Kirkus Review of Unnaturally Delicious

““A provocative, well-documented challenge to one of the major contentions of environmentalists.””

That's a summary of the review of my forthcoming book, Unnaturally Delicious, from review magazine, Kirkus.

Here's the whole review:

“An exploration of “the innovators and innovations shaping the future of food.”

Lusk (Agricultural Economics/Oklahoma State Univ.; The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto About the Politics of Your Plate, 2013, etc.) admits that along with the abundance we now enjoy, there are significant challenges that must be met head-on, including climate change, environmental degradation, cruelty to animals, the abundance of unhealthy junk food, obesity, and more. Nonetheless, the author is optimistic. “We have inherited a bountiful world of food…[that] our ancestors could scarcely have imagined,” writes the author. For him, this is proof that Malthus and his modern followers such as Paul Ehrlich—author of The Population Bomb (1968) and other books—were misguided. Lusk’s claims are provocative, but he buttresses them by citing Department of Agriculture statistics demonstrating that U.S. agriculture has kept up with population growth through the application of technological innovations. Lusk reports that American crop production has more than doubled since 1970 while the use of pesticides has fallen, less land is in production, the agricultural labor force has decreased by half, and soil erosion has been reduced. In short, “agriculture has one of the highest rates of production of any sector of the U.S. economy.” The author admits to having had an axe to grind in the past, and he bristles at the use of the descriptive term “sustainable.” To him, it was “synonymous with organic, natural and local” and implied the necessity of reducing population. Lusk explains that he now recognizes that true sustainability depends on the use of agricultural technology. One counterintuitive example is the sustainability of U.S. beef production, which he claims has a “far lower carbon footprint than [grass-fed beef] in other parts of the world” because it is fattened with grain. Another fascinating example is the use of information technology to regulate seed-planting by providing farmers detailed, real-time information about their fields.

A provocative, well-documented challenge to one of the major contentions of environmentalists.”

It's officially out March 22, but you can buy your copy now.

Did the Cancer Announcement Affect Bacon Demand?

On October 26, 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — an agency within the World Health Organization — released its report indicating that processed meat is carcinogenic.  

The announcement sparked a lot of media coverage with titles like: "Bad Day for Bacon".  (Here were my thoughts shortly after the announcement, along with some survey responses based the news).

Despite the news coverage after the announcement, I haven't seen much investigation of whether it impacted meat markets.  Thus, I thought I'd take a look at the data, recognizing it is probably impossible at this point to conclusively identify whether the IARC report caused a shift in demand.

I turned to the USDA Ag Marketing Service's daily reporting of pork primal composite values.  Rather than just looking at what happened to the prices of bacon (or rather pork belly) in isolation, it is probably useful to look in relation to another cut that may be less affected by the announcement.  I chose the pork loin.  This is an attempt to control for any changes over time happening on the supply-side (the quantity of loin from a pig is, at least in the short run, in fixed proportion to the quantity of pig belly).

I calculated the ratio of pork belly prices to pork loin prices over the past year.  The graph below shows the price ratio before and after the IARC announcement.  In the few weeks before the announcement, bellys were selling at 1.9 times the price of loins.  In the few weeks after the announcement, bellys were selling at only 1.5 times the price of loins.  Thus, there has been a roughly 26% drop in the relative value of bacon. 

At this point, I'd be hesitant to say that the IARC announcement is THE cause of this change, but the large immediate drop just following the release date is suggestive of some impact.  

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.