Fads in Fad Diets

Over at Vox.com Jullia Belluz had a post last week showing trends in google searches for different diets from 2005 to 2015.

Scroll through the following graphic.  I knew the gluten-free diet was trendy, but I hadn't appreciated the extent to which it had fully and completely overtaken all the other fad diets.  Back in 2006 and 2007, organic diets seemed to be most popular in many locations, by 2009 it seemed to be gone and replaced by a rise in vegan and gluten-free diets.  We're all gluten free now.  What's next?

The making of hybrid corn

After giving a talk at University of Nebraska a couple weeks ago, Cory Walters suggested the book The Hybrid Corn Makers: Prophets of Plenty written by Richard Crabb in 1947 (the whole book can be downloaded here).  I’m a couple chapters in and it is already fascinating.  The introduction (which explains hybrid corn)  was written by HD Hughes, a professor who was at Iowa State College at the time.    

Hughes writes:

“One of the greatest advantages of the technique of breeding hybrid corn is the opportunity afforded to develop strains especially well fitted to particular conditions of weather, soil, disease, and insects. By bringing together the right combination of inbreds, hybrids are “custom built” for particular needs. . . . From this we can see how important it is to find the particular hybrids best adaptetd to conditions likely to prevail in a given location. Many hybrids, especially those used in the northern corn-growing areas, are so closely adapted to particular conditions that they are superior to other hybrids only in an area no more than fifty or one hundred miles north or south”

I share this passage because there seems to be a common, modern view that "monoculture" cropping agriculture has led to a dramatic reduction in genetic diversity.  I gave a talk last week to a large intro to food science class and talked a bit about biotechnology.  One student asked me precisely this question: Don't GMOs reduce genetic diversity and thus make the entire system more vulnerable to  disease, etc.  But, as the above quote shows, even in the 1940s, there are many different types of corn in different locations, and that's true still today.  I also pointed this out when responding to Nassim Taleb's claims about GMOs: 

“Moreover, what he doesn’t seem to get with regard to modern GMOs is that a GMO isn’t a variety. A particular trait - say herbicide resistance - is introduced into many, many varieties in different parts of the country and the world. ”

In any event, the first chapter of the book is an interesting discussion on the history of corn and how it spread across South and North America.  Crabb writes:

“Scouts sent by Columbus to explore what is now the Island of Cuba became the first white men of record to see corn. On November 5, 1492, the first corn fields they encountered stretched across the Caribbean countryside continuously for eighteen miles.”

and

“Columbus returned to Spain in early in 1493, carrying with him the first maize ever seen in Europe. That year corn grew in the royal gardens of Spain and withing two generations was growing as a food crop in every country of sixteenth-century Europe. In less than a century, Indian corn had moved completely around the world.”

Genetically Modified Pigs 2

Yesterday I linked to a recording of a panel discussion on GMO pigs.  I now see that CBC news has an article on the topic.  Here's a bit of what I had to say:

“Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State University, agrees.

”These are all very different traits that have very different potential impacts,” he told The Current.

However, most people don’t know much about genetic engineering, he said.

”So I think that makes it hard to discuss with someone in the general public.”

He noted that the genetic modifications that researchers are making to pigs are “aimed at addressing what we’d all probably agree are important problems.”

”There are risks with these technologies, there are risks with every technology,” he said. “There are also risks with not approving these technologies.”

But he acknowledged that surveys show that the public has a general aversion to genetic modification and is willing to pay more to avoid GMO products.

”I don’t think it’s necessarily a fear of genetic engineering — it’s a fear of uncertainty,” he said.

That aversion can be offset somewhat if people know why the animals are being modified, he added.”

Why we eat better today

Megan McArdle has an excellent post at Bloomberg review that she titled The Economics Behind Grandma's Tuna Casseroles.

McArdle sets out to explain why we eat differently (and in many ways better) than our grandparents.  Here's my favorite passage:

“You have a refrigerator full of good-looking fresh ingredients, and a cabinet overflowing with spices, not because you’re a better person with a more refined palate; you have those things because you live in 2015, when they are cheaply and ubiquitously available. Your average housewife in 1950 did not have the food budget to have 40 spices in her cabinets, or fresh green beans in the crisper drawer all winter.”

She also notes that food preference were probably similar in the 1950s as compared to today, it's just that our grandparents couldn't afford to eat the way we now do, and technological changes have made what were previously "fancy" foods available to the masses.  Take, Jello for instance:

“The foods of today’s lower middle class are the foods of yesterday’s tycoons. Before the 1890s, gelatin was a food that only rich people could regularly have. It had to be laboriously made from irish moss, or calf’s foot jelly (a disgusting process), or primitive gelatin products that were hard to use. The invention of modern powdered gelatin made these things not merely easy, but also cheap. . . . Over time, the ubiquity of these foods made them déclassé. Just as rich people stopped installing wall-to-wall carpeting when it became a standard option in tract homes, they stopped eating so many jello molds and mayonnaise salads when they became the mainstay of every church potluck and school cafeteria. That’s why eating those items now has a strong class connotation.”

There is a lot more at the link and the whole thing is worth reading.

Genetically Modified Pigs

A few weeks ago I participated in a panel discussion on CBC radio out of Canada on the topic of genetically modified animals.  They aired the story this morning.  You can list to the whole thing here.