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February 2014 Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

The latest release of the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS) is now up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the Super Bowl earlier this month, consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for chicken wings was up 11% this month.  Consumers also appear to be poised to spend more on food away from home this month compared to previous months.  

We repeated a question we asked last month on trust in information about meat and livestock from different sources.  

In particular, we asked, “How trustworthy is information about meat and livestock from the following sources?” Fifteen sources were listed (the order randomly varied across respondents), and respondents had to place five sources in the most trustworthy category and five sources in the least trustworthy category. A scale of importance was created by calculating the proportion of times a meat and livestock information source as ranked most trustworthy minus the proportion of times it was ranked least trustworthy.

This month, we added a question asking how much people knew about each source of potential information (on a 1 to 5 scale).  When you combine those two, the following emerges

trustknowledge.JPG

People have a high level of trust and knowledge of federal regulatory agencies (USDA and FDA).  Although people say they know companies like McDonald's and Tyson, they place a lower level of relative trust in information about meat and livestock from them.  The New York Times, University professors, and Chipotle have relatively low trust and low knowledge.  

Interestingly, being more familiar with a source does not appear to make one more or less likely to trust the source (the correlation between the two measures is almost zero at 0.03).  

I suppose, as an organization, the "ideal" place to be on this graph is to be highly trusted and well known.  What if an organization wants to become more trustworthy?  I suspect that's harder to do for entities that are already well known - like McDonald's or Tyson.  Plus, anytime one has a vested interest in an outcome, their information is unlikely to be as credible as sources with no (apparent) conflict of interest.  That's why it surprises me a bit University professors don't score a bit higher on the trust scale. Maybe people just don't think we know much about meat and livestock (but that's why I picked two Universities that were likely to differ in this regard).  A lot of open questions here. 

What Message is General Mills Sending with Cheerios?

Julie Gunlock had an interesting editorial in the USA Today on General Mills decision to go "GMO free" with Cheerios.  She points out the tough pickle food companies are finding themselves in:

It is understandable that food companies are desperate to find a way to please their critics and reach détente with the powerful anti-GM movement. Yet, it appears these companies have settled on a strategy combining meek contrition (we're sorry we use perfectly safe GM ingredients) and appeasement (we'll get rid of perfectly safe GM ingredients in some…but not all…products). This squishy and schizophrenic policy will accomplish one thing: it will make the problem much worse.

For starters, while General Mills publicly states on its website that the company agrees with the wide consensus among scientists that GM ingredients are safe, the change to Cheerios sends a very different message to consumers: We've made the product safer. Do they mean to suggest Cheerios was previously unsafe.

From a business standpoint, by suggesting Cheerios has been made safer, the company puts its other products — those that still contain GM ingredients — in a bad light. The company might be spinning this as providing consumers more choices, but organic cereals (which cannot contain GM ingredients) have been available for years. Cheerios is hardly breaking ground.

I'm not sure I'd expect food companies to make a principled stand for scientific evidence when they could make money doing otherwise.  However, as Julie points out, it isn't even all that clear that this move is in the long-term best economic interest of the company even if it does cause a quick, short term bump in market share. 

What causes obesity?

According to Gary Taubes, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, we don't really know.

I agree.

Here is Taubes:

Here’s another possibility: The 600,000 articles — along with several tens of thousands of diet books — are the noise generated by a dysfunctional research establishment. Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.

and

One lesson of science, though, is that if the best you can do isn’t good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it — relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science — and then do more, or do something else. As it is, we have a field of sort-of-science in which hypotheses are treated as facts because they’re too hard or expensive to test, and there are so many hypotheses that what journalists like to call “leading authorities” disagree with one another daily.

If I'm not mistaken, Taubes is leading an effort to raise funds to experimentally test his conjecture  (related to effects of sugars and other carbs) about a cause of obesity.  He has written persuasively about his views, but rather than leaving it at that, he's putting his money where his mouth is, and using scientific experiments to test his theory.  Good for him.



The New Yorker on Atrazine

The New Yorker has a long article appearing online today about the controversy between a Berkeley professor (Tyrone Hayes), his research on the herbicide atrazine, and Syngenta - the company that makes it.  

I found this article disturbing in many respects.  I have do doubt Syngenta faces all kinds of chemophobia fear mongering, and constantly has to fight public battles with strategic activist groups who attempt to alter public opinion and public policy, sometimes based on shaky science.  I wish the New Yorker article would have discussed more of that dynamic.  Nevertheless, what it does reveal are allegations of internal memos from the company with  tactics (most of which were apparently never implemented) to smear and discredit the Berkeley professor.  That ought to frighten any academic working on controversial issues, and it unfortunately is likely to reduce the incentive to work on precisely those issues which need the most attention.  This piece focused on the tactics of a business against a professor (and a professor's enthusiasm for attacking the company) but I have little doubt the same can happen from interest groups on all sides of a debate.

More disconcerting still is what this says for the ability of science to resolve disputes about knowledge.  Whether atrazine causes abnormalities in a particular type of frog at a certain dosage should be one of those questions science can answer.  Either atrazine causes these effects or it doesn't.  This isn't one of the mysteries of the cosmos.  This isn't macroeconomics.  Yet, there are apparently findings on both sides of the issue (Note: I have't personally delved into the scientific literature on this particular matter in any detail).  Unlike some of the "science" that gets cited by the anti-GMO crowd, the work critical of atrazine has appeared in top journals like PNAS and Nature, as have articles finding no effect.  Still it appears that the biggest determinant of whether an effect was found is the prior belief about whether one exists.  I don't have a problem with Syngenta funding research on the topic (who, after all, will pay for such research?), but it is disheartening when repeated scientific experiments cannot ultimately settle a dispute that is empirical in nature.  

The last paragraph of the piece was an interesting quote from one of the professor's former students:

He had come to see science as a rigid culture, “its own club, an élite society,” Noriega said. “And Tyrone didn’t conform to the social aspects of being a scientist.” Noriega worried that the public had little understanding of the context that gives rise to scientific findings. “It is not helpful to anyone to assume that scientists are authoritative,” he said. “A good scientist spends his whole career questioning his own facts. One of the most dangerous things you can do is believe.”

In part, I agree.  But, I also fear this is part of an attempt to undermine the ability of scientific inquiry to settle empirical disputes.  I teach a graduate research methods class, and talk a bit about the definition of science, which is often described as a systematic process for discovering new knowledge.  Yes, we should question our facts.  Yes, we should question our biases (and where humans are involved, that will always be an issue).  But, I hold out hope that science can, indeed, provide knowledge for those willing to follow the evidence where it leads.  Otherwise, every issue is simply a PR battle.