Who are the vegetarians?

One of the challenges researchers face in trying to learn about the characteristics of vegetarians is that there are so few of them.  I've seen estimates that put the percentage of vegetarians in the US population as high as 13%, but most estimates are closer to 5%.  That means that if one does a survey that has 1,000 respondents (which is a pretty typical sample size for pollsters), you'll only have about 50 vegetarians in the sample - hardly a large enough sample size to say anything meaningful.

We've been running the Food Demand Survey (FooDS) for 19 months now, and each monthly survey has over 1,000 respondents.  I took the first years' data (from July 2013 to July 2015), which consists of responses from over 12,000 individuals.  This sample is potentially large enough to begin to make some more comprehensive statements about how vegetarians might differ from meat eaters in the US.

Applying weights to the sample that force the sample to match the population in terms of age, gender, region of residence, etc., we find that 4.2% of respondents say "yes" to the following question: "Are you a vegetarian or a vegan?", which means that 95.8% say "no".  

There is some sampling variability from month-to-month, but overall, the trend in the percentage of respondents declaring vegetarian/vegan status has remained relatively constant, and if anything, has trended slightly downward over time.

So, how do self-declared vegetarians/vegans differ from meat eaters?  The following table shows differences/similarities in socio-economic and demographic characteristics.

Some of the biggest differences appear for age, race, overweight status, and politics.  Vegetarians tend to be younger, less white, skinnier, and more liberal than meat eaters.  Two unexpected results are that vegetarians indicate a much higher rate of food stamp participation (which is a bit surprising since the share of households with >$100K in income is higher for vegetarians than meat eaters) and a much, much higher rate of food-borne illness.  

In our survey, we also measure respondents' "food values" (for detail on the approach, see this academic paper we published).  This approach requires people to make trade-offs (they cannot say all issues are most important).  Respondents are shown a set of 12 issues and are asked to place 4 (and only 4) of them in a box indicating they are the most important issues when buying food, and to also place 4 (and only 4) issues in a box indicating they are the least important issues when buying food.  We measure relative importance by subtracting the share of times an item appears in the least important box from the share of times it appears in the most important box.  Thus, relative importance is on a scale of +1 to -1, and average scores across all 12 items must to sum to zero.  

Meat eaters tend to rate taste and price as relatively more important food values than vegetarians.  Vegetarians tend to rate animal welfare and the environment as more important food values than meat eaters.  Even still, vegetarians rate nutrition, taste, price, and safety as more important food values than animal welfare or the environment.  

The survey also shows people a list of 16 issues and respondents indicate how concerned they are about each issue (1=very unconcerned to 5=very concerned).  As the table below shows, vegetarians are more concerned about all issues than are meat eaters, even an issue like GMOs which is (at present) primarily a plant issue.  The difference in level of concern between vegetarians and meat eaters is particularly large for gestation crates, battery cages, and farm animal welfare.  

Given some previous discussion on the economics of Meatless Monday, I ran some statistical models to determine whether vegetarians tend to spend more or less on food than meat eaters.  

Without controlling for any differences in income, age, etc. that were found in the initial table above, I do not find any statistically significant differences in spending patterns.  Meat eaters report spending about $94/week on food eaten at home and vegetarians report spending about $3 less (a difference that isn't statistically significant); meat eaters report spending about $46/week on food eaten away from home (e.g., at restaurants) and vegetarians spend about $9.80 more (a difference that isn't statistically significant).  Even after I control for differences in income, age, etc., I do not find any significant differences in food expenditures between vegetarians and meat eaters.  The biggest determinants of food spending is income (high income individuals (>$100K in income) spend $35/week more away from home than low income (<$40K in income)) and household size (larger households spend more).  Younger people spend about the same as the older on food a home, but spend more eating out than do the old.  

Price responsiveness to unhealthy food taxes and healthy food subsidies

I recently ran across this article published in Current Obesity Reports calling for more rigorous methods to assess the effects of soda and fat taxes.  The article makes a number of good points, but it also misses many more complications that should be included for a rigorous evaluation - for example, how do firms respond when subjected to new food policies?

Another example comes to us via this paper in the Journal of Marketing by Debabrata Talukdar  and Charles Lindsey.  If you want to tax unhealthy foods and subsidize healthy ones, the authors suggest regulators may face an up hill battle because consumers are less sensitive to rising prices for unhealthy foods and falling prices for healthy foods than the reverse.

A portion of the abstract:

“The results from multiple studies confirm that consumers exhibit undesirable asymmetric patterns of demand sensitivity to price changes for healthy and unhealthy food. For healthy food, demand sensitivity is greater for a price increase than for a price decrease. For unhealthy food, the opposite holds true. The research further shows that the undesirable patterns are attenuated or magnified for key policy-relevant factors that have been shown to decrease or increase impulsive purchase behavior, respectively. As the rising obesity trend brings American consumers’ food consumption behavior under increased scrutiny, the focal findings hold significant implications for both public policy makers and food marketers. ”

They conclude:

“For public policy makers, our findings imply that the efficacy of economic policy interventions in inducing healthier food consumption behavior will be much more limited than what is expected under the conventional premise of symmetric patterns of demand response. This may warrant that public policy officials lower their level of expectations regarding the effectiveness of so-called sin tax initiatives in curbing demand for unhealthy food.”

The problem with nudging

Jeremy Waldron in the New York Times Review of Books has one of the best critiques of the "Nudge" approach advocated by Sunstein and other behavioral economists (HT: Tyler Cowen).

After discussing the problem with the elitism inherent in "we" (i.e., the experts) making decisions "them" (i.e., the laypeople), he gets to the issue of dignity:

“Consider the earlier point about heuristics—the rules for behavior that we habitually follow. Nudging doesn’t teach me not to use inappropriate heuristics or to abandon irrational intuitions or outdated rules of thumb. It does not try to educate my choosing, for maybe I am unteachable. Instead it builds on my foibles. It manipulates my sense of the situation so that some heuristic—for example, a lazy feeling that I don’t need to think about saving for retirement—which is in principle inappropriate for the choice that I face, will still, thanks to a nudge, yield the answer that rational reflection would yield. Instead of teaching me to think actively about retirement, it takes advantage of my inertia. Instead of teaching me not to automatically choose the first item on the menu, it moves the objectively desirable items up to first place.

I still use the same defective strategies but now things have been arranged to make that work out better. Nudging takes advantage of my deficiencies in the way one indulges a child. The people doing this (up in Government House) are not exactly using me as a mere means in violation of some Kantian imperative. They are supposed to be doing it for my own good. Still, my choosing is being made a mere means to my ends by somebody else—and I think this is what the concern about dignity is all about”

and

“Choice architects nudge almost everything I choose and do, and this is complemented by the independent activity of marketers and salesmen, who nudge away furiously for their own benefit. I’m not sure I want to live in nudge-world, though—as a notoriously poor chooser—I appreciate the good-hearted and intelligent efforts of choice architects such as Sunstein to make my autonomous life a little bit better. I wish, though, that I could be made a better chooser rather than having someone on high take advantage (even for my own benefit) of my current thoughtlessness and my shabby intuitions.”

Sounds somewhat similar to how I ended my chapter on behavioral economics in the Food Police

“The economist Robert Sugden says the paternalists are wrong: “There is a viable alternative to paternalism. It is what it always has been – the market.” I don’t know about you, but when I walk into a cafeteria, I want the managers to tempt me – to offer me what looks good at a price I’m willing to pay. Yes, this kind of world might require more will-power and self control, but the alternative world of the paternalistic food police would deprive us of the noble act of making a wise choice when we had the freedom to do otherwise. ”

One thing nudging defenders often say is something like: "but companies nudge us all the time . . ."  That is true, but one must recognize that we can opt-out of a company nudge.  Companies are in competition with each other, and if we don't like the results of the company-nudge, another entrepreneur will come along.  Not only that, if the company nudges aren't really in our best interest, why doesn't another company come along, tell us that and sway us to buy their product?  In short, the difference between a company nudge and a government nudge is the the abundance of competition and op-out ability for the one and the lack of competition and monopoly in the other.  

My most recent piece on the topic came out recently in the European Review of Agricultural Economics.

How novel are the genes introduced during genetic engineering?

It is often asserted that genetic engineering (or GMOs) are different and should be regulated differently because they introduce "new" genes that couldn't have been introduced "naturally."

A piece at the genetic literacy project by Curtis Hannah, a plant geneticist, however, questions that wisdom: 

“The remarkable advances in the way DNA is sequenced have made the sequencing of all the genes in a particular organism (termed the genome) extremely cheap. Thousands of genomes from different organisms have been decrypted and comparative genomics is a thriving field of scientific endeavor. Investigators have also sequenced different members of a particular family and unexpectedly found that the two different members of the family did NOT contain the same genes. Some genes were found in some members of the family but not in others. This phenomenon of plus/minus genes is particularly rampant in plants.

An exceptionally striking case of this was published recently in the journal Plant Cell. Of 8681 corn genes studied at the DNA level by this group, only a small fraction, 16.4 percent, were found in all 503 lines examined. The vast majority of these genes (83.6 percent) were found in some BUT NOT ALL lines. Corn is not an exception since similar cases of plus/minus genes have been found with other important food crops. Hence, new non-GMO or conventional varieties of food crops appearing on the market this year likely contain genes that were not in those same crops the year before. Also, the new ones likely lack genes that were present the year before.

Where do these genes come from? There are several sources. First, most food plants underwent a duplication of most if not all their genomes during their course of evolution. This duplication then allowed some relaxation from Darwinian selection such that the one gene copy was free to diverge in sequence and take on a new function.”

He concludes:

“To summarize, the new methods to rapidly, accurately and cheaply decipher genomes have uncovered hitherto unimaginable variation in the genetic material of all organisms, including the ones we eat. Hence, labelling plants and their derived foods GMO and non-GMO is clearly a distinction without a difference.”

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.