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Is making beef like making beer?

That is the claim in this piece at CNN by the Director of New Harvest, which aims to make lab-raised meat. 

The production of beer requires living organisms -- yeast -- and nourishment for those organisms -- grain. How these elements come together with others to make beer is straightforward in theory, and nuanced in practice. The products are varied and distinct.
Cultured meat production is extremely similar. Explained simply, all that is required is a cell line and nourishment for those cells. How the cells are grown, and under what conditions, are adjustable. The potential variety of materials and processes will allow cultured meat to take on many distinctly unique forms, flavors and textures.

I really liked the following two paragraphs about technology in food:

It's a new way of thinking because this is food science by the public, for the public. It prompts a widespread conversation about a food technology years in advance of its market release rather than years afterward. It's a new way of thinking because it's a technology largely driven by societal demand and people have pushed this forward, as donors to a cause.
The biggest reasons why cultured meat hasn't progressed further is a lack of funding and a lack of creative understanding. We're not used to food technology being a positive solution. We're not used to food development being nonprofit. And we're not used to a nonprofit group generally categorized as an animal rights/environmentalist group requiring a cancer research-scale budget. But we're learning.

 

 

What Do Food Stamp Recipients Buy?

This editorial in the LA Times sounds an "alarm" about our lack of knowledge about how food stamp recipients spend their money:

The debate in Congress  about cutting the food stamp program has sparked predictable clashes between those who want to help the poor and those who want to cut government spending. But strangely missing from the arguments is a shocking fact: The public, including Congress, knows almost nothing about how the program's $80 billion is spent.

The underlying premise of article seems to be a notion that we need to know how food stamp recipients spend their money so we can decide if they are using it wisely.  That is, should purchases of food stamp recipients should be restricted to exclude unhealthy items?  I'm a bit skeptical of the impacts of such policies for reasons I talked about previously:

we have to realize that restricting [food stamp] use may not have the intended effect.  Money is fungible.  If you can't use food stamps to buy sodas, you'll use them to buy more of something else - freeing up money to buy soda.

But, that's not the reason I'm weighing in here.  Coming off a highly successful meeting of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association earlier this week, I was again reminded of the exciting and energetic work being done by my fellow food and agricultural economists.  I can only think that many of them who study food stamp (SNAP) issues would bristle at the statement in the LA Times that: 

SNAP is kept under wraps. And Congress acts blindly, with the House voting to remove SNAP from the farm bill altogether and the Senate proposing to cut $4 billion from the program.

If Congress acts blindly, it is only because they (or their staffers) are unwilling to read the peer-reviewed research.   The fact is that there are large number of studies that, by merging various data sets, have investigated what SNAP recipients eat, how their purchases differ from non-SNAP recipients, and whether SNAP participation causes things like obesity.  

True, we may not have scanner-type data from grocery stories tied to EBT cards, but that is a far stretch from claiming we know nothing or act "blindly". 

 

Another study raises questions about sweetened beverage taxes

A small group of food and agricultural economists have been quietly releasing research that questions the argument that sweetened beverage taxes will have any meaningful impact on the rates of obesity.  First was a French study showing fat taxes to be quite regressive (i.e., the burden is most heavily paid by the poor) having very small effects on nutritional content.  Then was a UC Davis study showing that the only kind of tax to have much effect on weight would be an across-the-board food or calorie tax.  After that, I discussed a Cornell study showing that sweetened beverage taxes are likely to be far less effective than previously predicted if food taxes are only calculated at the register and not posted on the shelf (as is the case in virtually all US retail outlets).  I then talked about my own research on the issue, pointing out some weaknesses in much of the conceptual reasoning about fat taxes. 

Now, comes this paper just accepted for publication in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.   The authors find: 

A half-cent per ounce increase in sugar-sweetened beverage prices is predicted to reduce total calories from the 23 foods and beverages but increase sodium and fat intakes as a result of product substitution.

The authors also showed that previous studies, which failed to account for the full substitution effects across foods (an issue we highlighted back in 2008 in this paper), would over-estimate the effectiveness of a sweetened beverage tax.  They also estimate that the consumer welfare losses that results from paying higher prices from a tax are higher among the poorer consumers than the richer consumers.  

Ultimately, the authors predict that a one-half cent tax per once of sweetened beverages would cause

reductions of 0.37 and 0.16 kg/person in 1 year

for low and high income consumers.