This Canadian wheat farmer would like access to GMO wheat
Bloomberg's large soda ban is officially dead says the highest court in NY
A website dedicated to the idea that "corporations are tainting our democracy and our dinner plates"
I wonder if people in the "food movement" will look more kindly on checkoffs if they can be used for organic food
An interesting interview with Trevor Butterworth on whether food science gets the press it deserves.
Butterworth explains how the food industry has become a "black box" which holds all sorts of societal fears. He argues that the food industry has become a "stock villain" that is "enemy to be attacked but rarely understood."
You can watch the video here.
As should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it a bit, the environmental impacts of consuming a local food depends on how efficient your particular locale is at producing the particular food. One of the ironies of this insight is that areas that have more intensified livestock operations may, at least in some dimensions, be more environmentally friendly than areas with less intensified production (because greater intensity often means more efficient).
Some empirical support for these these insights was recently provided in an article by Misak Avetisyan, Tom Hertel, and Gregory Sampson just published in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics.
The abstract:
“With the increased interest in the ‘carbon footprint’ of global economic activities, civil society, governments and the private sector are calling into question the wisdom of transporting food products across continents instead of consuming locally produced food. While the proposition that local consumption will reduce one’s carbon footprint may seem obvious at first glance, this conclusion is not at all clear when one considers that the economic emissions intensity of food production varies widely across regions. In this paper we concentrate on the tradeoff between production and transport emissions reductions by testing the following hypothesis: Substitution of domestic for imported food will reduce the direct and indirect Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions associated with consumption. We focus on ruminant livestock since it has the highest emissions intensity across food sectors, but we also consider other food products as well, and alternately perturb the mix of domestic and imported food products by a marginal (equal) amount. We then compare the emissions associated with each of these consumption changes in order to compute a marginal emissions intensity of local food consumption, by country and product. The variations in regional ruminant emissions intensities have profound implications for the food miles debate. While shifting consumption patterns in wealthy countries from imported to domestic livestock products reduces GHG emissions associated with international trade and transport activity, we find that these transport emissions reductions are swamped by changes in global emissions due to differences in GHG emissions intensities of production. Therefore, diverting consumption to local goods only reduces global emissions when undertaken in regions with relatively low emissions intensities. For non-ruminant products, the story is more nuanced. Transport costs are more important in the case of dairy products and vegetable oils. Overall, domestic emissions intensities are the dominant part of the food miles story in about 90 % of the country/commodity cases examined here.”
I first ran across the Food Babe several months ago when I came across her ridiculous assertion that everyone should avoid "Monsanto Butter."
The Food Babe appears, in the intervening time, to have gained ever more followers and media attention. But, her most recent campaign against an ingredient in beer, by drawing the attention of actual experts on the topic, may turn one of her greatest successes (getting Anheuser-Busch to disclose ingredients and alter their production process) into a credibility stumbling block that she is likely to have trouble overcoming.
Indeed, it's been a bad few days for the Food Babe. Her latest campaign has even spawned several new phrases from the blogosphere.
Each of the above links roundly criticize and debunk the fear-mongering and pseudo-scientific approach taken by the Food Babe. To those I'll also add posts by Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 and Maureen Ogle, author of Ambitious Brew. There really isn't much left to add to these critiques.
While there has been some positive discussion of the Food Babe's activities (e.g., see this article in Business Insider), mainly focusing on the power of social media to force food company change, one must ultimately ask whether the change is good or bad, and whether the methods used to obtain such change are justifiable. And, when we see the Food Babe's other writings against GMOs or against the flu vaccine, there is cause for concern (those efforts have also been criticized, for example, see here and here).
That is the question I attempt to answer in a paper forthcoming in the European Journal of Agricultural Economics. The paper is a summary the plenary address I will give in a couple months at the European Association of Agricultural Economics congress.
The issue at play:
“The traditional economic approach justifies government regulation when there are market failures. Thus, economists have traditionally confined their advocacy for government regulation to well-defined classes of market failures that exist when there are issues like externalities, public goods, market power or information asymmetries. Although these traditional motivations are often mentioned when advocating food policies, the new and particularly influential weapon that has been added to the arsenal is the argument that there are cognitive failures. The identification of the cognitive failures, and their policy implications, is the subject of behavioural economics.”
The article goes on critique the idea that behavioral economic findings necessarily justify paternalistic regulations. For example:
“If we really suffer from time inconsistent preferences, then resources like stickk.com allow us constrain (or impose costs) on our future-selves. The fact that many people are unwilling to create commitment contracts only serves to emphasise that although we often say we want to behave differently in the future, we are unwilling to actually constrain ourselves. So, there is no real inconsistency in our preferences; only an inconsistency in what we actually do and the stories we tell ourselves about what we wished we were doing in a world with no difficult choices or consequences. But, in cases where time inconsistent preferences actually exist, we do not need paternalists to constrain our future choices; we face ample incentive (and opportunity) to make that determination ourselves.”
or
“If we no longer use individual’s own choices to define what is or is not ‘good’, then whose do we use? The paternalist seeks to replace each individual’s judgment of the ‘good’ with their own. But, if we forgo the traditional economic notion of consumer welfare analysis, we lose any logical basis for claiming that one policy is superior to another from the consumers’ standpoint.”
The article concludes with some suggestions for future research, such as this one:
“Fourth, it might be constructive to use behavioural insights to, rather than devise new policies, learn how to better determine what consumers want, and perhaps even to help consumers better learn and ascertain their own preferences. In Norwood and Lusk (2011), we propose one such value elicitation approach, but there are other ways these concepts can be applied and implemented. Rather than seeking to discover ever new behavioural biases, perhaps we should learn how people make choices when they are warned of their biases and are offered opportunities to state their preferences in environments that minimise them. If using willingness-to-pay values in cost–benefit analysis is only credible if the values arise from well-defined preferences, it makes sense to think about designing approaches to help consumers learn and reveal those preferences.”