PPS590 – Food Policy

1. PPS590 – Food Policy 1. “Why Study Food?,” Food Production, and Population Growth

2. Why Study Food? “I am much more interested in another question,– a a question upon which the “salvation of humanity” depends to a far greater degree than it does upon any piece of theological curiosity: I refer to nutrition.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo.

3. Why Study Food? “A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in points of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion. … Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized.” – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier.

4. Why Study Food? “Vegetarians and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit.” – Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential.

5. Why Study Food? “Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known … as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship, which are themselves costly to develop. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes, an ideal example of what Thorstein Veblen … called conspicuous consumption. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship, and social aggression.” – William Deresiewicz, “A Matter of Taste?”

6. Why Study Food? “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” – Kate Moss, model.

7. Why Study Food? “Worst of all, from this point of view, are those uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone—a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know that eating in public is offensive. Eating on the street … displays a lack of self-control: It betokens enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now, it cannot wait.” – Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul.

8. Why Study Food? Studying food is very much in the Zeitgeist – the preceding quotes are from the Winter 2013 issue of The Point magazine. But really, why study food? Why study food now?

9. Why Study Food? Studying food is very much in the Zeitgeist – the preceding quotes are from the Winter 2013 issue of The Point magazine. But really, why study food? Why study food now?

10. Why Study Food? My answer:

11. Why Study Food? In other words, though some need less food than others, everyone needs food. More specifically, my interest in food policy was born out of my interest in agriculture and development, and issues related to food security.

12. Why Study Food? But what other reasons are there? Beyond survival, Belasco (2008) addresses this question in chapter 1. In short: Our distance from food production leads us (qua consumers) to take food for granted. Food is the object of anxiety: What and how we eat are both related to disease and death. We worry about running out of food.

13. Why Study Food? Belasco believes there is an academic bias against the study of food, broadly defined. I’d be happy to discuss the reasons why I agree outside of class. For Belasco, we decide what we eat on the basis of three pillars: Identity—Convenience—Responsibility. The third pillar has traditionally been neglected. Convenience has been driving the food industry.

14. Why Study Food? Identity is very important – Guatamalan corn and biofuels – and Belasco dedicates two chapters to its importance. Concept of “cuisine,” which resemble that of culture: Like social norms, does a cuisine emerge and evolve so as to minimize transaction costs and in response to incentives? Psychological aspects: Proust’s madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann.

15. Why Study Food? Food and sexuality: Judeo-Christian tradition has linked eating the fruit of knowledge with sexual shame very early on! And notice how often do we talk of food porn? Food often plays a role of central importance in art, be it music (Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”), painting (still life paintings, The Last Supper), literature (Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel), film (the food Grace Kelly brings James Stewart in Rear Window), and so on.

16. Why Study Food? Food and gender: Preparing food has traditionally been seen as a female activity. Growing food is often seen as a male activity. Belasco: Food can be a tool of female empowerment and a tool of female enslavement. Hypothesis: Labor-saving technologies in the 20th century (i.e., increased convenience) have increased the relative cost of (female) labor, which has liberated women by allowing them to work outside the home.

17. Food Production and Population Growth Let’s now switch gears and discuss food population, population, and the Malthusian hypothesis. Malthus was a British social scientist whose life straddled the 18th and 19th centuries. In 1798, he published his Essay on the Principle of Population, in which he laid out a hypothesis that was largely wrong, and which had devastating consequences for much of subsequent history.

18. Food Production and Population Growth In short, Malthus’ hypothesis was that food production would never stay ahead of population growth because it would be constrained by fixed assets such as land, while human population tends to grow exponentially. Malthus: “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

19. Food Production and Population Growth In the 200 years since Malthus published his Essay, never has there been enough food to feed the entire world. The world has experience famines, to be sure, but “[s]tarvationis the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat. While the latter can be a cause of the former, it is but one of many possible causes” (Sen, 1981).

20. Food Production and Population Growth In other words, if food security is defined as food being available, accessible, and utilized, starvation and famine has historically been a problem of access, not of availability. The mistake in Malthus’ reasoning, of course, was that even if some inputs (e.g., land) are only available in fixed quantity, technological innovation is possible and has so far kept abreast of population growth.

21. Food Production and Population Growth Still, the Malthusian hypothesis periodically makes a comeback: Paddock and Paddock’s Famine 1975! (1967), Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968), and Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute in 1995 More recently Julian Cribb, an Australian journalist, has served Reverend Malthus’ reheated leftovers, on the basis of high and volatile food prices.

22. Food Production and Population Growth Though it is not clear what has been the precise cause of high and volatile food prices since 2005, we have a pretty good idea. If I had to wager a significant amount of my salary, I would say the main cause of higher and more volatile food prices has been the push toward biofuels… and reactions to higher, more volatile food prices (e.g., commodity export bans, trade restrictions, etc.) Little evidence that commodity speculation has had any impact (Aulerich and Irwin, 2012).

23. But just because technology has saved our hides in the past does not mean it will automatically do so in the future. Witness this week’s issue The Economist, which talks of dwindling innovation worldwide. The Economist, January 12, 2013

24. Food Production and Population Growth Quo vadis? There are several issues which one must keep in mind. Our best indicator of food scarcity is the price of food. The price of food is determined by the intersection of the supply and demand of food.

25. Food Production and Population Growth What are the nonprice determinants of food supply? Technology (of which more later) and input costs, for the most part, but also expectations, competition and market distortions (e.g., taxes and subsidies). What are the nonprice determinants of demand? Income, consumer preferences (which respond to marketing), number of consumers, expectations, price of substitutes and complements. We will discuss Godfray et al. (2010, PTRSB) for more.

26. Food Production and Population Growth So how can we make sure that humankind does not run out of food in the near future? First off, we have to close the yield gap–the difference between realized and potential yields. Low yields occur because of technical constraints or because of market failures. But this does not lend itself to broad policy prescriptions, as the yield gap is context specific (North America vs. sub-Saharan Africa).

27. Food Production and Population Growth All the while, we should strive for sustainability, including economic sustainability, i.e., profitability. But at what scale environmental sustainability? Second, we need to increase production limits. The Green Revolution worked well in Asia, but there has been no such thing in Africa.

28. Food Production and Population Growth This will mean relying increasingly on biotechnology and genetic modification. As such, the precautionary principle indicates that specific innovations will need to be tested for safety. But there is also the more thorny issue of intellectual property rights regimes, which are seen as way too generous toward innovators. And then there’s the problem of the public’s perception of biotechnology and GMOs.

29. Food Production and Population Growth Third, we need to reduce food waste. A study released last week claims that in the UK, more than 50% of food is wasted. A more realistic estimate is on the order of 30-40% food waste. Consumers are largely to blame: We want fruits and vegetables that look a certain way. How often do we not get to food in time? The litigiousness of the American consumer also leads to “best before” dates that are exaggeratedly early.

30. Food Production and Population Growth We also need to change our diets. Raising animals for meat consumption is not very efficient, and over 30% of the world’s cereal production is fed to animals. By Bennett’s Law (Bennett, 1941), this will only get worse in the foreseeable future as a consequence of the economic rise of China and India, among others.

31. Food Production and Population Growth Lastly, we will need to expand aquaculture. Fish can and does play an important role in diets worldwide, constituting a major source of protein for almost half of the world’s population (Tveteras et al., 2012). But aquaculture might cause harm to the environment because of current production methods. The associated externalities need to be considered and dealt with.

32. Food Production and Population Growth In sum, though there are many reasons to be optimistic, we also need to make sure to take the right decisions, i.e., those that will ensure that we have a sufficient, stable food supply in the future. If I had to summarize this semester in one sentence, it would be this: There is more to food than what the New York Times leads you to believe, and easy answers are few and far between.