal has left many Americans wondering whether the same could happen here. Americans are unlikely to find a horse burger. Before celebrating, it might do some good to learn why.

Because horse slaughter ended in the US in 2007.  The consequences?

Unable to find a home for aged or crippled horses, ranchers faced high prices for euthanasia and disposal. Many horses were abandoned and left to starve. Investigations into horse abuse, for example, increased 60 percent in Colorado following slaughter cessation. Our research suggests that slaughter cessation caused a 36 percent drop in horse prices at a major Oklahoma auction and resulted in losses of $4 million per year in the yearling quarter horse market.

and

Americans are unlikely to find horse meat on their plate because we no longer produce any. It's possible that mislabeled products could be imported, but about 90 percent of the beef eaten by Americans is homegrown. If mislabeled products were found here, the answer wouldn't be, as we've seen, to ban horse slaughter. However much we are culturally predisposed to abhor eating horse, the reality is that it's safe and perfectly tasty. Just ask the French

and:​

. . . if a food retailer lies, there are legal remedies. The mere knowledge of liability, not to mention lost reputation, incentivizes truth telling. More vigilance might have stopped the faux beef sellers in Europe. But no government can prevent us from all harm. Nor should we want it to. Vigilance is costly and our governments are already doing too much.

in conclusion

The lesson from these equine scandals isn't necessarily that the government should have been doing more. Rather, politicians should learn what every good horse intuitively knows: Look before you leap.

The Food Police

My new book The Food Police: A Well Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate officially goes one sale April 15, 2013.  You can pre-order a copy now in hardcover or kindle or nook.

​To whet your appetite, the front and back covers of the book jacket are below

Here is an early review from Kirkus, the book review magazine:​

Why Do People Want Local Food?

That was the question motivating some research ​I conducted with a couple co-authors that is forthcoming in the journal Ecological Economics.  A lot of the previous research in this area had simply interviewed people at farmers markets and asked why local food was desirable.  This sort of approach is problematic for a number of reasons.  For one, people at farmers markets are not a random sample of the population and likely have different preferences and desires than the average consumer.  Another problem: we don't always know why we do what we do even though we're good at making up post hoc stories.  

To address these challenges, we conducted some research with a randomly recruited group of German consumers (located in Bonn Germany) who spend real money to buy real food.  ​Our research strategy was to pick two different kinds of foods for which freshness is related to distance traveled for one but not another.  The idea is that this would let us sort out the extent to which desires for freshness are driving desires for local food.  We picked apples (where distance traveled is related to freshness) and wine (where distance traveled is not related to freshness) and asked how much people were willing to pay (WTP) for different apples and bottles of wine that had traveled different distances.  

Here is our key result:​

These findings imply that ‘a mile is NOT a mile’. The data in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 indicate that discounts for km traveled (especially in percentage terms) are higher for apples than for wine — a fact that suggests freshness is one driver of demand for ‘local’. In fact, comparing the change in bids across apples and wine suggests that of the total drop in WTP that occurs from moving from 20 to 1000 km, about 28.5% can be attributed to freshness (i.e., (1 − 0.35 / 0.49) ∗ 100 = 28.5%). In the following we will present additional evidence that people perceive freshness to be more related to distance traveled for apples than wine . . .

The (Not So) Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

​The New York Times Magazine ran a feature story this weekend by Michael Moss entitled The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.  There is really so much that could be said about this piece (and probably the forthcoming book by Moss), but for now, I'll just leave you with the letter I sent to the editors of the NYT:

Michael Moss’s over-wrought piece on the “Science” of addictive junk food misses some key facts.  Around the time the executives of Big Food were in their clandestine meeting, regular folk were voluntarily cutting back.  CDC data reveals that the average weight of 40-49 year old women fell 0.2 lbs over the last ten years.  In the last four years, the average weight of men in this age range went down 1.7 lbs (women’s weight fell by 3.3 lbs).  It seems that the addictions cooked up by nefarious food scientists are waning.  Or maybe they weren’t addictive at all.  I gave up regular Dr. Pepper in 2002 when my pants began fitting too snugly, and I can’t recall any withdrawal symptoms.  If Big Food isn’t in their lab trying to create new tasty treats I want to try again and again, I’m not sure why they exist.​

Sometimes It's Hard to Be a Woman

That was the opening lyric to the Tammy Wynette song Stand by Your Man (although I much prefer Lyle Lovett's rendition).  Not being one myself, it is a bit dangerous to weigh in on such matters, but when one looks at the data, the lives of many women - at least as far as housework goes - has gotten much better over the past half century (though, to be sure, lives today are probably more complicated).    ​

According to this study published in PLoS ONE from 1965 to 201:

The time allocated to [household management] [Lusk: these are duties such as time spent in food preparation, post-meal cleaning activities (e.g., dish-washing), clothing maintenance (e.g., laundry), and general housework] by women] (19–64 yrs) decreased from 25.7 hr/week in 1965 to 13.3 hr/week in 2010 (P<0.001), with non-employed women decreasing by 16.6 hr/week and employed women by 6.7 hr/week (P<0.001). 

​

Non-employed women have gained almost a whole day! ​I referred to similar statistics toward the end of my TEDx talk, where I discuss some of the positive changes that have resulted from modern agriculture and improved food technologies.  With today's widely available dishwashers, microwaves, and washing machines, not to mention easily available, convenient food, housework doesn't take the time it once did (it's also true that men help out more than the once did, which helps).  

The authors of the PLoS ONE article went one step further, however, and asked: what happened to all those calories women once burned cooking and doing housework?  ​Their answer is that, even though many women now exercise more, the result is that those calories haven't gone anywhere - they've been stored as extra weight, and as such, this technological shift is (at least partially) to blame for the rise in obesity.  They calculate that non-employed women experienced a 42% reduction in energy expenditure (30% for employed women) because of the change in time spend on housework. 

Here is their conclusion:​

From 1965 to 2010, there was a large and significant decrease in the time allocated to HM [household management]. By 2010, women allocated 25% more time to screen-based media use than HM (i.e., cooking, cleaning, and laundry combined). The reallocation of time from active pursuits (i.e., housework) to sedentary pastimes (e.g., watching TV) has important health consequences. These results suggest that the decrement in HMEE [household management energy expenditure may] have contributed to the increasing prevalence of obesity in women during the last five decades.

I made a related argument at the end of my talk on the politics and economics of obesity (see here).  ​It is almost impossible to sort out all the good changes that have happened since the 1960s (less smoking, more air conditioning, more driving, more convenient food, less housework, etc.) from some of the bad (e.g., higher prevalence of obesity).  It's probably human nature to want to have our cake and eat it too, but sometimes we may just want to accept the tradeoffs live presents us.  While there are probably a few women who wouldn't mind switching spots with their grandmothers, I suspect the vast majority would prefer their current lot in life.  None of this is to say that  we can't work toward a thinner and healthier present - only that it helps to have a bit of perspective before getting up in arms.

P.S.  As much as the story told in the PLoS ONE article fits in with the narrative I've weaved in some previous talks (and in my forthcoming book), there are some holes in the logic.  For example, why has the weight of men risen from 1960 to today?  Are men doing less housework too?  Or have their employed jobs also become less strenuous?  Another challenge:  women didn't start sitting on their duffs when they stopped doing as much housework - many started jobs outside the home, which presumably required some energy expenditure, though the current study simply lumps all "paid work" together as if sitting at a desk or digging ditches requires the same energy.    ​