2016 Review

2016 has been a busy year.  I've had the pleasure to serve as president of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), continue the Food Demand Survey (FooDS), travel to Australia, Alabama, Montana, California, DC, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Georgia, and New York just to name a few, advise several graduate students who graduated, keep up a regular stream of research with 11 articles published in peer reviewed journals (and 10 more already forthcoming for 2017), publish articles in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and give several radio and podcast interviews (including on one of my favorites - Econ Talk). My latest book Unnaturally Delicious was also released this year. 

Here on the blog, there were about 150 posts this year garnering about 82,000 page views in 2016.  Here are a few of the most viewed posts of the year.

• Real world demand curves (in which I take issue with the claim in a Freakonomics podcasts that economists have never observed a "real world" demand curve)
• New York Times on GMOs (critiques an article by Danny Hakim in the New York Times on effects of GMOs) 
• Country of Origin Labeling and cattle prices (this post analyzes the claim that the repeal of mandatory country of origin labeling caused a big drop in cattle prices)
• 11 things to know about GMOs (points to a short OSU facts sheet I wrote with Eric and Cheryl Devuyst answering some commonly asked questions about GMOs)
• What do cows want? (this post applies the economic concept of "revealed preferences" to the study of animal welfare)
• Changes in meat consumption (proves some economic explanations for recent changes in meat consumption)
• New research on the Berkeley soda tax (this post discusses some research on the effects of the soda tax in Berkeley suggesting consumption changes may not have resulted from the effects of a price change per se; see also this previous post)
• False beliefs about food stamps (in this post, I covered a paper by Craig Gundersen which debunks several widely held beliefs about the effects of SNAP)
• What is going on in your brain? (here I review the findings of a paper I co-authored on neuro-economics and food choice forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization)
• Trade matters (highlights the importance of trade for U.S. agriculture)
• Evolution of American agriculture (provides statistics on changes in US agriculture over time and introduces a paper about the USDA I wrote for the Mercatus center)

Thanks for tuning in! 

Lesser Beasts

I just finished reading Mark Essig's book Lesser Beasts.  It is a fascinating account of the history of the pig - from hunter-gather times right through to today.  There were all kinds of interesting tidbits about the pig and the book uncovers an often unappreciated role for the pig in the development of civilization, politics and power-dynamics, and more.  

One theme that comes up several time is that throughout history, the pig was often a food of choice for the poor, in part because they pigs are so prolific producers of offspring and because they are such versatile eaters (devouring everything including excrement and dead bodies).  As a result, the ruling elite often disliked pork because of the pigs' unsavory diets but also because hogs gave the poor freedom to ignore the dictates of the leaders.  Kings and other rulers often controlled the supply of wheat and other-foodstuffs as a way of keeping their subjects in line, but pigs gave poor their own access to calories.  Essig also plays up the role of pigs in fostering the rise of civilization, writing:  

“Only when farmers grew enough food to fill the bellies of bureaucrats, priests, and soldiers could these elites go about the business of creating what we call civilization.”

Another interesting theme of the book is that throughout history pigs have served as a store of value, insurance against risk, and as mechanism to prevent waste and transform undesirable or inedible calories into tasty bacon, lard, and ham.  For example, Essig describes how Spanish and Portuguese sailors discovering North and South America made ample use of the pig. They: 

“dumped breeding pairs of pigs on uninhabited islands. ‘A sow and a boar have been left to breed’ on a certain island, one Spanish explorer told another in a letter. ‘Do not kill them. If there should be many, take those you need, but always leave some to breed, and also on your way, leave a sow and a boar on the other islands.’”

The plan apparently worked quite well.  When one supply ship sent to Jamestown, VA was blown off course to an island in Bermuda, they were pleased to find pigs left by the Spanish more than a century prior.  There is another story about how 24 pigs in Cuba soon turned to 30,000.  We also learn that one of De Soto's prized possessions in his trek across North America was his swine herd.  

Pigs were adept at converting inedible wilderness into tasty human food.  They continued to do this as the world industrialized:

“By the seventeenth century, however, a growing economy had created a new niche for pigs. Activities such as dairying and breadmaking, once undertaken in every household, became large commercial enterprises. The concentration of by-products rose, and so did the concentration of pigs: they began to devour all sorts of commercial wastes. ”

Fast forward a few centuries,  and they were not only devouring waste (as they still do today) but pigs were making use of the easy calories coming from a New World crop: corn.  As Essig writes: 

“In the nineteenth-century America, corn was too difficult to transport to become a cash crop, so farmers turned into valuable added products that were easier to sell: pigs and whiskey. ”

He also quotes an individual in 1867 as asking, "What is a hog but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?"

The last three chapters were easily my least favorite as Essig uncritically recounts the "evils" of factory farming.  While there might be aspects of modern hog production that many of us would like to change, its in these parts of the book that Essig moves from the positive to the normative.  At one point Essig acknowledges pigs of yesteryear didn't always have lead lives high in animal welfare, but he seems to place a lot of moral weight on intentionality writing:  

“Such suffering, while not uncommon, indicated that something was wrong. The problem with confining pigs is that cruelty is built into the system.”

If you're looking for a more balanced critique of modern hog production, I suggest the documentary At the Fork.

These quibbles aside, I recommend Lesser Beasts - it's hard to imagine finding a more compelling account of the history of the humble pig.

Food Demand Survey (FooDS) - December 2016

The December 2016 edition of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) is now out.

The regular tracking portion of the survey showed a decline in willingness-to-pay (WTP) for all meat products (except hamburger which was virtually unchanged) relative to last month.  Willingness-to-pay for all meat products is markedly lower than last year at this time.  For a bit of perspective, here are  changes in WTP for four meat products expressed relative to the first issue of FooDS (May 2013).

While the current data shows a slight downward tick in current spending on food away from home, recall that this corresponds to the past two weeks, and anticipating spending away from home is less negative than it usually is.  

We added several ad hoc questions to study consumer response to the new GMO labels that may appear in the future as a result of the national mandatory labeling law.  Results of those questions will be released at a later date.  In addition, we asked some questions related to preferences regarding the regulation of crop breeding techniques.

The following question was posed: “Crops produced through certain types of genetic engineered that involve the transfer of genes from one species to another (i.e., “foreign DNA”) are currently regulated by three U.S. agencies (the USDA, FDA, and EPA) to check for environmental impacts and impacts on human health. By contrast, crops produced through traditional breeding methods, include hybridization, are not regulated by the U.S. government. To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statements?”

Individuals responded on a five-point scale (1=strongly disagree, 2=somewhat disagree, 3=neither disagree nor agree, 4=somewhat agree, or 5=strongly agree) to six statements: i) Regulations on traditional crop breeding are too weak, ii) Regulations on genetically engineered crops involving “foreign” DNA are too weak, iii) New crop breeding and genetic techniques that do not involve “foreign” DNA should be regulated the same as traditional crop breeding techniques, iv) New crop breeding and genetic techniques that do not involve “foreign” DNA should be regulated the same as genetically engineered crops involving “foreign” DNA, v) Genetics and crop breeding should be regulated based on health and environmental outcomes rather than the processed used to create new crops, and vi) I do not know enough about these issues to say how crop breeding should be regulated.

The most common answer was “neither agree nor disagree” for all statements. “Regulations on traditional crop breeding are too weak” received the least agreement while “genetics and crop breeding should be regulated based on health and environmental outcomes rather than the processed used to create new crops” received the highest level of agreement, though a level similar to that of the remaining statements.

Assorted Links

• This article in The Conservation by Fabrice Etile attempts to sort out the various explanations for the rise on obesity.  The conclusion: "Despite initial academic evidence then, the main drivers of the global rise in obesity levels remain, to a large extent, a black box."
• A fantastic piece by Øystein Heggdal that skewers a report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food System.  Key points include spurious yield comparisons across countries, a "clever sleight of hand" in using the Rodale Institute's comparison of organic and conventional crop yields, and undue focus on pesticides and fertilizers as contributors to climate change.
• In the New York Times, Stephanie Strom reports on some interesting innovations to increase the shelf life of fruits and veggies
• Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrock is optimistic about the future of cultured meat and meat replacements.  He conjectures: "Animal rights will be the big social revolution of the 21st century."  (He linked to this interesting paper which I'd never before read entitled, "Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolution").
• Guy Bentley expresses skepticism over the Harvard study's claim that a 1 cent per ounce tax on sugary drinks would prevent 100,000 cases of obesity and 3,683 deaths

The Atlantic on Agricultural Fertilizer

Over at the Atlantic, Alex Fitzsimmons has an article on a vastly under-appreciated technology: synthetic fertilizer.   Fitzsimmons notes concerns about excess fertilizer application and reliance on fossil fuels, but he also weights that against the fact that we have forestalled the dire Malthusian concerns.

Fitzsimmons quotes me as saying:

“Pessimists like Malthus and Ehrlich consider people a self-destructive drain on nature, but as Lusk, the Oklahoma State University agricultural economist sees it, “they underestimated the ability of humans to adapt and innovate and make productive use of the resources we have available.””

Its nice to see some attention paid to this subject in the popular press. In any event, you can read the whole thing here.