Economics of Meatless Monday

I ran across this article published last week by Katey Troutman entitled the Economics of Meatless Monday, which cited some research by Bailey Norwood and me on vegetarianism.  

The article makes a number of good points, but also some that are a bit off base.  After discussing per-capita beef consumption in US, the author writes:

“New trends in consumption, however, suggest that things might (slowly) be changing; per capita consumption of meat in the U.S. has fallen in recent years, though we still consume more meat than either our parents or grandparents did, according to The Huffington Post.

Americans are choosing to eat less meat, or in some cases, turning to an entirely vegetarian diet, for a number of reasons. Animal welfare activists champion vegetarianism as a way of boycotting factory farming and animal cruelty, while environmentalists point out the environmental benefits of forgoing meat. Still other Americans belong to religious traditions which either forbid or look favorably upon vegetarianism, particularly those which originated in ancient India, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Yet worldwide many people are vegetarian for an entirely different, often overlooked reason: economics.”

The author, however, never discusses the the biggest economic reason why per-capita consumption of meat is down.  Is he supply-side not the demand-side.  As I've previously discussed, cattle inventories are at the lowest levels they've at been in decades, largely because of drought and prior high feed prices, resulting in substantially higher beef price.  To put it plainly: consumers are eating less beef because there is less beef being produced.  The fact that prices have risen dramatically means many consumers still want the now scarcer beef and are bidding up the price for available supplies.

I don't see much evidence of a rapid rise in vegetarianism.  For over a year and a half, we've conducted a monthly survey of US consumers as a part of the Food Demand Survey (FooDS).  Self-declared vegetarians have been at about 4-5% of the sample since it began (and this is probably an overstatement given other research suggesting people "over-declare" vegetarian status) with no evidence of a trend.  Unlike the claim in the article that vegetarianism in general and meatless Monday in particular will save you money, my analysis of the FooDS data shows that self-declared vegetarians spend the same amount of money on food at home and on food away from home as do meat-eaters.  

The author also writes:

“Jayson Lusk and Bailey Norwood, perhaps the first researchers to study the economics of vegetarianism, concur with advocates of eating less meat. In their 2009 study they found that “it is significantly more expensive to produce a pound of meat (or milk) than a pound of commodity crops.””

I suppose it's nice to be pointed out for being one of the first to tackle a subject (the published paper is here; there were some mistakes in the published paper that are corrected in this document).  The key word in the above quote, however, is "commodity crops."  As I've noted in the past, people generally don't like to eat the commodity crops directly, and if you look at the cost of non-commodity crops (for example, see this USDA study), they can be more expensive on a per-calorie or per-gram-of-protein basis (think about the cost of lettuce on a $/kcal basis).  Finally as we argue in our published paper, economics is about more than just cost, it also involves value, and most Americans are willing to pay quite a bit to have meat in their diet.  

Assorted Links

Which food words each US State (and political party) obsesses about on Twitter

Cool maps of the most and least profitable farming counties in the US (watch the video at the bottom of the link)

I wondered about this when I first walked into French grocery stores

Cow-free milk

Famine Food

Pierre Desrochers, one of the authors of the great book The Locavore's Dilemma, has a new article in Spiked on one of the latest food fads - a fad Desrochers says harkens back to foods our ancestors would have eaten during a famine.

He writes:

“Yet one wonders what our remote ancestors would think of this culinary fad. . . . Although wild ingredients might be free, the attendant foraging and preparation costs are significant. What they would probably find most amazing, however, is that what they typically knew as ‘famine foods’ are now commanding a significant premium over plentiful and convenient things that actually taste good rather than ‘wild’.

Unfortunately, for many of our remote ancestors, the absence of effective transportation, such as railroads and container ships, meant that they had no choice but to survive on a local diet and, in the process, put all their agricultural eggs into one geographical basket. This was always a recipe for disaster. ”

and

“As the ‘visionary’ haute cuisine of Redzepi and Patterson reminds us, wild foods typically display one or a combination of flaws when compared to cultivated ones, be it lower yields or nutritional value, less interesting taste or greater difficulty to harvest, store, process and preserve the produce. ”

He concludes:

“The fact that food snobs now need to revert back to the famine foods of old should not be viewed as an indictment of our modern food production system, but rather as astounding proof that, today, that system feeds middle-class consumers better than most kings in history. ”

Incentives for Safer Food

Over at the US Food Policy blog, Parke Wilde writes about the terrible track-record Foster Farms had with noncompliance leading up to it's widely publicized Salmonella outbreak.

Parke advocates for better public access to food safety information (such as, I presume, the public release of noncompliance reports written by food safety inspectors) as one approach to partially deal with food safety issues.  

He also points out the main challenge with food safety: as consumers we often cannot directly observe whether a food is contaminated before purchase.  Parke writes:

“Food safety problems are fundamentally about lack of public information. If consumers had magic sunglasses that displayed the presence of Salmonella on chicken in the grocery store, there would be no need for government regulation. Immediately, faced with market consequences for distributing chicken with Salmonella, the companies would clean up their product. ”

Well, they may not be magic sunglasses, but it appears entrepreneurs are working on hand held sensors, chopsticks, and iPhone apps that may one day let us quickly check for food contaminants.  

These innovations may, one day, prove to be a very powerful incentive for companies to provide safe food.  The nice thing - from the consumers' perspective - is that they let us take action before an illness happens.

Food Fads and Fears

I've been reading the book Fear of Food by Harvey Levenstein.  It is a fascinating read, chronicling the history of food fears and fads that hit Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I have a few quibbles with some of the material in the chapter on "Bacteria and Beef", but overall, good stuff.

One passage showed how at least one version of the Paleo diet had been advanced since the early 1900s for many of the same reasons it is advocated today, almost 100 years later:

“In 1920 Fleischmann’s urged eating its yeast cakes because ‘the process of manufacture or preparation’ removed from many foods the ‘life giving vitamine’ that provided the energy people needed. ‘Primitive man,’ it claimed, ‘secured an abundance of vitamines from his raw, uncooked foods and green, leafy vegetables. But the modern diet - constantly refined and modified - is too often badly deficient in vital elements.’”

Levenstein also chronicles the emergence of food scientists and nutritionists who often had significant effects on dietary fads and public policies.  It is remarkable the hubris with which many of these men made dietary advice and public policy, particularly because we now know they were often quite wrong in their scientific knowledge.  Whether it was Metchnikoff and Kellogg and their views on autointoxication and the merits of yogurt, or Horace Fletcher's method of chewing to "Fletcherize" food,  or Harvey Wiley and his war on benzoate of soda, or Elmer McCollum and his promotion of acidosis, or Russell  Wilder's belief that thiamine deficiencies would cause the nation to loose their will to fight the Nazis - there seems to be a continual stream of people willing to use scant evidence to promote their favored cause to promote public health.  Not just idly promote - but with often with righteous indignation and certitude of belief.  I have no doubt many of these men passionately believed the diets they promoted but that didn't ultimately make them right.  

Levenstein writes, in the midst of concern of lack of vitamin consumption in 1941, that

“The New York Times said, ‘The discovery that tables may groan with food and that we nevertheless face a kind of starvation has driven home the fact that we have applied science and technology none too wisely in the preparation of food.””

Unfortunately, something similar could be said about how applied science and technology have often been used none too wisely to promote various public policies and best selling books.   

It is true that science has progressed and we know more than we used to.  One of the things we've hopefully learned is that we often need to exercise a bit of humility.