Nutritional Guidelines Redux

By now, I'm sure many readers have seen the announcement that the secretaries of the USDA and HHS have announced that the latest dietary guidelines will NOT include issues of sustainability.

This is a topic I've commented on several times in the past, and I was interviewed by Stewart Varney on the Fox Business Network yesterday about the development (I haven't found a link yet to post).

Here are just a few scattered thoughts and comments.

First, it is a bit odd that the nutritional guidelines don't consider behavioral responses of consumers.  That is, if it is recommended not to eat food type X, then what will consumers switch to eating instead?  Note that the question isn't: what do we wish consumers would eat instead, but rather what substitutions will actually occur?  This issue was highlighted in a post by Aaron Carroll on the NYT Upshot blog when discussing a large study that showed reducing saturated fat intake didn't produce noticeable health benefits: 

“The study also resulted in a reduction of unsaturated fats and an increase in carbs. That’s specifically what the committee argues shouldn’t happen. It says that bad fats should be replaced with better fats. However, people did reduce their saturated fats to 10 percent of intake, and didn’t see real improvements in outcomes. This has led many to question whether the quantitative recommendation made by the committee is supported by research.”

In a day and age when behavioral economics is all the rage, and is even being required by the White House, it is a bit absurd to believe consumers will follow all the guidelines and recommendations to-a-tee.  A more pragmatic approach is to realize most people will devote enough attention to get a couple take-home messages, and then act.  We need to study how consumers will actually substitute given their preferences and the messages they digest.  This isn't necessarily a critique of information behind the guidelines themselves (after all, we do want some systematic, scientific summary of the state of nutritional knowledge), but rather a call for research on how the guidelines are actually implemented and communicated and are ultimately used by consumers.

Second, this article by Tania Lombrozo at NPR touches on an issue I addressed several months ago: when guidelines mix nutrition and "sustainability", it necessarily involves value judgments not  science.  She writes:

“Science can (and should) inform our decisions, but you can’t read off policy from science. Invoking science as an arbiter for questions of values isn’t just misguided, it’s dangerous — it fails to recognize what science can (and can’t) provide and it fails to make room for the conversations we should be having: conversations about the kinds of lives we ought to live, the obligations we have to each other, to future humans and to other animals, and — among other things — what that means for the food choices we make every day.”

Finally, looking at a lot of discussion surrounding this issue, while the guidelines purportedly discuss "sustainability" - the issue is often boiled down to a single issue: greenhouse gas emissions.  While it is clear that beef is a larger emitter of greenhouse gasses than most other animal and plant-based food, the impacts need to be placed in context.  In the US, livestock production probably accounts for a very small percentage of all all greenhouse gas emissions.  Telling people to eat less meat will likely have small effects on greenhouse gas emissions.  My gut feeling is that further investments in productivity-enhancing research will have a larger effect on greenhouse gas emissions than cajoling consumers.  

In other places discussing "sustainability" the issue of food security is mentioned, as is resource use.  To an economist's ears, when I hear "resource use", I immediately think of prices.  Prices are the mechanism by which resources get efficiently allocated in a market-based economy.  As such, it gives me pause when I think of a report by a a group of nutritionists making recommendations on proper resource use.   I'd never trust a dictator (or even a group of economists) on having enough knowledge to making optimal decisions on resource use.  Beef is a relatively expensive food.  That tells us it is using a lot of resources, and that higher price causes us to eat less than we otherwise would.  

But, what about externalities?  To the extent beef production uses a lot of corn or land, that's already reflected in the price of beef.  But, does the price of beef reflect water use and potential (long run) impacts of greenhouse has emissions?  Probably not fully.  So, the key there is to try to get the prices right.  Well functioning water markets would be a start.  Greg Mankiw recently had an interview on getting the price of carbon right.  Once the prices are right, then "recommendations" regarding resource use are somewhat meaningless: you're either willing to pay (and able) the price to buy the items you like to eat or not.  

Food by Subscription

I was recently interviewed by the Atlanta Tribune for a story they were running on subscription-based services that deliver meal ingredients to your home.  

It was a bit ironic that this interview request came at this time because my family had recently been trying out one such service: HelloFresh.  Here's what I had to say about why we tried it out:

“My wife spent a large amount of time each week menu planning (i.e., figuring out what to cook for the week), and then even after getting the week planned out sometimes our local grocery store wouldn’t have all the items she needed. So, recently, she signed on to HelloFresh as a way to cut down on time spent searching for recipes and traipsing about town for different ingredients.”

Why is the market growing?

“In general, it’s hard to separate a short-term fad from a trend that has staying power. One thing to look at is the underlying economic forces and see whether there is reason to believe a larger market could exist.
...
Demand for convenience has grown. Demand for quality has grown. The subscriptions boxes offer convenience and quality, all in the comfort of one’s home. Typically one had to choose one or the other (e.g., I could have convenient but that would mean low quality or eating out), but boxes are an innovation that has broken down that traditional constraint. ”

On whether the market will continue to grow

“Hard to say. It will depend on the ability of the box services to continue to offer competitive offerings with grocery stores and restaurants, and it will depend on how these other food service outlets respond in turn. For example, restaurants already offer take out. And, what’s to stop Walmart or Kroger from offering their own boxes ready for pickup?”

Isn't this just a frivolous expense?

“Whether something is a “splurge” depends on one’s budget. . . The box service my family uses winds up costing us about $10 per person per meal. We could easily spend that amount if we went out to eat at a sit-down restaurant, and fast food is only slightly less expensive. Cooking from scratch would be less expensive in terms of food cost, but would require “hidden costs” in more time planning, shopping, and cooking. It’s unlikely that boxes are the best option for every family, but they’ll likely make sense for some families some of the time.”

Anti-GMO propaganda in most unlikely of places

The internet can be a dangerous place for kids.  That's why I was a bit worried when my son said to me today on the way to school: "you won't believe what I saw on Mom's computer."

I was only slightly relieved to hear that he had headed over to a web site a friend had told him about called bigdino.com that links to a bunch of kid's games.  Having talked with me several times about GMOs, he thought I'd be interested to know there were at least three games  at the website on the topic.   You can play the game "Harvest" - the goal of which is to "protect your barn from waves of GMO invaders" or play the games "Stop GMO" or "Stop GMO 2" (the later games seem to be made by a company called MyPlayYard games).

There are insightful images, such as this one of a rabbit pouring some toxic substance on carrots before you're thrown into a game where you're being chased by scary looking radishes and carrots where you must kill or be killed.  

Precondition a generation of kids to be fearful of GMOs, to learn to shoot first and ask questions later, and we wonder why it sometimes so hard to have reasonable discussions about biotechnology . . .

Local foods good for the environment?

A couple months ago the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a paper by Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell.  The paper was widely reported in the press.  For example the Washington Post the headline: As much as 90 percent of Americans could eat food grown within 100 miles of their home.  Another outlet: Most Americans could eat locally.  

I promptly wrote a blog post asking: even if Americans could eat locally, should they?  Shortly thereafter, I exchanged several emails with Pierre Desrochers, the author of the excellent book The Locavore's Dilemma: In Praise of the 10,000-mile Diet.  We decided a more formal reply was warranted.  

I'm pleased to report that a couple days ago Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment published a letter by Pierre and me.

We write:

“In a recent paper, Andrew Zumkehr and Elliott Campbell (2015; Front Ecol Environ 13[5]: 244–248) present a simulation study that assesses the technological feasibility of providing enough local calories to feed every American. In so doing, they suggest turning back the clock on one of Homo sapiens sapiens’ greatest evolutionary achievements: the ability to trade physical goods over increasingly longer distances, producing an attending ever-widening division of labor (Horan et al. 2005). The main benefit of this process is that one hundred people who specialize and engage in trade end up producing and consuming far more than one hundred times what any one individual would achieve on his or her own. By spontaneously relocating food production to regions with higher biotic potential for specific types of crops and livestock in order to optimize the overall use of resources, trade and the division of labor have delivered more output at lower costs.

Zumkehr and Campbell largely sidestep these benefits. They cite a few studies suggesting that (re)localized food systems would deliver environmental, economic, food security, and social benefits, but neglect to mention critiques of those claims”

We offer these specific critiques of their model:

“We also take issue with the authors’ use of yield data from each county to infer the agricultural potential of each location. This approach suffers from selectivity bias; the effect of increasing local food production onto more marginal local lands will likely deliver less-productive results than current average yields. In a competitive market economy, observed crop yields near urban locations are likely to represent an upper bound for the overall level of productivity in the area because only lands productive enough to outcompete other uses are currently devoted to agricultural production. The authors are also silent on the environmental consequences of removing wildlife from current idle lands to make room for domesticated plants and animals.

Moreover, the authors exclude cost considerations and conclude that the “current foodshed potential of most US cities is not limited by current agronomic capacity or demographics to any great extent”, but rather by “social and economic” considerations. However, an economic barrier is just as real and restrictive as an agronomic one. Resource and budget constraints simply will not allow all wants and desires to be realized. It is all very well telling people with limited means to eat local cake, but they should also be told of its price tag.”

Animal-less Burgers

In my forthcoming book, Unnaturally Delicious, I've got a chapter on the promises and challenges of efforts underway to produce lab-grown meat.  My chapter focuses mainly on the efforts of a Dutch scientists, Mark Post.

This article in Tech Crunch discusses related efforts by a different group of scientists and investors.  

“Impossible Foods, a four-year-old, Redwood City, Ca.-based company at work on a new generation of meats and cheeses made entirely from plants, has raised $108 million in new funding from a powerful group of backers.

Investors in the round, which was led by UBS, include Viking Global Investors and earlier backers Khosla Ventures; Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates; and Horizons Ventures, which invests on behalf of Hong Kong business magnate Li Ka-shing.”

Those are some heavy hitters.  It will be interesting to see where it all goes.