The Food Police

by Jayson Lusk

  When people find out I’m an economist, they usually ask me what will happen to stock prices or interest rates. I haven’t the faintest idea what to tell them, and truth be told, most economists don’t know either. Deep down, economics isn’t really about financial markets. It is the study of how we make decisions when our wants are bigger than our wallets. Food economists spend their time thinking about how to eat more and better with less; providing information about food supply-and-demand conditions to farmers, agribusinesses, nonprofits, consumers, and government agencies; and projecting the impacts of private and government decisions.

  I have spent the last fifteen years studying the economics of food—trying to figure out things such as how much consumers are willing to pay for better-tasting meat and why they seek to avoid controversial food technologies. I’ve written hundreds of academic papers on food economics, consulted nonprofits, agribusinesses, and governments, served on the editorial councils of a half dozen of the top academic journals in agricultural and environmental economics, and sat on executive boards of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations. I tried to approach the study of food regulation from an objective standpoint by comparing the costs and benefits of the policies in question—seeing which actions and policies made the best use of our scarce resources given all our competing desires. I labored under the assumption that this was the key issue in determining the merits of a regulation. I was naive.

  Today, food policies are increasingly motivated by ideology rather than projected economic consequences. The merits of a policy are primarily judged not by whether they benefit all the people affected but by whether they advance the fashionable agenda of a new food elite. It was once the case that those proposing a new food policy had to offer serious analysis illustrating its impacts, but now the simple mention of a food problem—the rise in obesity or poor nutritional intake among the poor—is apparently sufficient justification for a policy intervention regardless of any evidence that it might work. All that is required is to demonstrate sufficient empathy for those in need. Jonah Goldberg recognized that modern liberalism “is an ideology of good intentions” wrapped up in a “cult of action.”16 And so it is with the food police.

  A few years back I was asked to join a small group of faculty members in a discussion with a Burger King executive who had been invited to give a lecture on campus. I was eager to hear about the company’s challenges and business strategies, but one of my then-colleagues, a professor from the nutrition department, apparently saw fast-food restaurants as one of the greatest evils ever conceived. She lectured the executive on the sodium and fat content in the Whopper and, with all the righteous indignation she could muster, asked how he felt about being responsible for the large number of heart attacks that occurred each year in America.

  The executive’s response was as revealing as the professor’s diatribe. He rattled off the sales statistics for Burger King’s salads and other healthy offerings; those items had been an abysmal failure. Burger King’s primary customers, eighteen- to twenty-five-year-old males, apparently don’t order salads, and the executive stressed that if Burger King wanted to remain in existence and continue to write paychecks for its more than thirty-five thousand employees, it had no choice but to offer what its customers were willing to buy. The nutrition professor was undeterred by the reality of what people actually wanted in the real world. She and others like her have an agenda that must be pursued regardless of whether the intended beneficiaries actually want it.

  I finally realized the extent of the absurdity last year, when I was asked to speak to the teachers of my university’s freshman English composition courses. I walked across campus prepared to give a five-minute spiel on writing strategies. Expecting questions on how I prepare students for the rigors of academic publishing, I was amused when a graduate student shot up her hand and asked what I thought about the documentary Food, Inc.

  For the next half hour, I engaged in a lively discussion with about seventy-five graduate students and professors of English. I wasn’t surprised that they had questions about food and agriculture, and I was happy to answer them. What surprised me was the absolute moral certitude permeating the air. Many in the room had no doubt they were being poisoned and fattened by an out-of-control food system. What facts did these folks have to bolster their case? Nothing more than what was presented in Food, Inc., along with a few innuendos picked up in the Sunday paper. I would never have dared question them on the finer points of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. Yet they were certain that my explanations for why food is produced the way it is were wrong.

  More shocking still was the fact that this debate took place not in Berkeley, California, or Cambridge, Massachusetts—there I might have expected some unusual views about agriculture, if for no other reason than that these locations are so far away from where most of our food is made. But this was Stillwater, Oklahoma. All these people had to do to see large-scale production agriculture was look out the window. Most of them probably lived within a mile of a real-life, flesh-and-blood farmer. They had no doubt stood next to a Monsanto chemical salesman in the checkout line at the grocery store. Yet they had come to believe that farmers were destroying their land and that agribusinesses were manipulating farmers and polluting the food supply. Many of my colleagues had swallowed a story whole from the food elite when they could have gotten closer to the truth simply by talking to their neighbors.

  Unlike the food police, I do not have an agenda to change what you eat. Nor am I a defender of the status quo. One of the things I most like about being an economist is that we are generally agnostic about people’s preferences: Animal-loving vegans and BBQ-licking carnivores are treated all the same. Human nature is recognized for what it is. Rather than chastising people for who they are, a more fruitful path forward is to look at the outcomes from our interactions with others and see what results are produced by our different rules, norms, markets, and policies. The famed Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises perhaps said it best: “Economics … abstains from any judgment of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at … Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends.”17

  The food police wish people were different and seek to change our preferences and behavior through coercion and propaganda if necessary. Of course, reasonable people can change their minds about the desirability of modern food production, but ideally these decisions would be made with accurate knowledge of the world surrounding them. I wrote this book because I can no longer sit back while the truth about food, and economics, is so badly distorted.

  Muckraking journalists are right to point out the errors and limitations in our modern food system, but we shouldn’t let that blind us to all that is good about how we eat. We have forgotten what we do well. As a result, we are on the verge of accepting cures that are far worse than the disease. It is fashionable to belabor all that is wrong with food and then pitch grand schemes that promise to save us all. I intend to do just the opposite. I seek to remind readers that we live in the greatest food-producing and -consuming nation in the history of the world, and to provide cautionary tales of the impotency, and sometimes outright lunacy, of the policies sought by the food police.

  Lest one believes my claims are merely rhetorical embellishments, let’s consider some facts about the state of food in America.

  MORE LEISURE TIME

  Cooking and cleaning have gotten much easier and more convenient. Today we spend 40 percent less time in food preparation and 81 percent less time on meal cleanup than we did in the 1960s.18 If that change doesn’t sound good to you, go talk to your grandmother.

  MORE MONEY IN YOUR POCKET

  Food is more affordable in the United States than anywhere else in the world. Americans spend half as much of their income on food prepared at home as the Germans, French, or Italians, and about a third as much as our Mexican neighbors.19 Food is also much more affordable t
han it once was. As a portion of our income, we currently spend about half as much on food as compared with the 1950s and about one quarter less than we did in the 1970s.20 Today we spend less than 10 percent of our income on food, which leaves 90 percent for all the other things in life we enjoy, such as art, baseball, Disneyland, iPhones, and computers.

  THE LUXURY OF EATING OUT

  We can now afford to eat out and let others cook and clean for us. Eating out was a rare treat when I was a child; today my kids expect to be waited on several times a week. In the 1970s, only about 28 percent of Americans’ food budget was spent eating out; today Americans spend about 43 percent of their food budget away from home.21 There has been a more than 60 percent increase in the number of restaurants per person since the early 1970s. The ability to grab a quick meal and let someone else clean up is one of the many factors that has allowed more women to pursue a career outside the home.22

  MORE FRUITS AND VEGETABLES

  We are eating many more fruits and vegetables. Per capita consumption of vegetables has increased by 20 percent since the 1970s; consumption of fresh vegetables increased 30 percent over this period.23 Similarly, per capita consumption of fruit has increased by 10 percent since the 1970s; consumption of fresh fruit increased 20 percent over this period.24

  SAFER FOOD

  Our food system is among the safest in the world and is getting safer. Laboratory-confirmed infections from the most common food-borne bacteria have fallen about 25 percent since the mid-1990s. Infections from specific dangers such as E. coli 0157 have fallen as much as 41 percent over that time.25

  LIVING LONGER

  In 1900, average life expectancy in the United States was only 47.3 years. In 1970 it was 70.8. A baby born today can expect to live more than 78.7 years.26 We live longer, in part, because of better medical technologies, but also because we have access to a more abundant, diverse, and nutritious food supply.

  MORE PRODUCTIVE FARMERS

  Science and innovation have allowed farmers to reap much more food from the same amount of land. From 1900 to 2010 the average amount of corn produced per acre more than quadrupled, increasing a whopping 440 percent! Wheat yields increased 280 percent. Even yields for obscure commodities such as flaxseed have increased over 270 percent since 1900. In the last twenty years alone, corn yields increased 30 percent, wheat yields increased 17 percent, and soybean yields increased 28 percent.27

  FEWER AND SAFER INSECTICIDES

  It doesn’t matter how farmers grow crops; there will always be worms, beetles, and other pests that want to eat the food before we do. Fortunately, farmers have found better ways to stamp out the competition. Crop farmers today use about half as much insecticide as they did in the 1960s.28 Thanks to biotechnology, insecticide use in corn fell 80 percent from 1997 to 2007. Moreover, USDA and EPA researchers studying agricultural chemical use concluded that “[i]n recent years, we have witnessed a significant trend toward replacing relatively hazardous active ingredients with less hazardous ones.”29

  FINANCIALLY SECURE FARMS

  Even after accounting for inflation, farmers earned 3 percent higher net incomes in the 2000s than they did in the 1990s. The value of their farm assets also rose, by almost 30 percent in real terms during that time.30 In fact, farming is no longer the profession of paupers. Although the income of farmers lagged behind that of nonfarm households for almost a century prior to the 1990s, the median income of farm households has exceeded the median income of all U.S. households in every year from 2000 to 2010. Median farm income averaged 10 percent higher than nonfarm household income over that same period.31

  MORE CHOICE

  A hundred years ago, many households were constrained to eat only what they could grow. We now have the opportunity to find flavors and textures particularly suited to our own palates. New product introductions by the food and beverage industry have increased almost 100 percent in the past two decades alone.32

  Don’t take my word for it. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2003, concluded, “There is no doubt that [the food system] delivers—more nutritious food with wider variety; improved safety, with less environmental impacts; and greater convenience than at any time in the Nation’s history.”33

  I’m not saying all food trends are heading in the right direction. Rather, my claim is that the actions of the food police have produced a misleading picture of food and agriculture. The food police rely on a distorted view of reality to gain support for a sweeping agenda that, if successful, will cause more harm than good.

  In the following pages, I endeavor to convey the enormity of what is at stake. I trace the history of the food police and uncover their origins in the thoughts and attitudes of last century’s Progressives. Today’s food police, sympathetic to the anticapitalist leanings of the socialists of yesteryear, have a new weapon in their arsenal: behavioral economics. I show that behavioral economics is the intellectual engine behind the food elite’s justifications for overriding our preferences and decisions with their own. Given this general backdrop, I then take specific aim at the fetishes of the food police (organic and local food) and their fear of biotechnology, all of which is underpinned by an untenable ideology of food. Along the way, we’ll see that the food police’s favored policies—from fat taxes to veggie subsidies to calorie labels at restaurants to strategic grain reserves—will hurt the poor, damage the environment, limit choice and innovation, and ultimately do little to alleviate their foodie angst.

  The food police don’t have a monopoly on passion for food. I love to eat, to cook, and to visit the farms and factories that make it all possible. I’ve spent a lifetime learning where food comes from and how to make it better. I believe our freedoms are worth fighting for—from what farmers choose to do on their own land to what we decide to stick on our own forks. My desire is that farmers and agribusinesses have the freedom to compete for a place on your dinner plate, and that you have the knowledge to eat, with a clear conscience, what you wish.

  THE PRICE OF PIETY

  Tune in to the Martha Stewart Show or the Food Network, watch Food, Inc. or Supersize Me, or pick up a book such as Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and you’ll find that there is an emerging consensus about food. What we hear isn’t good news. In fact, it’s downright frightening. Yale professor Kelly Brownell tells us that we live in a “toxic food environment.”1 Bestselling author Michael Pollan says that “Americans have a national eating disorder.”2 After showing a picture of an atomic explosion, New York Times columnist and food writer Mark Bittman proclaimed that our modern food production system is leading to “a holocaust of a different kind.”3

  The prescription for our ailments is local, organic, slow, natural, and unprocessed food along with a healthy dose of new food taxes, subsidies, and regulation. If we would only repent our wicked ways and shackle our oppressors, we’d reap better-tasting, healthier, sustainable, and equitable food. To save the planet and our very lives, we must return to nature and abandon modern agriculture. These are the sacred cows of a growing food movement. Yet sacred cows make the tastiest burgers.

  Is it possible that what you’ve read about modern food is all wrong? We humans are notoriously bad at judging small risks. It’s also human nature to focus on the negative and the emotional. The result is that stories claiming that we are drowning in a river of cheap, pesticide-riddled corn are more salable in the media than reports showing the benefits of lower prices at the supermarket. We fret over the dangers of food pesticides when we’re 1,600 times more likely to die in a car accident and even 15 times more likely to die from drowning in the bathtub.4 When activist organizations and government agencies require crises to secure donations and public funding, there is a natural incentive to slant the facts. In fact, our vision of reality can become badly distorted.5

  Did you know, for example, that science is now beginning to suggest that despite all we’ve been told, cutting salt intake has little effect on the chances of having a heart att
ack or stroke and may even increase the chance of death?6 Yet with every new study questioning the effectiveness of salt-reducing diets, the food police ramp up their efforts to force food processors and restaurants to cut back on sodium. It is time to rethink the rethinking of the modern American food system.

  We can deliberate any food policy, but something larger than costs and benefits is at play. As John Donvan of ABC News put it when moderating a debate on organic food, “What strikes me about this debate is that the tone here is as bitterly partisan as anything that’s happening in Washington. And I’m curious about why that is. And it’s on both sides. It’s also from all of us here in the hall. There is a nasty feeling to this issue.”7

  The debate is nasty because our freedom is at stake. On one side are farmers who want to work, and consumers who want to eat, as they please; on the other side are the self-proclaimed saviors of the food system, who want to make decisions for us. The food elite have appointed themselves our caretakers. They seek the power to steer food production and choice, claiming to know better than farmers and consumers. It is time we regained control of our forks and farms, and rightfully assumed responsibility for our own health, environment, and pocketbooks.