Two books on agricultural policy controversies

In my in-box are two new books on agricultural policy controversies, both written by agricultural economists. Both books seek, with partial but not complete success, to move beyond a certain fear of criticism, openly engaging readers who may have diverse public interest concerns and motivations.

First is Depolarizing Food and Agriculture: An Economic Approach (Routledge/Earthscan, 2014), by Andrew Barkley and Paul W. Barkley. I offered a comment for the back cover:

When criticized on environmental or nutritional grounds, U.S. farm groups sometimes are tempted to adopt a thickly-armored defensive posture. In this daring book, respected agricultural economists Andrew Barkley and Paul Barkley offer a persuasive alternative. Echoing Schmpeter's vision of creative destruction (naturally), but also drawing on John Stuart Mill and Nelson Mandela (more surprisingly), the authors argue for an open and understanding approach to contemporary food and agriculture controversies, eventually offering hope -- as the title indicates -- for depolarizing food and agriculture.

Second is Agricultural & Food Controversies, part of the "What Everyone Needs to Know" series from Oxford University Press (2014), by F. Bailey Norwood, Pascal A. Oltenacu, Michelle S. Calvo-Lorenzo, and Sarah Lancaster. In a Huffington Post review, Jayson Lusk -- who was author of a more strident 2013 book called the Food Police -- notes the value of the new book's respectful discussion:

Rather than striking a defensive or muckraking tone, as so often is the case in this genre of writing, Norwood and colleagues embrace the controversies, interpreting them as a sign of a healthy democracy struggling to deal with pressing challenges. They reveal what the best science has to say on topics ranging from food pesticides and GMOs to the carbon footprint of beef production and the well-being of farm animals. They weigh in on synthetic fertilizers, local foods, and farm policy. Theirs is a respectful discussion of the positions taken up by different advocacy groups, but there is no hesitation in drawing conclusions where logic and science warrant.

U.S. food supply inconsistent with dietary guidance

The U.S. food supply is far out of balance with dietary recommendations. A new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics quantifies the gaps. In brief, the U.S. food supply was quite unhealthy already by the 1970s and has not improved noticeably since then.

The authors -- Paige Miller, Jill Reedy, Sharon Kirkpatrick, and Susan Krebs-Smith -- use a measure more commonly applied to individual survey data, called the Healthy Eating Index. Getting this measure to fit national food supply data from USDA requires a bit of shoe-horning, but nonetheless the results are persuasive about the basic picture. As the video below illustrates, for example, Americans have for decades had all the protein we could possibly need, but the food supply for vegetables falls much short of recommendations.

The video -- from the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR) -- generally thinks of the food supply as "upstream" and food consumers as "downstream." A possible implication is that policies should alter the food supply so that downstream consumers could eat more healthfully. It should be noted that people in the food business, and perhaps most agricultural economists too, give greater weight to consumer preferences for unhealthy food as a key driver of the gap the study describes. Economists may suggest that the food supply would provide plenty of healthy food if that's what consumers actually would buy.

Still, nutrition scientists and agricultural economists have in recent years been doing better than ever at listening to each other's perspectives on these big questions. For example, in an accompanying article, which calls on dietitians to get involved in designing federal policies such as the Farm Bill, Claire Zizza reviews agricultural economics perspectives as well as public health perspectives on how such policies should be evaluated. It all makes a lively conversation.

 

Web search interest in "food policy" and "agricultural economics"

Circa 2005, U.S. web search interest in the terms "food policy" and "agricultural economics" was about equal. Nowadays, web search interest in "food policy" is much higher. There may be lessons in this for U.S. agricultural and applied economists.

Textbook on Economics of Agricultural Development

Many important debates in U.S. Food Policy turn on competing views about the global food prospect, especially the food situation in developing countries. For those who want to study this topic seriously, Routledge has just published the new third edition of the comprehensive textbook, The Economics of Agricultural Development: World Food Systems and Resource Use, by George W. Norton, Jeffrey Alwang, and my Friedman School colleague William A. Masters. From the link:

Our third edition is out in August 2014, and the Japanese edition appeared in January 2013. Click here to read a review of the first edition (in ERAE), find it at your local bookstore or any online bookseller, request a review copy from Routledge, or visit our instructors’ website for lecture slides, extra photos and example quizzes.

Summarizing the Agricultural Act of 2014

Choices Magazine -- the outreach magazine of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) -- this spring and early summer published a special series summarizing the Agricultural Act of 2014 (also known as the Farm Bill).

Jody Campiche organized the series and presented the theme overview:

After more than three years of debate on the next farm bill, the Agricultural Act of 2014 was signed into law on February 7, 2014. Overall, total spending under the new bill will be reduced by $23 billion as compared to the baseline over the next 10 years. The Agricultural Act of 2014 reforms the dairy program, includes major changes to commodity programs, adds new supplemental crop insurance programs, consolidates conservation programs, expands programs for specialty crops, reauthorizes important livestock disaster assistance programs, and reduces spending under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). However, despite large cuts in total program spending, the Act continues to provide important programs to ensure a safe and adequate food supply and to protect our natural resources. The articles in this theme discuss new or revised provisions relating to commodities, crop insurance, dairy, conservation, nutrition, and specialty crops as included in the Agricultural Act of 2014.

The series includes articles on commodity payments, conservation programs, dairy programs, crop insurance, specialty crops, and my contribution on nutrition assistance programs.

AAEA recognizes Food Policy in the United States

In its 2014 awards program, the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) has given honorable mention to my book, Food Policy in the United States, in the category "Quality of Communication."

As publisher of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and other top-ranked periodicals, AAEA is the leading scholarly and professional association in U.S. agricultural and applied economics. Though my book is highly multi-disciplinary -- designed to engage non-traditional audiences interested in food policy debates -- AAEA's recognition shows that the book also meets the exacting standards of the mainstream of my home profession.

My department chair, Will Masters, wrote the nomination letter to AAEA:

Prof. Wilde’s book distills the instructional content of his 13-week graduate course on U.S. Food Policy into a very readable 200 pages, enlivened with anecdotes from 10 years of experience blogging on the topic at http://usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com. The quality of writing is extraordinary, making economic insights accessible by clear use of plain language, amply illustrated with well-designed charts and tables, plus sidebars with more academic material to add depth without interfering with the story line. The book is particularly innovative in its scope, spanning agricultural production and international trade, food manufacturing, grocery stores and restaurants, food safety and labeling, advertising and health claims, and nutrition assistance programs....

In summary, Prof. Parke Wilde’s Food Policy in the United States offers a big step forward in fulfillment of the AAEA’s vision and mission. This book exemplifies the highest standard of scientific communication needed by our profession, first to help students in classrooms all across the country, and then to help graduates improve food and agricultural policy in Washington and elsewhere.

I hope the AAEA's honorable mention encourages faculty to consider using this book for courses that address -- in a lively but rigorous way -- the immense student interest in food movements and food policy. Faculty members who are considering adoption may acquire a copy from the publisher.

Superfood fads for global farmers

In a Marketplace report last night, Dan Bobkoff describes the excitement of new crops for global farmers without overstating the power of any single new crop to transform the world. To communicate this balance of opportunity and realism, Bobkoff chatted with my fellow Tufts economist Will Masters.

Masters is chairman of the Food and Nutrition Policy Department in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts. He says more often than not, so-called miracle crops like moringa or breadfruit are distractions. "Why [is] it that it didn't get identified as a huge success previously?"

In other words, it's not like farmers haven't tried many of these crops before. Farmers experiment. They'll plant something new, and see how it does. And, over the years, many of these so-called superfoods failed for the most mundane of reasons. They take too long to grow, require too much labor or are prone to pests. It's not as easy to spread breadfruit as wheat.

"That search across all the available biodiversity has been going on for thousands of years," Masters said, "and it's led to a system that has found a half dozen or dozen major species that feed the world. And that's because those major species have some pretty amazing characteristics."

Economists and the restaurant industry offer input on the minimum wage debate

With support from the Obama administration, Congress is contemplating an increase in the minimum wage, in small annual steps to $10.10 per hour by 2016. After that, the minimum wage would rise automatically with inflation.

A group of several hundred economists signed a letter of support sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute. The letter said the proposal would help 17 million workers directly, and perhaps another 11 million workers by boosting wage expectations at the low end of the labor market. The letter said the weight of recent research shows "that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market."

A competing group of several hundred economists signed a letter of opposition. The letter says the consequence of the minimum wage proposal is "that business owners saddled with a higher cost of labor will need to cut costs, or pass the increase to their consumers in order to make ends meet. Many of the businesses that pay their workers minimum wage operate on extremely tight profit margins, with any increase in the cost of labor threatening this delicate balance."

In my own profession, several leading agricultural and applied economists signed each letter.

The New York Times this week pointed out that the letter of opposition was not really written by Vernon Smith, the lead signatory, who is a Nobel-winning economist. The letter was circulated by a firm hired by the National Restaurant Association (NRA), which has much to lose from the new minimum wage proposal. Smith is quoted saying he hadn't known who originated the statement, but he didn't mind that it turned out to be the restaurant industry, because the content of the letter is what mattered.

I asked a couple of my favorite agricultural and applied economists who had signed each letter if they wanted to respond to the controversy. One who signed the letter of support just confirmed that he supported the proposed minimum wage increase, but preferred not to say more.

Dan Sumner, a leading food policy thinker and economist at UC Davis, who signed the letter of opposition, gave this response. I had asked him if he felt "ill-used" by the restaurant industry. His email tackles the concern that the NRA support was non-transparent, discusses anti-poverty policies he judges superior to the minimum wage, and casts the minimum wage unfavorably in the context of other governmental efforts to set prices.

Parke:

I just assumed the min wage letter was developed and circulated by an interest group. Interest groups are the ones with enough interest to organize such an effort.

But, like Lucas and Smith, the proposition and argument itself is what matters to me. I have no connection with fast food places.

I put the minimum wage in the category with farm subsidies as a silly policy ill-targeted and worse than worthless for three reasons.

a. It uses policy resources, effort and attention, that would be better spent doing effective things to help the poor, such as earned income credits or targeted education programs or quality day-care or ...

b. It sends the signal that government price fixing is good policy more broadly. I know from my own specialty that government-set prices are generally bad policy. Thinking we can fix labor market problems or ill-trained workers or any other problem by having members of Congress set some favored price based on what their favorite lobby says it should be just encourages shoddy thinking.

(You will recall that is my problem with the press and the Congress continuing to act as though food stamps had anything to do with food. The reason I like the SNAP program is that is is unrelated to nutrition and the nanny notion that the feds should tell people how to spend their money, even charity.)

c. Minimum wage is so ill targeted as a poverty program and really does make it harder for some poor gal with very little to offer to get that first job. If I have to pay $10 anyway I can turn her away and hire only her sharper cousin, who already had a leg up.

Anyway, that's my off the cuff thinking.

By the way, the interest groups I have least time for are the ideological lobby groups and NGOs that seem to be very loose with the facts and analysis. These range from Heritage to HSUS to the Union of Concerned Scientists. My sense is these folks are just as likely to have an underlying bias to everything they do, and they pretend they act in the "public interest" relative to firms and groups of firms who have clear financial motivations.

Dan

USDA estimates that 31% of the food supply is lost and uneaten

A new report from USDA's Economic Research Service finds:

In the United States, 31 percent—or 133 billion pounds—of the 430 billion pounds of the available food supply at the retail and consumer levels in 2010 went uneaten. The estimated value of this food loss was $161.6 billion using retail prices. For the first time, ERS estimated the calories associated with food loss: 141 trillion in 2010, or 1,249 calories per capita per day.

How grains and oilseeds flow through the U.S. food economy

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) recently (in December 2013) announced the once-every-five-years release of benchmark national input-output accounts, showing how resources flow from one industry to the next in the U.S. economy.

For people interested in the economics of the food system, some graduate students and colleagues and I last year developed a tool in Tufts' Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) for interactively illustrating such input-output flows. A working paper (#44) describes the tool. A previous blog post shows an example. The visualization tag at this blog collects other posts about interesting food policy data illustrations.

In this video, I use the new BEA benchmark input-output data to describe how grain and oilseeds flow through the food economy. Before making the video, I rounded the numbers to the nearest billion dollars and deleted some negligible small resource flows, so serious students of these data will want to refer to the original files from BEA. Because the numbers likely will be illegible in the video player embedded in the blog post, I've included a link to the original video, which you can download and play with higher resolution on your computer's own video program (such as Windows Media Player or the Mac equivalent).

Food policy advocates and "personal responsibility"

In an interview with Jayson Lusk, author of the Food Police, the Casual Kitchen blog today asks: 'Why is it that many food policy advocates strongly dislike the phrase "personal responsibility"?'

Jayson's answer, expressing a balanced sense of personal responsibility combined with awareness of environmental influences, is fine.  It is worth adding that many food policy advocates talk about "personal responsibility" all the time.  Just do a search for "Michelle Obama" and "personal responsibility."  You will find the topic thoroughly covered by the Cato Institute (an institution rarely accused of being part of the "Food Police"!).  You will find a lively discussion of how much the Obamas emphasize "personal responsibility" in tough non-pandering commencement speeches.  The Obamas' views, with a mix of personal responsibility and public purpose, sound a lot like Jayson's.

The Casual Kitchen, and Jayson too, can win arguments any time they like against the almost satirically narrow-minded caricature of the "Food Police" that they have set up.  But, perhaps it will become boring after a time to knock down row upon row of carnival dolls sitting on a shelf.  If so, they will want to engage in greater detail the issues that Michelle Obama raises in her speeches for the "Let's Move" campaign.  Here is a good speech to begin with.

Thinking like an economist ... about grocery stores

In a recent blog post, my Friedman School colleague Will Masters considers the differences in the economic incentives that manufacturers, restaurants, and supermarkets face when it comes to selling healthier food:

Today’s New York Times has a terrific news story about this frontier of research by their reporter Michael Moss. Moss just released a lively new book about how food manufacturers raise the levels of salt, sugar, fat and other ingredients in processed foods far beyond what you’d add in your own kitchen, while research at Tufts and elsewhere has shown similar problems in restaurant food. In contrast, grocery stores sell a lot of fruits, vegetables and other relatively healthy stuff, generally around the perimeter of the store. So, in the choice between processed foods, restaurant foods, and plain old groceries, what determines how consumers’ spend their hard-earned money?

Part of the answer is advertising.  I imagine other key factors are consumer tastes, demand for convenience, prices, and overall health orientation. The comments to Will's post are interesting.

Will, incidentally, this year won the prestigious Bruce Gardner Memorial Prize for Applied Policy Analysis from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

An introduction to Food Policy in the United States

A second excerpt from the first chapter of Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan), which was published in April.

This book offers an introduction to food policy in the United States. Food policy encompasses laws, regulations, decisions and actions by governments and other institutions that influence food production, distribution and consumption. While food policy is defined broadly, a food program is a more specific institution that provides or distributes food.

Food policy is intertwined with many of the fundamental economic and social decisions of the day. Will traditional farming in the United States disappear as an economically viable way of life? Can U.S. agriculture contribute to nourishing a growing world population without destroying the environment? What labor rights do farm workers have? Does globalization help or harm U.S. farmers and food consumers?  How can the safety of food be protected without imposing unnecessarily burdensome rules and regulations? What can be done about the epidemic of obesity and chronic disease? How can school lunches be improved? Why do some families go hungry in such a rich country?

U.S. food policy is an important topic for readers in the United States and also in other countries. The United States is the world’s largest exporter for some crops and a leading importer for others. The U.S. government position carries considerable weight in multinational policy decisions about globalization and international trade. Consumers around the world aspire to emulate some aspects of U.S. consumer culture, even as doubts arise about the nutritional merit and environmental sustainability of U.S. food consumption patterns. Some environmental constraints on U.S. agricultural production are local, but others are global. In these respects, the implications of U.S. food policy extend beyond national borders.

This book focuses on national-level food policy in the United States, but there are similarities with policy-making at other levels of government and in other institutions. Federalism refers to the division of authority between the national government and state and local governments. Policy innovations may be first attempted at the state and local level and later adopted at the federal level.

U.S. food policy is absorbing in part because it is dysfunctional. Just as other areas of politics in the United States suffer from partisanship and deep regional and cultural divisions, food policy can become mired down in bitter struggles across stagnant political lines in the sand. On topics ranging from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to advertising that targets children, it can seem as if no policy actors have either changed their mind or persuaded an opponent in the past generation.

Faced with such challenges, it may be worthwhile to climb down from the ramparts and devote some time to reflection and study. To some extent, this book is a descendant of hefty agricultural policy textbooks such as traditionally were used in departments of agricultural economics in U.S. land-grant universities, but there are important differences. This book tackles both normative questions (about how decisions should be made) and positive questions (about how decisions actually are made) in U.S. food policy. Throughout the book, real-world policy struggles provide the contemporary hook to motivate the reader’s attention to the more specialized details of economic principles, policy analysis, institutional structures and data sources. The study of these more academic topics may pay off even for readers whose primary interest is the policy arena. The hope for this book is that these principles and data sources hold some promise for knocking loose the logjam in policy-making.

Agribusiness reviews Food Policy in the United States

In the forthcoming issue of the journal Agribusiness, Neal Hooker reviews my book, Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan, 2013).  Neal is an economist, a nationally known food policy expert, and professor at The Ohio State University.  He recommends the book warmly for university classes in food policy at the upper-level undergraduate and graduate levels.

So returning to the goal of comprehension, does this book deliver? Having taught food policy courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels and being faced with the challenge of an appropriate text with a strong disciplinary base, I believe the answer is yes. Detailed and timely enough to give more than a cursory description of the economics of policy in an important and salient area (food, always a good pedagogical vehicle for students), the book encourages the reader to learn more. Clearly enthusiastic and knowledgeable, Parke has distilled his understanding of the often complex U.S. food policy environment for many to explore.

The Food Police by Jayson Lusk

For fifteen years, Oklahoma State University economist Jayson Lusk sought to study food regulation issues in a balanced way.  As he recounts:

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.

The Food Police (Crown Forum, 2013) is the new book Lusk wrote after he outgrew this foolish impartiality.

In the Food Police, every government initiative to address any environmental or social problem within the food system represents misguided overreach.  There may be an exception, but I couldn't find one.

In the Food Police, the conventional food system is fine as it is.

• Food is highly affordable.  There is no need to spend much ink on commodity price spikes, the growing world population, or environmental constraints on food production.
• Organic agriculture is foolish, conventional pesticides are safe, and farmers in recent years have replaced dangerous pesticides with safe ones.  (How the farmers found any dangerous pesticides to replace is a mystery to me).  
• Americans live longer because of our "abundant, diverse, and nutritious food supply."  Moderate overweight is fine; it probably extends our lives.  The connection between obesity and diabetes is doubtful, and diabetes may be genetic, so don't worry about diabetes either.
• It would be unhealthy to reduce salt consumption.
• Crop yields increased from 1900 to 2010. There is no need to mention that yield growth has slowed in recent years or that agricultural economists are greatly distressed about declining public investment in agricultural research.

Very briefly, at sporadic intervals, Lusk vaguely refers to imperfections in the food system. On page 20, he says, "I'm not saying all food trends are heading in the right direction."  On p. 35, he says, "None of this is to say there aren't problems associated with our modern food system."  But, in each case, the reader never gets to hear any details about these problems.  Lusk quickly moves on to decrying how the Food Police exaggerate whatever problems there might be.

A long-standing principle of the U.S. Food Policy blog is that reasonable people ought to be able to agree on the toughest food policy controversies of the day.  When possible, we should avoid letting food policy debates get caught up in the broader divisions that have made American politics so dysfunctional in recent years: Democrat and Republican, heartland and coastal states, religious and secular, black and white.

At every turn, Lusk chooses instead to tie his food policy arguments to seemingly unrelated flame wars.  He writes, "The progressives' plan for slow, natural and organic food production has been tried.  It's called Africa."  The food police ignore personal liberties, even though these are "many of the same people who scream, 'It's a woman's body,' any time the subject of abortion comes up."  Lusk calls the food police "fascists."  Lusk accuses the San Francisco board of supervisors of astounding hypocrisy for regulating toys for kids in restaurant meals, because the same city values other liberties highly: "'In the City by the Bay, if you want to roller skate naked down Castro Street wearing a phallic -symbol hat and snorting an eight-ball off a transgender hooker's chest while underage kids run behind you handing out free heroin needles, condoms and coupons ... that's your right as a free citizen of the United States.'"

Jayson Lusk is a leading agricultural economist.  He co-edited a book from Oxford University Press, to which I contributed a chapter on food security in developed countries.  Yet, the new book reminded me of right-wing bloggers, such as Michelle Malkin.  I was going to bite my tongue and avoid mentioning this similarity, but then I noticed in footnote 3 of chapter 1 that the casually and irrelevantly homophobic San Francisco anecdote was a direct quote from the blogger Michelle Malkin herself.

The footnote provides reassurance that I may offer my frank summary of this book without giving offense.  Jayson Lusk's Food Police is like a Michelle Malkin blog post, but it's 190 pages long and about food policy.

Using the Visual Understanding Environment software from Tufts University to illustrate food industry input-output flows

This new visualization tool allows you to explore resource flows between industries.

For example, you can see how much meat and poultry flows into the restaurant food industry, and then how much restaurant food flows to the final consumer (all measured in billions of dollars per year). You can create your own diagram showing the industries and flows that you select, in any order you choose.

This project extends the capability of Tufts University’s Visual Understanding Environment (VUE).  I worked on this with Rebecca Nemec, Graham Jeffries, Mike Korcynski, and Jonelle Lonergan.  Our working paper (.pdf) gives instructions for using several practice data sets, or for downloading your own data from the federal government's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).  Accompanying data files and a processing program are available on my department's working paper series page.

The best way to understand the capabilities of this visualization tool is to watch this video, also available full-size on Vimeo.

Visualizing Input-Output Data Using VUE from Tufts University - Online on Vimeo.

An inter-disciplinary approach to U.S. food policy

An excerpt from the first chapter of Food Policy in the United States: An Introduction (Routledge/Earthscan).

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is the federal  government’s most authoritative official statement on nutrition and health issues (discussed at length in Chapter 8), presents a social and ecological framework for food consumption and physical activity decisions (see Figure). Similar models are found in many other high-profile nutrition policy documents (Institute of Medicine, 2012). To analyze major national problems of obesity and chronic disease, this framework goes far beyond immediate causes such as food and beverage intake and physical activity. Like planetary orbits that are farther from the center, the outer layers list more distant influences on food choices.

The framework calls attention to important topics, including agriculture (Chapter 2), the food and beverage manufacturing industries (Chapter 5), the retailing and restaurant industries (Chapter 6), marketing and the media (Chapter 9) and socioeconomic factors  (Chapter 10). Once nutrition and public health professionals begin to explore these more fundamental influences on food and beverage consumption, they find themselves engaged with challenging topics in economics and political science.

At first, this engagement can be unnerving. When interacting with patients, professionals in medical fields are rightly proud of their ability to diagnose problems and prescribe an appropriate remedy. It is tempting at first to adapt this medical patient approach to food policy applications. For example, if expanding food portion sizes contribute to rising rates of obesity, it is tempting to say government agencies should prescribe smaller portion sizes. If nutrient-dense foods cost too much, it is tempting to say government agencies should prescribe a price ceiling for fruits and vegetables. It is disappointing if policy-makers reject such proposals as politically infeasible. It is downright frustrating if policy-makers say with a straight face that a well-intentioned nutrition policy prescription is unwise. Yet, except in special settings such as school meal programs, determining portion sizes may be a decision that people do not want to delegate to their government. A price ceiling for fruits and vegetables may have unintended consequences, such as reducing the incentives to grow fruits and vegetables.

The outer layers of the social ecological framework bring nutrition policy into contact with many other societal objectives, such as a thriving economy, a healthy environment, poverty alleviation and effective political governance. Powerful policy actors in these outer layers do not—and sometimes should not—behave as if food consumption and physical activity stood alone as the sun at the center of the social ecological solar system. Governments balance food and nutrition concerns against other considerations, just as individuals and families do.

As we explore more deeply the normative question of what food policies best serve the public good, it will appear necessary to discern which decisions should be delegated to governments and which decisions should be made by individuals interacting in economic markets. And, as we explore more deeply the positive question of what policies can win political support, it will appear necessary to anticipate how a variety of producer and consumer interests will respond to such proposals.

These inter-disciplinary explorations are more difficult than simply prescribing the right policy medicine, but ultimately they offer both sharper policy insight and greater potential for political success.

Source: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010.

U.S. meat consumption fell after 2004

According to USDA data on food consumption per capita, U.S. meat consumption fell from about 2004 to 2010 (the most recent data available).

Beef consumption peaked in 2002 and has fallen about 12% since then.  Pork consumption peaked in about 1999 and has fallen about 11% since then.  And I had not realized that chicken consumption peaked in about 2006 and has fallen almost 5% since then.

Total combined consumption of beef, pork, and chicken peaked in about 2004 and has fallen more than 6% since then.

I think these trends likely are driven both by economic recession and by increasing health and environmental awareness.

Americans consume substantially more beef, pork, and chicken than is necessary for a balanced and healthy diet.  The federal government's mainstream advice on diet and health, MyPlate, suggests that about a quarter of the dinner plate can come from the protein group (which includes fish, seafood, beans, peas, soy foods, nuts, and eggs, in addition to beef, pork, and chicken).

The unusually high U.S. consumption of beef, pork, and chicken also raises environmental concerns, with implications for water quality (when nutrients in manure reach water sources) and land use (because of the large amounts of animal feed that are converted comparatively inefficiently into meat-based foods).

It is worth mentioning that meat is a good source of protein and several other nutrients, but these nutrients are not currently under-supplied in U.S. diets.  Similarly, animal agriculture is a particularly sensible use of certain grasslands that are environmentally unsuitable for crop production, but this grass-based production system is not where most of our beef, pork, and chicken comes from.

Overall, I don't think the government should be too pushy when it comes to influencing people's diets.  It seems quite wise simply to accept and accomodate the recent market-driven downward trends in meat consumption, without taking government action to oppose them.

These trends are a good thing for our health, environment, and economy.
Source: interactive chart by the author using USDA food availability data.

Update (later the same day): I just saw that Steve Baragona at Voice of America yesterday described this same trend.  I had been thinking about this topic, because my colleague Paul McNamara mentioned related work on trends in vegetarian consumption by a student in his department at the University of Illinois, Daniel Karney.

Virginia Tech seminar, March 22

I will be giving a departmental seminar in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Virginia Tech, tomorrow, March 22, at 3 pm.

The title is: "Not just for farmers: Six ways that agriculture programs affect food, nutrition, and the environment."

Please come visit if you are in Blacksburg, Virginia.  The room is Fralin 102.

Five contemporary games with excellent food and agricultural economics insight

Here is my top-five list of contemporary board or card games to play with students, colleagues, or friends who have interests in food economics or agricultural economics.

Among older games, Monopoly (1933) offers buying and selling, but it misses some of the decision-making tensions that really make economics fascinating as a social science.  Monopoly still probably deserves better than its two stars on the Board Game Geek site, which is used throughout this post as a linked source for more information about each game.  The old card game Pit (1903) -- also designed in part by George S. Parker -- imitates the raucous sound of an old commodities exchange, but the trading ratios do not really have anything to do with prices that represent resource scarcity.

The newer generation of games listed here includes economics themes in imaginative ways.  My kids, spouse, and I enjoy the game-play of all five. 

5.  Roll Through the Ages (2008).  This dice game by Matt Leacock is one of the easiest games on the list.  Each player gets a score sheet (as in Yahtzee) and a wooden board with pegs (as in cribbage).  The goal is to earn points by improving your civilization.  If you build more cities, you get to roll more dice.  In each turn, you must provide enough food for your cities.  With any surplus production, you can develop new technologies (such as irrigation to prevent drought) and build wonders (such as pyramids).  Costly early investments generate later advantages.  Those who make such investments benefit from a longer game, while those who make fewer early investments benefit from a shorter game, so a lot of strategy depends on actions that can shorten or lengthen the game.  Food production is central, and the game illustrates some simple aspects of development economics.

4.  Bohnanza (1997).  In this card game by the German designer Uwe Rosenberg, you plant cards representing various bean crops in fields on the table in front of you.  You earn coins when you harvest the beans.  In the game's best agricultural economics feature, you can trade cards with other players who are growing different crops.

3.  Agricola (2007).  In this elaborate board game, also by Uwe Rosenberg, you start with a wooden hut and try to build up a thriving pre-industrial farmstead.  You begin with two family members.  Each turn, you send out family members to work at tilling fields, collecting resources, or building things.  Every several turns, there is a harvest season, with extra tension as you bring in crops and multiply livestock, trying to ensure enough food for your family.  If you raise more family members, you have more laborers but also more mouths to feed.  Agricultural economics themes are pervasive.

2.  Railways of the World (2005).  This dramatically over-sized board game by Glenn Drover and Martin Wallace is a spinoff of the old computer game Railway Tycoon.  The non-computerized version is terrific.  The target audience surely includes old steam train fanatics, who will love the detail about various 19th Century locomotives, but I think the economic history aspects also are very good.  For example, in the Eastern United States scenario that comes with the basic set, you make early investments to connect cities.  The game cleverly replicates some U.S. economic history, in which short routes between Northeastern cities are central in the early turns, but then a network of links from Chicago becomes crucial later.  Small color-coded cubes representing goods are distributed randomly to color-coded cities at the start of the game.  You earn points by delivering the goods to similarly-colored cities on the rail links you have built.  The best agricultural economics feature arises from the natural way that the presence of pent up supply of a good in one place, combined with unsatisfied demand for the good in a city elsewhere, generates a great incentive to invest heavily in a rail link between the two locations.  There is an astutely designed system for taking out bonds to fund early investments, but each bond requires later interest payments.

1.  Settlers of Catan (1995).  This game by Klaus Teuber is one of the most popular in the past quarter century of innovative European board games.  You build settlements and roads on an island with three or four other players.  The board itself is composed of randomly distributed hexagons, so it is different each time you play.  Each settlement entitles you to resources from surrounding hexagons.  Different resources -- clay, wheat, sheep, ore, and lumber -- are used in various combinations to build new settlements, upgrade settlements to cities, or support armies to attack your neighbors.  The game earns the number one spot here, because it succeeds more than any other game I know in imitating some key insights about pricing in real-world economic markets.  Players trade resources with each other at prices they determine themselves.  For good players, the prices adapt to random changes in the relative scarcity of the various resources.  This pricing system works itself out naturally, and doesn't get in the way of the game play, which is plenty entertaining.