The Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

For a number of years, I've thought about creating a monthly survey to track consumer knowledge, concerns, and preferences for various food-related issues.  After no small amount of effort, and thanks to the funding from the Willard Sparks Endowment and DASNR and the assistance of Susan Murray, that vision has now become a reality.  

The inaugural issue is now up online, and we will to follow with regular monthly releases.

Of course, this initial issue can't report changes , but that information will come.

For those who might be interested, the purpose of the project is to provide timely information on:

• Indices of consumer sentiments on (or beliefs about) the safety, quality, and price of food consumed at home and away from home.
• Indices of consumers' anticipated demand for various meat products consumed at home and away from home.
• Awareness of food-related issues or events that could affect demand.
• Emerging policy or marketing issues.

It is envisioned that such data could be used by analysts to:

• Construct and analyze trends in beliefs, demand, and awareness
• Forecast changes in consumption
• Compliment (i.e., merge with) existing sources of secondary data (e.g., USDA disappearance or scanner data) in food demand analysis

Some of the motivations for starting the project include the following.

• Although scanner data is available to analyze immediate past behaviors, it is inherently backward-looking.  A consumer survey can be devised to be forward looking, potentially providing better forecasts.  Moreover, analyzing demand using scanner data is tricky due to issues of supply shifts, endogeneity, unobserved quality variation, promotions, etc that can be overcome with a well-designed survey.
• Current meat demand indices are aggregate, quarterly, assume a constant demand elasticity, and attribute all price/quantity changes to shifts in demand; a survey is more rapid and can better isolate demand-side issues.
• Existing surveys of consumers (i.e., panel diaries or home scanning data) only focuses on at-home food consumption; away from home food consumption now accounts for just under half of all food expenditures.
• Although some marketing companies routinely track eating intentions and awareness of food issues, the data is proprietary and is not publically released in any uniform fashion.  Moreover, their survey questions are not always designed using state-of-the-art techniques in consumer research.

Cooked circa 1887

A couple of weeks ago, I published a piece at TIME.com ​taking issue with some of the emerging cultural notions about food, particularly Pollan's views in the new book Cooked. He essentially argues we'd all be better off if we got back to the kitchen and cooked for ourselves.  I posit that it is one of the marvels of our modern world that we don't have to cook (unless we want to).

​In that context, it is useful to see what people who lived a century ago, many of whom had to work long hours in the kitchen, thought about cooking.  I happen to be reading the book Looking Backward ​written by Edward Bellamy in 1887 with a group of colleagues.  In the book, Bellamy imagines a man living in the late 1800s who wakes up to find himself in a socialist utopia in the year 2000.  I thought the following passages about cooking in his time (1887) compared with the imagined utopia in 2000 were quite revealing.

Here is one passage where a women in the year 2000 is talking about "chores" in the modern utopia:

"Who does your housework, then?" I asked.

"There is none to do,"​ said Mrs. Leete, to whom I addressed this question.  "Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens."

So, this author's vision of a utopia is one in which people don't have to cook for themselves!​  He reveals the reason why when discussing the work of women in the late 1800s:

"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I exclaimed.  "In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."

"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that; enough to convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives."

As history reveals, be glad you don't have to cook unless you happen to like to.​

Environmental Working Group on Organic Impacts

The Environmental Working Group (EWG)​ lists on their web site a ranking of the relative environmental impact (measured in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) of different foods.  The table is based on life-cycle analysis (LCA) conducted by a company called Clean Metrics.

I'm not ​an expert on LCA and I haven't dug into the detail on how Clean Metrics conducted the analysis.  Thus, I won't comment for now on the relative ranking of the different foods and commodities.  

However, I find the labeling on the EWG's prominent graph highly misleading.  The reason is that the chart repeatedly says things like:​

choose organic; ​buy organic; avoid growth hormones

Here is the problem. The research doesn't actually support the claim that these urgings would actually lower greenhouse gas emissions.  In fact, by their own admission, the EWG reveals that:

The lifecycle assessments are based on conventional rather than pasture-based or organic systems of food production. . . we were unable to identify definitive studies and widely accepted methodologies assessing greenhouse gas emissions from pasture-raised, organic or other meat production systems. 

So, the analysis didn't actually study the greenhouse gas emissions of organics or pasture-raised!​

​Moreover, when we look at the words of the company (Clean Metrics) that conducted the study that forms the basis of the EWG chart, we see things like:

There is not a strong correlation between organic food production methods and lower carbon footprints.

and

On balance, grass-fed animal products from ruminants are likely to have higher carbon footprints compared to products from conventionally housed/fed animals.

​Also, when we look at the research on growth hormones, like in this Journal of Animal Science article, we find

Manure output increased by 1,799 × 10^3 t as a result of [growth -enhancing technologies - primarily growth hormones] withdrawal, with an increase in carbon emissions of 714,515 t/454 × 10^6 kg beef

and this article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science shows that the use of the growth hormone rBST in milk could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, the EWG may have other reasons for advising against consuming foods with growth hormones or advising to eat organic over conventional, but I find it misleading to make these claims in a prominent graph ranking foods by greenhouse gas emissions.

Interview with Oklahoma Horizon

Here is an interview I recently conducted on the Food Police with Oklahoma Horizon TV with aired on Oklahoma Public TV and on RFDTV.​

Food Fear Mongering

A colleague forwarded me this story from NBC news.​  It's really hard to know where to start in on all the misleading claims and innuendos.  There first couple paragraphs will give you a sense of the tone:

American eaters, let’s talk about the birds and the bees: The U.S. food supply – from chickens injected with arsenic to dying bee colonies – is under unprecedented siege from a blitz of man-made hazards, meaning some of your favorite treats someday may vanish from your plate, experts say.

Warmer and moister air ringing much of the planet – punctuated by droughts in other locales – is threatening the prime ingredients in many daily meals, including the maple syrup on your morning pancakes and the salmon on your evening grill as well as the wine in your glass and the chocolate on your dessert tray, according to four recent studies.

At the same time, an unappetizing bacterial outbreak in Florida citrus droves, largely affecting orange trees, is causing fruit to turn bitter. Elsewhere, unappealing fungi strains are curtailing certain coffee yields and devastating some banana plantations, researchers report.

​Strictly speaking, each of the above examples does indeed correspond to a real challenge faced in each of the above industries.  But, does it represent a "food supply under assault" as the title of the article suggests?  Are each of these the cause of global warming?  The author later blames problems on "mono-culture" agriculture but that doesn't fit well any of the commodities described above. 

Much of the paranoia seems to stem from an interview with one professor of public health at Johns Hopkins who is quoted as saying things like:​

We need to regard all of these (examples) as a very powerful motivator to try to work on the carbon emissions, to start pushing that parts per million of carbon dioxide back down

​and

“Maybe seeing this impact all this has on our ability to raise the food we depend on will get us to the tipping point of real policy change and real action,” Lawrence said. “I hope so.”

Another professor of environmental science is quoted as saying:

We’re in a situation where the food supply is more vulnerable than it has ever been

​Providing a few anecdotal stories does not constitute scientific evidence.  If we are indeed so vulnerable, why is it that crop prices in the US have come down off their highs a year or so ago.  If late corn planting were really a sign of disaster (as this article suggests), it would be reflected in high corn prices but that's not what we're seeing.    

Moreover, why didn't the author actually go to the data and look at per-capita food availability (which can be found here)​, which doesn't reveal any general lack of scarcity. Or, why didn't they turn to the research on the projected impacts of climate change on agricultural production, which suggests it may be beneficial for agriculture (for some counter evidence, see here).  Either way, yes climate change will likely hurt some regions and some commodities, but it will also help other regions and commodities.  Growing corn and melons in Canada will become much easier (and less costly) if it gets warmer there.  

Its this sort of fear mongering based on anecdotal evidence, rejection of modern technology, ​followed up by ill-advised (and under-researched) policy recommendations that largely motivated me to write the Food Police.