Food Company Voluntarily Adds GMO Labels

This is a potential game changer (from the NYT):

“Breaking from its industry rivals, Campbell Soup will become the first major food company to begin disclosing the presence of genetically engineered ingredients like corn, soy and sugar beets in its products.”

A while back when writing about the duplicity of a many food companies on the issue of GMO labeling, I wrote

“For now, food companies are not required to add labels indicating the presence of genetically engineered ingredients. But, it might ultimately be in their best interest to do it voluntarily, and in a way that avoids the negative connotations implied by the labels that would have been mandated in state ballot initiatives.

Some day in the near future, after concerted efforts to educate the public and create consumer-oriented biotechnologies, we may see food companies clamoring to voluntarily add a label that proclaims: proudly made with biotechnology.”

Campbell's isn't going that far (and in fact they're supporting nationwide mandatory labels on foods with genetically engineered ingredients).  Nonetheless, this is an interesting move, and it will be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Possible Impacts of Massachusetts Ballot Question on Animal Welfare

Joshua Miler of the Boston Globe has a piece on a ballot initiative in Massachusetts.  He writes:

“The proposed Massachusetts ballot initiative, backed by a coalition called Citizens for Farm Animal Protection, has met the first and most arduous signature-gathering hurdle to make the ballot and is expected to clear the other obstacles that remain to make the November ballot.

It would ban the production and sale in the state of eggs from hens and meat from pigs and calves kept in tight enclosures starting in January 2022. For selling of shell eggs in Massachusetts, each hen would have to have access to at least 1.5 square feet of usable floor space.”

What are the possible cost implications?  

On the one hand:

“a consulting firm being paid by advocates to conduct an economic analysis of the ballot question’s impact, said the price increase would be modest. He predicted something on the order of 1 or 2 cents per egg, 12 to 24 cents a dozen”

On the other hand:

“[a top executive at Sauder’s Eggs, a big producer in Pennsylvania which ships many eggs to Massachusetts] estimates that the Massachusetts ballot question would raise the price by 70 or 80 cents per dozen, maybe more.”

Here was my take, as cited in the story:

“Some experts in the field say the best place to look to compare prices is California, where the sale of eggs from hens kept in small “battery cages” became illegal at the start of last year.

In a recent paper, Jayson L. Lusk, a professor of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University, and another researcher used grocery store scanner data from California and other states to estimate how California’s animal welfare law changed the price of eggs. Per a dozen eggs, they found it raised prices by around 75 cents on average, a 22 percent increase over what the price of eggs would have been had the laws not gone into effect.

Lusk acknowledged that there are several confounding variables in extrapolating that data to Massachusetts, from last year’s avian influenza outbreak to Massachusetts importing more of its eggs than California (which could make the increase bigger) to the growth of the cage-free industry by 2022 (which could make the increase smaller).

But the overarching conclusion was clear.

“Egg prices are going to increase in Massachusetts” if the ballot measure passes, he said, “I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. The question really is ‘how much?’ ””

The cited research papers are discussed in this post.

Eating Right in America

With the federal new nutritional guidelines coming out today, I suspect there will be a lot of talk about why the guidelines ultimately didn't recommend less meat eating, the impact of the guidelines, and the process behind the formation of the guidelines.

As such, now is probably as good a time as any to share a few thoughts about Charlotte Biltekoff's book, Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health, which I picked up over the break.  In the book, Biltekoff argues that dietary advice is about much more than just science and represents a social construct laden with moral undertones.  She recounts the history behind several different phases of the dietary reform movements in the US starting with the science-based nutrition efforts (the force behind "home economics") that began in the late 1800s and early 1900s right through to today's alternative food movement (as far as entertaining food history goes, I prefer Harvey Levenstein's Fear of Food).  The thing that unites all the food reformers, Biltekoff argues, isn't the actual diets they recommend but rather the religious fervor of the people recommending the diets.  

She argues that one of the reasons we worry so much about what we eat today is:

“not because of an increase in incidence of diet-related diseases or because of growing knowledge about the role of diet in preventing such diseases, but because of ongoing expansions in the social significance of dietary health and the moral valence of being a “good eater.””

and

“dietary ideals always communicate not only rules for how to choose a “good diet”, but also guidelines for how to be a good person.””

Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that as organized religion as been on the decline in recent decades that people are seeking to express their moral chops in other domains - food now being a common choice.

Interestingly, Biltekoff is quite critical of the modern alternative food movement led by Alice Waters and Michael Pollan.  It is a movement that she, quite rightly, says has served to discount scientific evidence and to elevate the role of the senses and tradition.  She also notes how the movement has, "heightened the moral valence of eating right with alternative food, creating higher stakes for food and bad eating than in previous eras" and that it "wielded its own moral force with little-self awareness or critique."  

Biltekoff concludes with the following:

“Given its social and moral freight, eating right is a kind of unexamined social privilege. It is not unlike and is clearly connected to other forms of privilege that usually goes unnoticed by the people who possess them, such as whiteness and thinness. Choosing socially sanctioned diets makes subtle but very powerful claims to morality, responsibility, and fitness for good citizenship. We who are lucky enough to have eating habits that align with the dietary ideals or inhabit the kind of bodies that imply we may think our shapes or healthy preferences are a sign of our virtue, the result of our will, or perhaps nothing more than a lucky twist of fate ... [should understand that] history shows that there are cultural mechanisms that produce the seemingly natural alignment between ideal diets, ideal body sizes, and the habits and preferences of the elite. We should therefore question our common-sense assumptions about the “goodness” of good eaters and be very careful about the subtle forms of social and moral condemnation we mete out, often unconsciously, to “bad eaters.” ”

I tried to put it more plainly in the Food Police: don't be a backseat driver when it comes to food.

Overall, I found the book to be a bit verbose, relativistic, and social-class-focused for my tastes, but it nonetheless provided some good food for thought. 

Thinking about risk

Consider this passage from a recent New York Times article

“Mr. Portier, who led the center when the revision process was initiated, said he believed parents should have been presented “with enough information to say caution isn’t ill advised, because we really don’t know, and there are enough indicators to say we should be cautious.””

The quoted former CDC official is espousing a form of the precautionary principle.  What do you think he's referring to? GMOs?  A new pesticide?  Food irradiation?

Nope. He's talking about cell phones.   The article describes some squabbles at the CDC on whether using cell phones cause cancer (the same World Health Organization group that says bacon and the weed-killer glyphosate may be carcinogenic  have also said that cell phones are a possible carcinogen), and how to communicate with the public on the issue.

So, here he have an issue for which there is apparently some scientific uncertainty, for which some government officials want the public to proceed only with caution, and the the public response?  A big shrug.  

Why is it that people think about the risks surrounding cell phones so differently than they do the risks surrounding GMOs, glyphosate, irradiation or many other food and agricultural technologies?  One could write a whole paper on that topic.  In fact I have (along with Jutta Roosen and Andrea Bieberstein).

There are a variety of reasons.  For one, people tend to conflate benefits and risks.  If something is beneficial then, people tend to think of it as less risky (even though we can imagine some very beneficial products that are also risky).  People directly see the benefits of using cell phones every day and thus they are perceived as less risky than, say, a pesticide that they have never heard of and scarcely can imagine  using.  Then, there is the old risk perception literature that originated with folks like Paul Slovic that is still relevant today.  The idea is that risk perceptions aren't driven by objective probabilities of possible bad outcomes but by how familiar or unusual a product seems and by how much control we believe we have over the risk.  Cell phones seems relatively safe because they're now quite familiar and because we decide whether to pick it up or turn it off.  Many food and agricultural technologies, by contrast, seem foreign and have secretly been slipped into our food supply (or so the story goes; ever notice now many of the top-selling food books use words like "hidden" or "secret" in the subtitles?).  

Whether there are good reasons for these psychological biases is less clear, particularly when they run at odds with the best scientific evidence we have on relative risks.  I for one, am perfectly at ease eating a tortilla made from Roundup-Ready corn while chatting on my cell phone.  The biggest risk is probably getting salsa on my iPhone.      

Country of Origin Labeling Conspiracy

I've seen the following meme going around on social media.    

I don't know whether the source is actually March Against Monsanto, but whoever put it out is obviously trying to stoke paranoia without any context or background.  And, like most good lies, the meme contains an element of truth.

First, it is true that both Houses of Congress repealed mandatory country of origin labeling (MCOOL).  This happened about a month ago.  What the meme doesn't revel is why.

MCOOL has been controversial since it's inception more than a decade ago, and the policy was fought by the largest beef and pork producer organizations.  Moreover, our trading partners were less than happy with the law.  Canada and Mexico filed suit with the World Trade Organization (WTO) claiming the law represented a non tariff trade barrier.  The USA lost the first round and several appeals (here's the timeline from the WTO).  What the meme doesn't reveal is that if Congress didn't repeal MCOOL then Canada and Mexico could slap on more than a billion dollars in retaliatory tariffs; my understanding is that these tariffs could have been on any products, not just meat.

What's not true about the meme?  

Well, despite the existence of MCOOL, our research shows most consumers didn't know where their beef or pork was coming from anyway; the vast majority of consumer's weren't checking the label.  More importantly, it simply isn't true that "now you will not know which country your meat comes from" simply because the government doesn't require the information.  If consumers really want the information and are willing to pay to have it, why wouldn't a retailer voluntarily advertise origin?  The restaurant chain Wendy's, for example, advertised for a while it only used North American beef.  Lots of small producers sell the animal products they raise at farmers' markets and at local restaurants.  There are thousands of products that voluntarily (without a government mandate) use  the "Made in the USA" logo to try to garner more sales.   There are lots of things I want (a new BMW; a private jet; perhaps origin information on meat), but just because I want something doesn't mean the government should mandate that it be provided. 

For more background, here's a recent report on issues surrounding MCOOL by the Congressional Research Service; here's another recent report summarizing the research on the subject prepared by my friends Glynn Tonsor, Ted Schroeder, and Joe Parcell for the USDA Chief Economist.