Currently viewing the category: "Econ-o’food"

It’s a new school year, time to rethink what we teach!

America’s 2008 financial crisis and its consequences led to long, fierce debates over the past decade about what went wrong in the economy, and how what’s taught in economics classes should change.  Among professors, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) plays a big role, and it’s flagship  Curriculum of Open-access Resources in Economics (CORE) textbook has been getting a lot of attention this Fall.

Many ideas from INET and CORE are already woven into my teaching, based on their role in the scholarly literature.  For example, I have used the Piketty and Saez data on income distribution ever since they first appeared in journal articles, well before the financial crisis. But N238 differs in many ways from standard introductory economics classes.  We just had an email exchange among a few Friedman School faculty about this and I am keen to hear what others think it, so I’ll post a few some notes here in hopes of sparking conversation about what’s taught in this class.

First, the innovations brought by INET and CORE aim are about responding to the 2008 recession with more attention to contemporary macroeconomics, regarding a country’s income level (growth and fluctuations) and income distribution (production, employment).  In contrast, the focus of our syllabus is entirely on how economics matters for agriculture,  food systems and nutrition.  Within nutrition we focus mainly on dietary intake, with two whole weeks on details of consumer behavior that are almost entirely omitted from the CORE textbook.

Second, the definition of economics used by INET and CORE is that economists study income flows.  Hence the title of their book is “The Economy“.  In contrast, the title of our class and of the background textbook we use is “Economics“.  The difference is important because we define economics as a method, not a topic.  We use economics to study all aspects of agriculture, food and nutrition, including many aspects of individual behavior and social outcomes that do not involve money.  Economics is just one of many ways to study these things, which can also be analyzed from other perspectives such as anthropology, sociology, history, or epidemiology.  By the end of each semester in N238, students should have a pretty clear sense of the difference between “the economy” (meaning what’s measured as income) and other things that matter for nutrition and can be studied using economics such as gender bias in time use within households, or consumer response to coupons and vouchers, or the impacts of home gardens on diets.

Third, the target audience for INET and CORE is students who really want to study economics as such.  The CORE textbook is written in a rather dense, abstract way that does not aim to reach the casual reader.  My aim is to teach in way that doesn’t require a textbook at all.  Class slides use updated data, and students who want a text for alternative explanations of basic concepts are encouraged to buy an inexpensive older edition.  I also point students to the relevant Khan Academy videos.  That solves the textbook pricing problem, and allows us to focus throughout the class on customized material about agriculture, food & nutrition.

So… I am keen to hear from anyone interested in curricular issues.  Can you see ways to teach economics more effectively, in this or other classes?

 

If you took the NUTR 238 final exam last week, you’ll know that this year’s questions involved news clippings from the past month’s food policy news, about SNAP restrictions, trade policy, pesticides and monopolies.

Now that class is over, a great to new way to follow these and other stories is via the Tufts library’s new subscription to an daily newsletter from FERN called AgInsider. You can get the daily headlines via email by signing up at thefern.org (scroll down to see link),  and if you have a Tufts login you can see the articles here.

For Tufts affiliates, one useful trick is to have your browser redirect the newsletter links to that library subscription.  I use this one: http://einaregilsson.com/redirector, for which the configuration is:

https://thefern.org/ag_insider/*
https://thefern-org.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/ag_insider/$1
https://thefern.org/ag_insider/xxx
               https://thefern-org.ezproxy.library.tufts.edu/ag_insider/xxx
Main window (address bar)

Among other newsletters my top choices are:  for US food news in general, the brilliant New Food Economy’s Weekly Dish; for US food policy news, Politico’s Morning Agriculture (subscription needed for Pro articles only) and Farm Policy News  (was subscription only, now free thanks to Univ. of Illinois); for global food issues, the Chicago Council’s weekly Food for Thought news brief.

And if you actually get away from the screen occasionally, I’ll toss in a plug for the podcast revolution:  I don’t have a favorite one on food policy – instead I occasionally listen to stuff about food culture, like Gastropod, Sporkful and the Eater Upsell, lots of academic wonkery with Tyler Cowan or LSE lectures, and find many great episodes about food policy issues on Planet Money.  Fiction is good too, with great scripted drama like Bronzeville and Homecoming, and yes, music:  my beloved Econotunes, and songs that play with food.

Happy summer!

Will

 

A friend who writes for the Financial Times newspaper just published a terrific essay on recent books about economics, and about the applicability of standard  methods like what we use in class to real-world choices and policymaking.  To read it you’ll need to make yourself an FT login at their website but it’s well worthwhile:

https://www.ft.com/content/331ff894-f876-11e6-bd4e-68d53499ed71

Our TA Rachel Gilbert also pointed out a great NPR story about a famous line of research in economics: “Does studying economics make you selfish?.  The answer is… maybe.   In my experience, the problem of selfish “economists” arises when people learn too little economics, rather than too much.  By stopping at the introductory stuff, people may never get to adult stage of what real-life economists actually do to improve social outcomes.

Before I came to Tufts, I taught for 18 years at Purdue.  When I left, the grad students asked me to a confessional “last lecture” in which I asked what an ethical economics of food would look like.  The full text in context is here:

http://freakonomics.com/2010/06/10/toward-an-ethical-economics-of-food-policy/

Of course the Friedman School context is very different from Purdue.  A first step towards translation would be to search and replace “agricultural economics” with “food economics” — and then find what else should be updated?

 

Our fifth annual class potluck this week was terrific.  We do love our food!

For this year, we were able to schedule the dinner immediately after introducing the idea of optimization in food choice.  The class had just completed a data-analysis exercise using the famous least cost diet problem, looking for combinations of foods that just meet daily nutrient needs at lowest total expense.

In NUTR 238 we do the diet problem by hand using spreadsheets, which reveals an amazing fact about food choice:   even well-trained nutritionists armed with all the latest data, when asked to solve this problem, consistently choose foods with much more protein and higher cost than humans’ daily requirements.   We cannot resist choosing dietary patterns that meet energy needs with expensive protein instead of fat or carbohydrates, and with too much of some nutrients and too little of others.  This demonstrates vividly how and why people don’t just count our way to nutrient adequacy.  To explain, predict and improve food choices, we need to understand nutrients and then think beyond them to other objectives and constraints.

Putting theory into practice, just for fun our Econ o’Food potluck this year involved prizes for best dishes that might help meet our nutrient needs in any of four different ways:

(1) Frugally, at lowest monetary cost;
(2) Conveniently, with least time needed to prepare and serve;
(3) Sustainably, with least harm to the environment;
(4) Meaningfully, with the most cultural significance for the community.

We had four expert judges:  Sean Cash, Anna McAlister, Parke Wilde and Norbert Wilson.

After much tasting and deep deliberation they decided which lucky students won their share of the world’s favorite treat.  The judges explained how everyone’s dishes succeeded at meeting their diverse goals with such panache that I’m not sure about who actually took home the chocolate… which, I suppose, is the point.   We’re just starting week 5 of the semester, and have so much more to discover!

 

My economics research is mostly about undernutrition in Africa and Asia, but I am also keen to learn about nutrition in the US, and maybe help improve policies closer to home.  Recently I had the opportunity to collaborate with Sue Roberts and others on a question that’s puzzled me for some time:  why do we so often leave restaurants feeling regretful that we ate too much?

Restaurants provide a steadily rising share of food consumption in the US and around the world, so making restaurant food healthier is increasingly important for overall diet quality.  The study from Sue Roberts’ group showed that, whatever one thinks of the ingredients and nutritional composition, all kinds of restaurants usually bring much too much food to the table. The headline was that 92 percent of measured servings exceeded recommended calorie requirements for a single meal.

People generally eat what’s served, and people don’t fully compensate by eating less at later meals.  Large portion sizes therefore play a causal role in over-eating.  Our paper documented how big portion sizes actually are, and made the case for asking restaurants as well as diners to take responsibility for the problem by offering smaller portions.

Our paper appeared recently in JAND, and pushed by a well-written press release it added one more study to the daily blizzard of nutrition news, like this Time.com article + video.  Friedman’s Marissa Donovan did a particularly nice piece for the wonderful Friedman Sprout website, here:  http://friedmansprout.com/2016/03/01/non-chain-restaurants-tip-the-scales.

In reporting her article, Marissa asked me a few questions about the study — here is my full response to Marissa’s enquiry:


 

Hi Marissa – sorry for very slow response, I was traveling in Ethiopia and am writing this on the flight back.  If you’re still working on the story, here are some answers:

  1. What was a surprising finding of the study?

What was most surprising to me about this study is that no one had done it before.  I think pretty much anyone who ever eats out has seen how large portion sizes are, even in independent restaurants.  But nutrition researchers took this to be inevitable, so not worth measuring — like everyone else, dieticians just knew that restaurants were dangerous for your waistline.  With menu labeling comes the possibility of actually controlling portion sizes, so it’s finally worthwhile to actually measure and publish the data.  Measuring something is a key first step towards improving it.

The one small result that’s surprising but not really a finding is that see few differences among types of restaurant.  We do find that one virtue of Mediterranean (in this case, Greek) restaurants is smaller serving sizes, but the study was not powered to detect differences among neighborhoods and price points.  If we had funds to collect and test many more samples, I expect we’d find that meal sizes are larger in restaurants that serve low- and middle-income people.  That’s certainly my experience from eating in all kinds of restaurants around the US, but it would take a lot of sample meals to detect a statistically significant difference since the variation among dishes is so large.

  1. What do these findings mean for restaurant goers?

I often see diners advised to commit themselves, before they see or smell the meal, to taking home half of what they will be served.  Making the decision early gives power to your far-sighted self.  The key is to make these decisions before you’re hungry, and especially before your appetite is revved up by an oversized dish.  But it’s very difficult to actually follow this advice, mainly because packing up and taking food home is such an awkward step.  In practice, I think it’s much smarter just to choose menu items that will come in small enough sizes for you to be comfortable eating the whole thing.  Use your far-sighted self to identify restaurants that offer delicious foods in portions suitable for your body size and activity level, then praise them for it on Yelp and Tripadvisor.

  1. How do the findings of this study change advice you would give to consumers (if at all)?

The standard recommendation is to stay away from restaurants and cook at home instead.  This helps you control portion size, and also the mix of ingredients.  But you can exercise some of that control in the restaurant by only ordering dishes whose composition and size are both OK.  I am confident that restaurants will eventually find ways to offer all kinds of food in appropriate portion sizes, and with appropriate ingredient ratios.  Until then, we just need choose restaurants that serve at least one good main dish in a reasonably-sized portion that fits our needs.

  1. What changes should be made on a policy level based on these findings?

I think many small steps will be involved.  Like so many policy problems, there’s no one magic bullet.  Making restaurant meals healthier will involve a lot of local steps, like municipal ordinances and state laws. Massachusetts regulations pioneered how to make restaurants healthier for people with food allergies and we can now do the same for nutrition and portion size. There is also room for many voluntary steps by individuals, including food writers and restaurant reviewers as well as restaurants, groups and associations.

A key first step is to understand that serving excessively large meals causes overeating and diet-related disease.  This may sound obvious but it’s not, since many people believe that overeating when served a big meal is just the diner’s fault.  A next step is transparency, with menu labeling so customers can know ahead of time how big each dish will actually be.  Then there’s right-sizing, through various steps to help restaurants serve more dishes in sizes that fit everyone not just their largest and hungriest customers.  Ultimately, I think segregating menus to have some “healthy” or “diet” foods that are served in small portions will be a thing of the past.  Almost all menu items can be served in appropriate sizes.

One specific idea to accelerate the transition to transparency and right-sizing many dishes is for local ordinances and state laws to give restaurant diners the right to order a partial portion at partial price.  As explained in the paper, we know that restaurants would not like doing that.  If such an ordinance were actually passed, most would reduce the default size of their largest dishes for which many customers ask to exercise this right, to avoid having to actually serve too many partial portions at partial prices.  They could then adjust other aspects of the menu so that those who decide that they want to eat more can order additional side dishes.  The problem of excessively large portion sizes can be solved.  A first step is just to realize that it is a problem, to measure what’s served and think carefully about what customers really want.

I hope that’s helpful!

All the best,

Will

 

EconoFoodPotluck2016_ATableOfDelightsOur fourth annual Econ o’Food potluck was last night, the biggest ever and great fun.

This year we had prizes for the best dish in each of five categories, aiming to be as nutritious and delicious as possible while pursuing any one (or more) of the following widely shared goals:

  1. least monetary cost,
  2. least preparation time,
  3. least environmental impact,
  4. most local or seasonal, or
  5. most personally meaningful.

From the photo you can see our table of delights.  The sourdough rolls on the right won the meaningfulness prize for Kathleen Nay (back row), for a gorgeous story about the sourdough starter that she and her husband began when they were married. Wow.

Sean Cash and Parke Wilde brought their best gastronomic game to the judging, with shoutouts for all the great food ideas of the night.  We all ate and drank so well — with an extra jolt for happy winners like Sam Hoeffler, whose prize was a fresh shipment of my personal favorite consumable: coffee, brought home last weekend from Ethiopia. EconoFoodPotluck2016_ParkeSeanAnnouncePrizeForSamHoeffler

Lots of fun, thank you all!

 

 

New students at the Friedman School have just arrived, and students everywhere are thinking hard about a lot of things. I often get emails from like the one below but they almost never ask so many great questions at once. After replying, I realized that this exchange would make a good blog post. It’s posted here with Abigail Auner’s kind permission and lightly edited for readability: a good intro to a great year of research and discovery ahead.

————————————————————-

From: Auner, Abigail Lacey (MU-Student)
Sent: Wednesday, September 2, 2015 8:33 AM
To: Masters, William A. <William.Masters@tufts.edu>
Subject: Hello! (And Sustainability Questions)

Good morning, Dr. Masters,

I am Abigail Auner, Joe’s niece. He told me that you study many of the same topics that I am learning about in school and want to learn more about, so if I may, I would like to ask you a few questions. First off, I study plant sciences at the University of Missouri with an emphasis in greenhouse management, and I am minoring in sustainable agriculture. My career interests include vegetable production and integrated pest management, but I am also trying to learn more about the economics of food, as that is often the weakest link in discussions of sustainability.

The main thing I want to ask is how do you see the future of agriculture? What, in your estimation, are some of the solutions that society must adopt to feed itself without bankrupting itself?

There are certainly countless attempts in progress to solve the food security problem. Lately I have read a bit about indoor agriculture powered by LEDs. This technology has become much more affordable in recent years, and one of the purported benefits is that, since the systems are not weather- or light-dependent, they can be used anywhere in the world. Some companies are creating modular “farm” units in shipping containers, and in Japan there are indoor farms in abandoned subway tunnels. I think this idea holds promise, but I have not seen any numbers on the cost and energy requirements, and these seem like limiting factors, along with training people to use the technology and adapting the systems to regional staples. What do you think of these developments?

Another facet of food in which I am intrigued is entomophagy. I studied abroad in Thailand over an intersession a couple of years ago, and there I had the opportunity to eat roasted crickets. They were surprisingly like potato chips, only with more crunch and protein. And recently there have been several new companies starting to purvey either food-grade insect products (like flour, protein bars, or corn chips) or insect-rearing kits for home production. Do you think that insect production has a viable future in the United States?

Also, what is the food system like in Zimbabwe?

I appreciate your time.

Sincerely,

Abigail Auner
B.S., Greenhouse Production – Expected May 2016
President, University of Missouri Horticulture Club
Greenhouse Assistant, University of Missouri

————————————————————-

From: Masters, William A.
Sent: Wednesday, September 2, 2015 11:35 AM
To: Auner, Abigail Lacey (MU-Student)
Subject: RE: Hello! (And Sustainability Questions)

 

Hello Abigail, nice to see this from you.  All great questions.  Way too deep for email… more like phd dissertation topics, but here goes:

 

— future of agriculture 

Much like the past, only more so:  that is, agriculture’s share of human activity has shrunk to occupy about half of world’s total workforce, and that share will keep declining as economies develop.  For those who remain farmers and others involved in agriculture to meet the needs of all those non-farmers, within planetary boundaries, we will need lots of innovations tailored to ever-changing local conditions.  Much of that innovation will be about producing more with less, but higher-income consumers also demand a lot of things other than food from our farmers especially animal welfare and the maintenance of traditional methods, as well as basics of water quality and other ecosystem services.  So agriculture as a whole is a big and diverse thing that meets a lot of human needs, in different ways, and there is room for many seemingly contradictory things at once.

 

— urban farming, LEDs and hydroponics etc.

One key need being met by modern agriculture is a sense of control, as people seek more closed-loop systems, and momentum from novelty and innovation.  Hence urban farming, driving photosynthesis with artificial lights and deliberate dosing of plant nutrients.   Another deep human need is a sense of connectedness to nature, hence organically farmed community and school gardens etc., as well as suburban farm-stands and pick-your-own operations.  But as you might guess, these are all pretty expensive ways of producing food as such, and in places where niche agriculture is cost-effective it often exploits an unusual local opportunity such as using waste disposal to heat greenhouses.  So if one is actually talking about food security for the US or the world as such, almost all peoples’ dietary needs are now and will continue to be met from the vast expanse of natural soil, bathed in sunlight and rainfall and irrigation, with increases in output per acre and per worker coming from innovations such as precision farming and satellite/drone imagery etc. as well as crop genetics, veterinary techniques, disease control etc. that help us grow more on the fixed stock of natural land and water.  That’s not to say that high-tech urban farming with LEDs, alongside organic farms and gardens, are not really important parts of the food system.  It’s just that they should be understood as part of agriculture that gives it richness and diversity, not the main source of sustenance.  They are the appetizer or dessert rather than the main course.  I am glad we have them and they fill real needs but I don’t eat them every day.

 

— insects!

Very fun.  Humanity is still young and it is very important to keep trying new foods, which are often old but neglected ones like crickets and also plants such as amaranth, as well as new food processing tricks like turning peas into egg-like substances.  Regarding insects in particular, it is conceivable that crickets or other species will take off.  The last huge breakthrough in the mix of species that we use for food happened in the mid-late 20th c. with hybrid corn and then soybeans and canola providing the vegetable oils and animal feeds that had earlier been super scarce and are now much cheaper…  Changes in the mix of species tend to happen gradually, e.g. the rise of chicken relative to beef that is going on now, partly as a slow response to the corn-soy-vegetable fats revolution.  And because agriculture is such a geographically patchy, diverse thing, even a niche enterprise can survive and become a pretty big business.  So there will be plenty of interest in new sources of protein and higher-quality fats.  I don’t think that I personally would invest my own time and money in an insect farm, since there is so much room for expansion of fish from aquaculture to meet similar needs, but I wouldn’t be surprised if insect-based dishes show up on more and more restaurant menus.  There are plenty of obstacles to both raising and processing them — which is part of the point whenever one is pursuing something challenging.

 

Also, what is the food system like in Zimbabwe?

Terrible.  Really tragic.  And it looks like things will get worse before they get better:

http://vam.wfp.org/CountryPage_overview.aspx?iso3=ZWE

 

Now back to work for me, but these are really interesting questions so merit much thought than email allows.  Please stay in touch, maybe especially if you’re considering going deeper into all of this with grad school!

 

All the best,

 

Will Masters

 

—————————————————————————–

William A. Masters

Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

and Department of Economics (by courtesy)

Tufts University, 150 Harrison Avenue, Boston MA 02111

http://sites.tufts.edu/willmasters

Office:  Jaharis Building room 140, phone +1.617.636.3751, fax +1.617.636.3781

Mobile: +1.617.575.9050 (forwards to cell/home and converts voicemail to email)

—————————————————————————–

 

A fun feature of NUTR 238 is our annual econ-of-food potluck dinner, to celebrate the privileges of modern food culture.  So many choices!  The idea is to show off our amazing dietary optimization skills, with prizes for the best dish in each of several categories.

We start with the oldest challenge in the economics of nutrition, with the dish that best contributes to a least-cost diet. We also have a prize for meeting nutrient requirements with the least environmental impact, and another for meeting your RDAs with the most cultural significance. And, lest we forget life’s most implacable constraint, a prize for doing so with the least preparation time. We had serious economists judging the contest, Sean Cash and Anna McAlister, but very unserious prizes:  what my wife Diane calls the universal food.

N238-EconOfoodPotluckPrizeWinnersHere are the winners:  From left, Anna (judge), Krista Zillmer (for a spectacular Spaghetti Squash Chow Mein) , Quinault Childs (for delicious cricket-flour cookies), Sean and me (with prizes), Aaron Shier (bowing to Milky Way Day) and Kristen Caiafa (for a bag of what is really, truly the global standard in least-cost nutrition).

Of course we also had many other wonderful dishes, from Iyamide’s Sierra Leonean stew to Ashley’s classic carrot cake.  As you can see from the detritus on the table, we ate it all.

Happy spring break, everyone!

 

PS:  NUTR 238 alumni can check out past potluck photos here.

 
Nathanaël Witschi Picard, 6 years old

A six year old’s weekday breakfast in Paris

The least-cost diet exercise we just did in class is beautifully illustrated by the gorgeous NYT magazine article about kids’ breakfasts around the world [h/t to Amelia].

Amazing photos.  Who knew that breakfasts could be so colorful and varied?  And seeing all these examples side by side reveals a lot about food choice.

Clearly, price and income does matter, but so does tradition and the personality of each individual child and their family.

One big influence on food choice that’s nicely illustrated by these examples is the difference between weekend and weekday breakfasts.  The weekday breakfasts are really rushed, more like least-time meals than least-cost.

Doga Gunce Gursoy, 8 years old

An eight-year old’s weekend feast in Istanbul

It turns out that meals are so much better when we have more time to prepare and eat them. Once people reach a high enough level of income to afford the nutrients we need, time allocation becomes as important as cash expenditure — and that tradeoff is especially visible at breakfast.

A lot of economists these days are very interested in how nutrition is influenced by our time use, with research on issues such as how mothers’ employment influences childhood obesity in the US, contributing to a global trend towards time-scarcity.

One of the biggest challenges in food policy is how to make food that not only nutritious, but also quick and convenient.  Any ideas?

 

On the T this week, just before the start of new school year studying food choices, I just loved seeing these two ads next to each other:

From Drop Box

Our food system offers many wonderful contrasts like this: sometimes we can spend a leisurely Sunday exploring fresh, traditional and local food — but sometimes we want a jolt of fast, new caffeinated drinks from far away. My own fridge is full of such contradictions. Care to guess what opposites might lurk in there?