Parke Wilde at Tufts University mentioned a new project he spearheaded in a recent blog post. Parke and colleagues have crated a tool that lets the user visualize the input-output data provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
I've looked at these sorts of tables before, but I've always found it is a bit hard to distill insights from them. This tool provides an easy way to visualize the flows between different food sectors. Great idea!
Below is a video of Parke describing the tool:
Parke Wilde, who is a professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and who recently wrote a book on Food Policy, weighed in on my book the Food Police.
His response was, shall we say, critical. I like Parke. I respect his work and enjoy his blog. Criticism is never fun, especially when it comes from people you respect. That being said, I'm quite confident that Parke and I start from different premises which leads us to different ideological perspectives. And that, more than anything, seems to affect Parke's view of the book.
In his review, he asserts that I'm fine with the food system the way it is. In fact, in the introduction of the book, I explicitly say I'm no fan of the status quo. In the farm policy chapter, I explicitly discuss my dislike for many aspects of current farm policy. So, the issue isn't whether one wants change, but rather how that change occurs. My book is largely a critique of popular notions for how to make future changes happen and a judgement on whether past changes in food have been "good" or "bad."
Ultimately, Parke likens my book to a long Michelle Malkin blog post. It is true that some of the book is tongue-in-cheek, sarcastic, and polemical - I wrote to engage, challenge, and provoke. But, his comment overlooks the fact that the book contains hundreds of references to the scientific literature. More than anything else, Parke is critical of the style. But it would have been nice to hear something about the substance. Did I get it wrong on organic foods? Or local food? Or biotechnology? Why? How? I critique the inferences people draw regarding the policy implications of behavioral economics. Am I wrong? How? I critique the fashionable policies proposed to curb obesity. Where did I go wrong?
In any event, I'm happy to bring "another perspective" to the table on the national food debates. The fact that Parke even felt compelled to mention my book makes me think I might have done precisely that.
For a number of years, I've thought about creating a monthly survey to track consumer knowledge, concerns, and preferences for various food-related issues. After no small amount of effort, and thanks to the funding from the Willard Sparks Endowment and DASNR and the assistance of Susan Murray, that vision has now become a reality.
The inaugural issue is now up online, and we will to follow with regular monthly releases.
Of course, this initial issue can't report changes , but that information will come.
For those who might be interested, the purpose of the project is to provide timely information on:
It is envisioned that such data could be used by analysts to:
Some of the motivations for starting the project include the following.
A couple of weeks ago, I published a piece at TIME.com taking issue with some of the emerging cultural notions about food, particularly Pollan's views in the new book Cooked. He essentially argues we'd all be better off if we got back to the kitchen and cooked for ourselves. I posit that it is one of the marvels of our modern world that we don't have to cook (unless we want to).
In that context, it is useful to see what people who lived a century ago, many of whom had to work long hours in the kitchen, thought about cooking. I happen to be reading the book Looking Backward written by Edward Bellamy in 1887 with a group of colleagues. In the book, Bellamy imagines a man living in the late 1800s who wakes up to find himself in a socialist utopia in the year 2000. I thought the following passages about cooking in his time (1887) compared with the imagined utopia in 2000 were quite revealing.
Here is one passage where a women in the year 2000 is talking about "chores" in the modern utopia:
"Who does your housework, then?" I asked.
"There is none to do," said Mrs. Leete, to whom I addressed this question. "Our washing is all done at public laundries at excessively cheap rates, and our cooking at public kitchens."
So, this author's vision of a utopia is one in which people don't have to cook for themselves! He reveals the reason why when discussing the work of women in the late 1800s:
"What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!" I exclaimed. "In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their possessors from household cares, while the women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them."
"Yes," said Mrs. Leete, "I have read something of that; enough to convince me that, badly off as the men, too, were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives."
As history reveals, be glad you don't have to cook unless you happen to like to.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) lists on their web site a ranking of the relative environmental impact (measured in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) of different foods. The table is based on life-cycle analysis (LCA) conducted by a company called Clean Metrics.
I'm not an expert on LCA and I haven't dug into the detail on how Clean Metrics conducted the analysis. Thus, I won't comment for now on the relative ranking of the different foods and commodities.
However, I find the labeling on the EWG's prominent graph highly misleading. The reason is that the chart repeatedly says things like:
choose organic; buy organic; avoid growth hormones
Here is the problem. The research doesn't actually support the claim that these urgings would actually lower greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, by their own admission, the EWG reveals that:
The lifecycle assessments are based on conventional rather than pasture-based or organic systems of food production. . . we were unable to identify definitive studies and widely accepted methodologies assessing greenhouse gas emissions from pasture-raised, organic or other meat production systems.
So, the analysis didn't actually study the greenhouse gas emissions of organics or pasture-raised!
Moreover, when we look at the words of the company (Clean Metrics) that conducted the study that forms the basis of the EWG chart, we see things like:
There is not a strong correlation between organic food production methods and lower carbon footprints.
and
On balance, grass-fed animal products from ruminants are likely to have higher carbon footprints compared to products from conventionally housed/fed animals.
Also, when we look at the research on growth hormones, like in this Journal of Animal Science article, we find
Manure output increased by 1,799 × 10^3 t as a result of [growth -enhancing technologies - primarily growth hormones] withdrawal, with an increase in carbon emissions of 714,515 t/454 × 10^6 kg beef
and this article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science shows that the use of the growth hormone rBST in milk could reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, the EWG may have other reasons for advising against consuming foods with growth hormones or advising to eat organic over conventional, but I find it misleading to make these claims in a prominent graph ranking foods by greenhouse gas emissions.