Matt Yglesias

When Life Gives You Excrement, Make Fuel?

Via Ezra Klein, The New Scientist observes that “A kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.”

People tend not to understand this very well because the tendency is to use the term “carbon dioxide” as a shorthand for “greenhouse gasses.” But though CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas, it’s far from the most potent. And livestock create huge amounts of methane both from their farts (yes, really, this is a real problem) and from the decomposition of their manure. The good news, as the good people at the Danish Biogass Association were eager to explain to me yesterday, is that there’s a way to deal with the manure side of this. Methane, in addition to being terrible for the environment when released directly into the air, is also usable as fuel (”natural gas”) and when used as fuel it’s relatively clean-burning compared to coal or oil. What they do at biogas plants is basically gather up a huge stinking pile of shit which is submitted to anaerobic digestion. This leaves you with, on the one hand, some digested manure that can be used as an effective and non-emissions-producing fertilizer and on the other hand some methane gas you can use to heat homes or generate electricity.

The biogas itself involves some CO2 emissions, so this isn’t a perfectly green technology. But making the biogas is much cleaner than not making the biogas if we assume that the quantity of animal excrement produced is independent of the existence of the biogas facilities. In other words, if the demand for meat is determining the quantity of cow and pig shit, then biogas plants count as very clean. They sharply reduce the quantity of methane put into the air, and can substitute for other dirtier fuels like coal or oil. If biogas were to actually become such big business that people started raising pigs specifically for the purpose of turning their shit into home heating fuel, then that wouldn’t work ecologically at all.

Currently, though, biogas requires substantial subsidy (in the form of a feed-in tariff) to be viable. So the smart green move is to subsidize biogas production enough to clean up the excrement we have, but not so much as to encourage the creation of additional livestock. In principle, it would probably make sense to have some kind of tax on meat that could be used to raise revenue to defray the cost of biogas subsidies.

The New Committee Lineup

Chris Dodd bucked expectations and decided to stay in charge of the Senate Banking Committee. Then Tom Harkin further bucked expectations and decided to depart from his perch at the Agriculture Committee (thought to be exactly where an Iowa Senator wants to be) and take over the HELP Committee. That leaves Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas as the chair of Agriculture, which should be good for her re-election bid.

But is it good for America? Brad Johnson notes that Lincoln is a very strident opponent of climate change legislation, calling even the post-Collin Peterson version of the legislation a “total non-starter.” And the left will have basically no leverage over her; she’s at real risk of losing her seat to a Republican, and Barack Obama is very unpopular in Arkansas. That said, the alternative to this scenario was Tim Johnson heading up Banking, so this is arguably a superior outcome. In terms of core agriculture policy issues, switching from Harkin at the top to Lincoln at the top will probably mostly make things bad in a different way. Policy less oriented toward the interests of people who grow corn, and more oriented toward the interests of Tyson Foods—purveyors of fine fast food chicken products.

How Much Does The Food Network Tell Us About America?

Lifestyle journalism often suffers from ambiguities in the ordinary language use of universal quantifiers. “Everyone reads The New York Times,” is the kind of thing you might say in casual conversation. But of course it’s not actually the case that all people read The New York Times. In fact, rather few people read it. It’s just that in certain social classes, NYT readership is so nearly universal that it feels as if everyone does it. Which is about how I feel about Top Chef on Bravo and the Food Network in general.

Meanwhile, Michael Pollan’s work is always interesting but at times lacking in a certain hard, quantitative rigor. And his latest, a big NYT Magazine article that “everyone” is talking about on how food became a spectator sport is a good example. He goes on and on at quite some length with a detailed exegesis of Food Network programming as if it were the greatest cultural force on the planet. I think this seems plausible to NYT Magazine readers because it fits in with their/our social universe. An essay that tried to explain changes in law enforcement doctrine almost exclusively through references to The Mentalist would, by contrast, strike people as bizarre. But according to Nielsen in the week of July 27 The Mentalist had 160% the viewers of any Food Network program.

And that’s during the summer, when the Food Network’s not competing with a-list first-run programming.

Calorie Labeling and the Dunch Problem

I wrote earlier today about the problem of large portion sizes in which many of us who might have one kind of desire to consume fewer calories nonetheless find ourselves drawn toward high-calorie orders in the moment.* Ezra Klein’s latest column in the print Post also tackles this subject and reports on the idea that mandatory nutritional labeling could make a surprisingly large difference:

We’re still waiting for the full data from New York’s experiment. But the researchers there shared unpublished numbers with the County of Los Angeles Public Health Department, which was preparing an analysis in case Los Angeles wanted to follow New York’s lead. Based on those numbers, Los Angeles researchers settled on a “conservative” estimate: 10 percent of chain restaurant patrons would order meals that were merely 100 calories lighter.

Surprisingly, that mild change in behavior has a huge and immediate effect: It would avert 38.9 percent of the county’s expected weight gain in the next year. If 20 percent of patrons order meals with 150 fewer calories, it would avert 116 percent of the expected weight gain, which is to say that the County of Los Angeles would actually lose weight.

Unhelpfully, the print column does not include this useful table which Ezra has previously blogged:

Now of course you’ll hear a libertarian argument to the effect of, “if people really wanted to know this stuff the market would respond automatically” which I think you’d have to say was naive at best. I do think that part of the key to making this have the desired effect is to be crude and obvious with the labels:

Chain restaurants will have to list caloric information on their menus and menu boards. Not behind the desk, or off to the side, or up on the ceiling. Where you can see it. New York, among other cities, has already instituted that policy. Every Starbucks in Manhattan now must post the calories in a MochaFrappaWhatsIt right next to the drink name.

What seems really wrongheaded about the NYC law is to limit its effect to chain restaurants. If the data on this kind of very soft paternalism looks promising, then I’d want to see its scope expanded.

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The Dunch Factor

(my photo)

I was walking downtown the other day and saw this sandwichboard outside a Potbelly’s. The idea was, basically, that people ought to be eating larger sandwiches for lunch. Messing around with their nutritional information calculator, I see that if you order a regular-sized meatball sandwich and an oreo milkshake from Potbelly’s you’ll be taking in over 1,400 calories at lunchtime. So it’s not clear that a larger portion size is what’s really needed here. And, as a general principle, it’s very hard to believe on the merits that what Americans need to be doing is eating more food.

But there’s a very profound problem of evolutionary psychology here. For the vast majority of human existence people were engaged in much more daily physical activity than is the typical member of a contemporary rich society and it was impossible to be certain that food would be available in the future. Consequently, people are largely designed with the instinct to err on the side of eating more food rather than less. Especially if the food is tasty. These days, of course, we’re in a very different situation. Nobody starves to death in the contemporary United States, but lots of people have problems related to poor dietary habits.

Hardly an original point on my part. But the sign made me think of it. And I suppose I would make the point that at the margin expenditures of funds to fight this tendency are going to do a lot more to improve public health than will expenditures of funds to treat people’s diabetes.

We Could Subsidize Urban Farming, But We Probably Shouldn’t

Elizabeth Royte’s New York Times Magazine article about urban farming was interesting, but I have to say that I don’t think urban farming is a particularly promising model for anything. And I think Ezra Klein is unduly impressed by the argument that since the current model of agriculture is based on heavy and unjustified subsidies that it might make sense to heavily subsidize urban farms.

The reality is that farming is an inherently space-intensive enterprise. Think about your favorite farmer’s market and how much space it occupies. Now think of how much space was occupied in the course of growing all the stuff that’s on sale at your favorite farmer’s market. Consequently, it makes sense to locate farms where land is cheap. Which is to say “not in cities.”

If you want to encourage more local food in a realistic and sustainable way, what you should be aiming for is not urban farming but suburban farming. In other words, not farming in cities, but farming near them. In most of America we have lots of rules—maximum height, maximum FAR, maximum lot occupancy, minimum parking—restraining how densely developed land can be in places where land is expensive. If those rules were relaxed in, for example, the DC area, then we’d have more housing and more offices and more retail in the urban core area of DC, Arlington, and Alexandria. That would reduce the economic pressure to transform farmland in nearby areas into exurban sprawl and strip malls. That would be farmland that’s local enough to be sold to consumers at farmer’s markets and whatnot without involving any outlandish economics.

That said, one place where I could imagine a role for explicit encouragement of urban farming is in the case of cities that have suffered from severe shrinkage (see Corby Kummer’s article about Holyoke for an example of what this might look like). In this case, though, the issue is that we do have some urban areas (primarily in the rust belt) that would benefit from becoming more compact. In both cases, the basic point is that there are good reasons to try to reduce the overall geographical footprint of our urban areas.

Michael Goldfarb Embraces Soft Power

Chez MacDo (cc photo by _gene_)

The other day, The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb wrote:

In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.

It’s worth pointing out that this is not hegemony at all, but rather the dread soft power. When I was in Finland, I saw an episode of Medium dubbed into Swedish on television. There was a Starbucks near the hotel I stayed at in Geneva. I’ve shown you my photo of Dunkin Coffee in Barcelona before. I’m told that an American-style Santa Claus is popular in Japan. They play basketball in China and baseball in Colombia. And of course Microsoft Office and iPods are ubiquitous wherever you have people rich enough to own modern information technology.

This is all good stuff. Just as it’s good that you can get sushi in any major world city, that Ikea has brought Scandinavian design concepts to a mass market, that Belgian beers are now widely available in the U.S., that there’s now a DC branch of a South African spicy chicken chain, and all the rest.

But the point is that that kind of thing is the real strength of the United States of America. Our culture, our technology, and our ideas—things that like sushi and the klippan sofa are good enough on their own terms to be appealing to others without resort to coercion and domination.

Medicine Should Be For Sick People

There’s a new advertising campaign under way in Metro taking aim at the routine use of antibiotics in commercial poultry- and livestock-raising enterprises:

Photo by Eric Goldman

For all the same reasons that antibiotics can be helpful to sick people they can also be helpful to sick animals. Or, in the minds of America’s industrial farmers, they can be given out routinely as a prophylactic measure so as to make it possible to raise animals in unhealthy and unsanitary environments, while also feeding them cheap corn that makes them ill. Unfortunately, as Eric Goldman emphasizes, this helps breed antibiotic resistant bacteria with dire health consequences for people.

The specific talking point that this increases health care costs is a cute way of piggybacking on the current political debate. In reality, I doubt that the actual contribution to health care inflation is especially large as the biggest costs are associated with chronic conditions or end-of-life situations. On the other hand, it is true that this is an important public health issue. Antibiotic resistant bacteria is, at the moment, a somewhat problematic situation. But the really scary thing is the prospect that it could become much worse. We’ve invented a lot of new antibiotics over the years, but there isn’t any guarantee that an infinite range of antibiotics are out there just waiting to be invented. In principle, we could wind up backing ourselves into some extremely problematic situations in the future, and making chicken slightly cheaper isn’t a good reason to be doing it.

Learn to Cook With the Republican Politicians of the Roaring Twenties

Dave Noon somehow unearthed Google Books’ copy of an extremely amusing 1922 volume titled The Stag Cookbook: Written for Men by Men, teaching the men of the roaring twenties how to cook without turning gay. One recipe offers Warren G. Harding’s waffles and over you can learn about Senator Reed Smoot’s peach cobbler recipie. And, yes, that’s Senator Smoot from the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Improving Food Safety

I have to admit that my first thought upon reading this article was “I can’t wait to see how the Senate kills this idea!”

The bill, introduced by Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), would give the Food and Drug Administration broad new enforcement tools, including the authority to recall tainted food, the ability to “quarantine” suspect food, and the power to impose civil penalties and increased criminal sanctions on violators.

Among other things, the proposal would put greater responsibility on growers, manufacturers and food handlers by requiring them to identify contamination risks, document the steps they take to prevent them and provide those records to federal regulators. The legislation also would allow the FDA to require private laboratories used by food manufacturers to report the detection of pathogens in food products directly to the government.

That comes via Hilzoy who reminds us of Rick Perlstein’s coinage “e coli conservatism.” But even if we assume a bill along these lines can be passed and signed into law, which hopefully will happen, my understanding is that the larger issue in the background here is often regulatory capture. Too often the critical agencies charged with overseeing aspects of the nation’s food supply have come to see food producers, rather than the broad mass of people, as their agencies’ key clients. What’s needed, beyond specific new legislative matters, is some action from the top of the executive branch aimed at shaping the culture deeper in the agencies.

Food Snobs in the Soup Kitchen?

Julie Gunlock complains at NRO that “food snobs” are ruining America by serving unduly fancy food at soup kitchens. It’s actually rare that conservatives get to combined their hatred of poor people with their hatred of “cultural elites” in a single argument, so Gunlock gets so busy dishing out the sarcasm that she can’t quite seem to deliver the “so what?” point where we see who is being harmed by this alleged trend.

But more perniciously, throughout the piece she runs together the idea of soup kitchens being too “snobbish” about what food they serve with the idea of soup kitchens being health-conscious about the food they serve. This is an important distinction to make, however. When people can’t get enough to eat, they become malnourished. The point of charitable food assistance is to help people avoid that fate. That means, however, that it’s foolish to ignore the nutritional content of what you’re serving. Oftentimes, the situation is so dire that you can’t afford to fuss too much about this. People in Somalia and elsewhere in the Horn of Africa are teetering on the brink of starvation and need food by any means necessary. But fortunately for us, even in this economy the United States is not a drought-ravaged, famine-stricken, war-torn, malgoverned third world state. We’re not facing imminent mass starvation. So it’s eminently sensible for people trying to bring food to those in need to be paying attention to the differential health impact of different meals.

Public Opinion and Farm Subsidies

By Matthew Yglesias

Tom Laskaway revisits a little discussion we had a while back (me, him, me) about public opinion and agricultural subsidies, with help from a more detailed survey from World Public Opinion. Turns out that Americans have communitarian ideas about this that aren’t well reflected in current policy. Voters say subsidies for large agribusiness firms (basically the only kind we give out) should go:

But they strongly support the idea of subsidies for small farmers:

For what it’s worth, in my role as someone who likes tasty food I’m certainly not averse to heading down to the farmer’s market to buy some tasty items from a local small-scale farm. But when it comes to the public policy issues, I’m pretty dubious that all the different virtues come together so tightly. If we’re talking about redirecting farm subsidies, I think it’s much more important to focus on what activities we’re subsidizing than on what scale of enterprises we’re subsidizing. The important thing would be to try to make subsidies promote public health and environmental goals. But if someone finds a business model that involves doing that on a very large scale, I don’t see a compelling reason to discourage him.

The “Health Aura”

Yesterday I was cooking a lamb ragu that’s not especially healthy. It kept running through my head that maybe I should also make some brussel sprouts on the side to make it healthier. But of course it doesn’t really work that way; the quantity of fat or calories or whatever in a pasta sauce isn’t negated by adding a side dish of vegetables. Still, just about everyone falls into that kind of trap now and again and I think everyone who’s not a Chicago School economist understands how this works. But this finding (via Ezra Klein) is truly weird. It seems that the mere presence of a salad on a fast food menu makes people more likely to order french fries.

The causal mechanism that Keith Wilcox, one of the report’s authors, gave to The New York Times doesn’t strike me as super-compelling: “When you consider the healthy option, you say, well, I could have that option. That lowers your guard, leading to self-indulgent behavior.” The measured effect in their study, however, is not a small one so it would be interesting to see if this result can be replicated elsewhere. The study will be out soon in The Journal of Consumer Research.

The Food Politics blog remarks labels this phenomenon “health aura” and says it “explains a lot about current food marketing trends” such as how I “may have noticed that vitamins, antioxidants, and omega-3’s are added to everything these days.” That kind of marketing gimmick, however, seems like a much cruder thing. People have heard that omega-3s are good for you, so you take a product that’s not good for you, put some omega-3s in it, and slap a big graphic on your box, thus implying that your omega-3 enhanced Fritos are health food. If I’m reading it right, this new study is saying that you could sell more Fritos just by putting them on the shelf adjacent to something that really is healthy.

Quick

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes “I was never the type to go to an island and lay up in a resort. Or go to Paris and eat at McDonald’s.” I’m not necessarily one to eat at a foreign McDonald’s either, except during my sojourn in Nizhny Novgorod back during the summer of 1998—the food available there would make anyone yearn for a Quarter Pounder. But I’m actually somewhat fascinated by foreign fast food. Ever since the revelatory Pulp Fiction scene about how the call the Quarter Pounder a “royale with cheese” because of the metric system, I’ve been interested in how the subtle variations against the backdrop of fast food uniformity bring our cultural differences into full relief. For example, at the time in Russia they Quarter Pounder was called a Tsarburger.

Ta-Nehisi’s post reminded me that when I was in France in 1999, I was staying with a guy who strictly eschewed McDonald’s but did have a taste for Quick, which is basically a Franco-Belgian ersatz-McDonald’s. This is in some respects a promising concept, since the french fries in Belgium are delicious. But in practice, the Quick fries are unexceptional.

My understanding is that the whole chain essentially arose because French policy in the 1980s was aimed at discouraging an influx of American fast food chains. But rather than savings France from the rise of restauration rapide, this merely created a semi-protective environment in which home-grown options could flourish. Somewhat along these lines, my understanding is that the most robust market for non-U.S. fast food options is South Africa. Thanks to apartheid, South Africa spent the key period of fast food globalization under international sanctions, and American firms were under fierce pressure not to launch operations there. Consequently, domestic chains rose up and competed with one another. This led to some chains—notably Nandos—actually emerging strong enough to not only survive, but expand outside of South Africa once apartheid ended.

Jim Oberstar Fights for Affordable Roquefort

I’ve written previously about the Bush administration’s steep retaliatory import duty on Roquefort cheese. This is of particular interest to me, because not only does it illustrate important policy points, but Roquefort happens to be my favorite cheese. I had thought, however, that nobody was going to take up the cause of America’s suffering cheese-loving elites. But now it seems Rep. Jim Oberstar has stepped up to the plate with a letter to the President. It reads, in part:

“Freedom fries and “freedom toast” did serious damage to U.S.-French relaions. We both want to reestablish America’s moral authority in the world under your presidency; a very noble gesture toward that goal would be to remove or reduce this mean-spirited and unproductive punitive duty on Roquefort cheese.

Though I am a supporter of “buy American”, it is for unfairly subsidized foreign products when they are identical or comparable to ours. Roquefort cheese is not in this category. I know from my own experience that if such retaliatory action were taken on products produced ins mall communities in my district, as oquefort cheese is in a small French town, it would have a serious adverse local economic impact.

I’m with Oberstar. But this reminds me that I’ve been meaning to write about Protected Designation of Origin rules more broadly. For example, I only recently learned that though “extra virgin olive oil” has a precise meaning in Europe, in the U.S. you can just slap that label on pretty much anything you like. This free market gesture, it seems to me, tends to actually eliminate incentives to produce high-quality olive oil since it’s difficult to credibly signal that your product is better.

The Trouble With Local and Organic

I think a lot of us have had the suspicion that the idea that everyone should eat only local, organic food is unrealistic not just in a “not going to happen” sense but in a very strong “wouldn’t actually be possible” sense. Paul Roberts in a great Mother Jones article about what sustainable agriculture would really entail gets the numbers:

In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria’s). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we’d need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, “would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion.”

Now a couple of things on the plus side. There’s pretty ample reason to believe that it would be desirable for dietary habits to not “remain constant.” Americans, and other big-time meat consumers, seem to eat substantially more meat than is healthy for us. A switch to a dynamic in which less meat is eaten, but meat-dollars are held constant so that you get less of a higher-quality product, would be tastier and healthier and move in the direction of sustainability. At the same time, most people aren’t Americans. If the billions of extremely poor people on the planet become less poor (which we should certainly hope for) they’ll want to eat somewhat more meat. So you’re still left with the same basic dilemma.

Roberts has some ideas for more realistic paths to sustainability. But it’s worth highlighting just one insight, namely that one problem with the current organic paradigm is that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. No-till farming, which Roberts explores, has some substantial environmental benefits over conventional methods including a substantial reduction in the use of artificial herbicides. But because it doesn’t reduce herbicide use to zero it doesn’t qualify as “organic.” Consequently, the current market set-up doesn’t provide any real reward from switching from a less-sustainable to a more-sustainable model.

That kind of focus on all-or-nothing issues reflects organic farming’s origins in quasi-mystical movements and it suits the business model of the “Big Organic” enterprises that have sprung up in recent years. But sound public policy is usually all about impacts at the margin. Doubling the proportion of the U.S. food supply that comes from organic sources would still leave us with 94 percent coming from conventional farms. You would accomplish much more by policies that produce a mild reduction in the ecological footprint of the entire conventional center.

The Trouble With Food Writers

It’s a bit embarrassing to read something written by a good friend of mine on a group blog to which I contribute only when Mark Bittman links to it. Both the original post and Bittman’s comment are worth reading. I’ll quote Bittman:

My take: There is a tendency among all of us who work with food regularly to become more than a little precious about it. (Whenever you start discussing which kind of salt you’re using, or which variety of beet you prefer, watch out.) And when we do, we forget that most people in the United States neither know nor care about such things, and that a large percentage of those are not, in general, eating well.

I would go further than this. I think there are real dangers in the growing trend toward chefs and food writers being the public face of arguments about the need to reform policies in the agriculture/food area. A fancy chef or a food writer, at the end of the day, ought to be an elitist about the subject. That’s the whole point of the enterprise, after all. But it’s not really the point of public policy. It’s true that there’s a certain extent to which food aesthetics and reason tradeoffs about public health, cost, and environmental sustainability intersect but people shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that it’s an unlimited extent. And I think it’d be a bit silly for all the great chefs in the world to busy themselves turning their worldviews inside out in order to become better policy analysts. Fundamentally, though, it’s just difficult for someone who’s a professional food-lover to really get inside the head of the typical person who doesn’t care at all about this kind of thing. And it should be hard! Lots of people read Bittman. And we do it because we do care. We want—I want—good advice about shopping, cooking, and eating written by someone who cares for people who care. But the requirements of good writing for a hobbyist audience aren’t the same as the requirements of broad policy.

Good policy—especially good environmental policy—would have a substantial impact on the relative price of different food products. Notably, meat in general and beef in particular would become more expensive. At that point, the nation’s cooks will turn their lonely eyes to the nation’s food writers for some different recipes. And those who rely for their sustenance on takeout will find that the well-paid executives of the nation’s food service industry find a way to adapt their services to the new business climate.

School Lunch Or; How to Make Government Work

One of the craziest stories I heard while I was in Finland was the shocking tale of the 1999 school lunch reform. The way this worked is that in 1999, parliament passed some legislation guaranteeing a nutritionally balanced school lunch. So the National Nutrition Council wrote some guidelines dictating that a properly balanced lunch would feature fresh or cooked vegetables covering half the plate, a starch (potatoes, rice, or pasta) covering a quarter of the plate, and meat or fish or a vegetarian protein alternative covering the remaining quarter. A desert of berries or fruit is served “if the nutrient content of the main course is not adequately diverse or if it contains little energy” along with skimmed or semi-skimmed milk and bread.

It was a crazy story not because the nutritional guidelines are crazy. Nor because the nutritional guidelines are perfect. This still actually leaves a lot of variance depending on exactly what’s served. But what’s crazy about it is the way it happened. Parliament felt children should eat a well-balanced meal, and so guidelines were written by a government agency and then implemented. Like magic!

It’s very hard to imagine anything like that happening in the United States, where something as basic as the food pyramid winds up being a locus for interest-group politics. Michael Pollan talks to Mother Jones about the way of the world:

MJ: Does WIC still specify that you buy dairy?

MP: Yes. We had a huge fight to get a little more produce in the WIC basket, which is heavy on cheese and milk because the dairy lobby is very powerful. So they fought and they fought and they fought, and they got a bunch of carrots in there. [Laughs.]

MJ: Specifically? Who knew: the carrot lobby?

MP: Specifically carrots. The next big lobby. But there is also money in this farm bill for fresh produce in school lunch. The price of getting the subsidies was getting the California delegation on board, and their price was $2 billon for what are called specialty crops—fresh fruit and produce grown largely in California.

Or watch this video:

Democracy is democracy, politics is politics, and life is what it is. But still, it seems to me that Americans have a deplorable tendency to take pride in the dysfunctional nature of our political system, and actually revel in it. It makes, after all, for a fascinating game in a way that a simple outsourcing of nutritional guidelines to apolitical experts wouldn’t. But I think there’s a big challenge for progressives here. And not just with regard to school lunch, but with regard to the whole thing. There are certain ends that can only be accomplished by state action. But state action is only really tolerable if you can actually make the government work well and an awful lot of our basic institutions just don’t work very well. At the same time, the medium-term policy frontiers increasingly focus on questions of public health and environmental security that have a hefty technical element. A lot of the argument for universal health care hinges on the fact that, in principle, comprehensive reform could deliver a much more efficient system. But will it actually deliver such a system, or will it just deliver whatever happens to get lobbied for? Care that benefits patients, or care that benefits health care providers of various kinds? Those ultimately aren’t questions about the design of any particular plan; instead, they’re questions of whether or not progressive governance can manage to somehow deliver better overall governance.

UPDATE: On a related note, Ezra Klein observes:

CBO occupies a weird space in Washington. They decide what legislation costs. They may get it right or they may get it wrong, but the number they settle on is the number legislators agree to use. And so this morning’s hearings featured powerful senators begging a small, bearded budget geek for favorable judgments as if he were the Oracle at Delphi.

And the thing of it is that while the CBO’s methods aren’t perfect and its conclusions aren’t incontestable, it really does do a pretty good job—good enough that it can continue to be widely respected. And having an expert agency be widely respected and do a pretty good job, thus providing a convergence point for congressional consideration of legislation, is much better than having our legislative debates just proceed with everyone inventing their own cost estimates.

Avigdor Lieberman Boosted By Pro-Pork Backlash

One of the oddities of Israeli politics is that Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right anti-Arab Yisrael Beitenu party is also a staunch upholder of secularism, since its primary source of support is immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who tend to be secular and many of whom like eating pork. And soon before the last election, the ultra-orthodox Shas party stepped up its anti-pork rhetoric. This, according to Jeffrey Yoskowitz, likely helped drive some secular voters away from Likud and toward Lieberman, in order to save their pork:

In lambasting the sausages and pork chops of Russian culture right before the election, Yosef aroused widespread fear among the Russian population of what Shas would do if it won enough votes to enter a governing coalition. “I wasn’t going to vote this year but now my husband says we have to vote for [Lieberman], otherwise [Shas] will shut us down,” Haaretz quoted one Russian shop-owner as saying. “It’s true we don’t sell pork here, but I’m from Russia and that might be enough [to close us.]” Lieberman himself credited Yosef for his bump in support, saying that of all the forces working in his favor, “No doubt, the rabbi deserves first prize.”

Netanyahu was also damaged by the rising Russian tide against Shas. His Likud party had turned to religious parties such as Shas and Agudat Israel to build coalitions in the past, which has facilitated their attempts to ban pork, make selling leavened bread on Passover illegal, and perpetuate many policies that singularly serve the interests of the ultra-Orthodox community. Therefore, while many Russian voters cared about Netanyahu’s security position, Lieberman’s core platform promised both the security of their borders as well as their culture–meats, cheeses, and all. It is not surprising, then, that Lieberman’s gains in support coincided in a drop in support for Likud–which, according to the last published poll before the election (released the day before Yosef’s speech), was slated to win a slim lead over the Kadima party.

He also observes that Israel’s pork community is quite embattled:

Escalating tensions have led to clashes between Russian immigrants and their religious neighbors in a number of cities across the country. In August 2007, for example, a Russian-owned deli was attacked in the northern beach town of Netanya–an occurrence that had become so commonplace that is was a theme canonized in the 2005 Israeli film, The Schwartz Dynasty. A month later, a similar non-kosher shop in Tzfat was attacked, just 24 hours after the Jewish Day of Atonement. The owner of a pork processing factory in Haifa, Dadi Marom, complained to me that every Friday afternoon his weekly sausage and beer tasting is interrupted by ultra-Orthodox protests.

In the United States, of course, Jews are a small numerical minority and the observant and un-observant alike tend to appreciate the dangers of intolerance and the virtues of a state that doesn’t seek to enforce religious taboos.

The Low Price-Elasticity of Vegetable Consumption

Ezra Klein has an interesting post primarily focused on the disappointing results of trying to subsidize fruit and vegetable consumption:

Diansheng Dong and Biing Hwan-Lin recently conducted a study for the USDA’s economic research service modeling the likely impact of a 10 percent discount on fruits and vegetables for low-income Americans (defined here as incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line). They concluded that the policy, which would cost $580 million, would spur low-income Americans to increase their consumption of fruits by 2.1-to-5.2 percent and vegetables by 2.1-to-4.9 percent. It’s not nothing, but it’s not much. The graph below shows the effects of the policy, the effects of the policy doubled (20 percent off fruits and vegetables), and in the final column, how far even the double-subsidy world is from the USDA’s recommended consumption of fruits and vegetables (which is probably still too low!)

One cautionary note about the graphic here would be that actual behavior is so far off from USDA recommended behavior that putting the USDA goals in the chart winds up making the changes very small. If the goal is a 70 percent increase in vegetable consumption, you shouldn’t be surprised that a 20 percent discount doesn’t achieve the goal.

More broadly, though, when discussing this issue it’s important to recall that vegetables are not expensive. I went to the farmer’s market over the weekend and mixed root vegetables (sweet potatoes, carrots, turnips, various kinds of onions and potatoes, etc.) were available for $1 a pound and all these are, needless to say, for sale for less money at a regular supermarket. Indeed, it’s the relative abundance of vegetables that gets us in trouble. Having evolved in an environment where plants are plentiful but meat and sweets and refined grains are rare, we’re programmed to act as if we’ll be eating plenty of vegetables out of necessity and had better grab the other stuff while we have a chance. So any policy to turn these habits around will run into some difficulties as it’s literally going against human nature.

But the bigger issue than price for most people is almost certainly convenience. We’ve created a society where people work longer hours than they used to, where parenting expectations have gotten higher, and where fewer and fewer families have mom serving as a full-time unpaid housekeeper/cook/nanny. Ezra observes that most people “live closer to a McDonald’s than a grocery store.” And, indeed, looking back on it I’ve been struck by how rapid and dramatic the change in my eating habits has been since I moved from being near many takeout food options but far from a grocery store to living closer to a supermarket than a takeout spot.

On the other hand, Ezra says “taking 10 percent off the price of the rotted bananas at the convenience store won’t do much to encourage their consumption” since they’re still rotten. I’m actually not so sure. Sometimes a store can get into a bad fruit equilibrium, as Sonya’s Market on 11th and Harvard was circa 2003 when I lived nearby. Few people bought the bananas there, so the bananas were rarely fresh, so you didn’t think of Sonya’s as a good place to buy banana’s, so the banana turnover was low and the banana’s were rarely fresh. Conversely, you can achieve a good bodega equilibrium where expectations of high demand lead to fresh produce lead to high levels of consumption which keeps the produce fresh.

Last but by no means least, I don’t think it makes a ton of sense to talk about subsidizing fruits and vegetables without talking first about un-subsidizing corn, soy and the corn ‘n soy derivatives that artificially drive down the price of Fritos and Big Macs. The policy argument for subsidizing healthy eating is convincing enough to me, but obviously is going to fly in the face of widely held anti-paternalist sensibilities. The case against subsidizing unhealthy eating, by contrast, is totally unimpeachable.

Health Scares Reduce Smoking, But Not Obeisity

I don’t think people talk enough about public health issues in the policy realm, so I’m resolved to start following news like this even if it doesn’t have a clear policy upshot:

Smokers are three times more likely to quit if they get a wake-up call in the form of a heart attack, stroke, lung disease or cancer diagnosis, a new study has found.

But obese and overweight people lose two to three pounds at most after being diagnosed with a serious illness like heart disease or diabetes, according to the same report. The study, which looked at weight loss only in people under age 75, was published on Monday in The Archives of Internal Medicine.

Part of the issue, I assume, is that even though quitting smoking is incredibly hard in a large variety of ways, it’s not hard to monitor yourself. Nobody accidentally smokes a cigarette. And tobacco addicts can come to realize that we’re addicts and that we need to abstain from tobacco consumption.

Food isn’t like that. Healthy eating doesn’t mean you give up eating. But that means you’re subjected to all kinds of judgment calls. That leaves people subjected to misinformation about the healthiness of different foods—often deliberate misinformation—as well as a whole range of weakness of will and self-deception phenomena. Or perhaps to put it another way, if you get a health scare and resolve to stop smoking, you’ve made a first-order commitment to yourself: “I won’t smoke cigarettes anymore.” Resolving to eat healthier, by contrast, is a second-order commitment. People could probably do a pretty good job of resolving to quit one particular bad eating habit—no more Swedish Fish for me ever again—but it’s not clear how much that sort of thing would really help. Fewer Swedish Fish could just mean more delicious Sour Patch Kids.

The Really Bad News

The economy’s getting so bad that the Wholesale Liquidators store in Eden Center is going out of business?

Meanwhile, last time I went to Hong Kong Palace it was incredibly crowded, so I think Tyler Cowen should stop recommending excellent, obscure dining spots. I remember the Jackson Diner in Queens before word got so far out (circa 1997?) and it moved to its new location with higher prices and worse food. So let me say here, do not go to Eden Center and eat the Vietnamese food there—now that the wholesale liquidators store is going out of business there is absolutely no reason to visit that particular strip mall. And stay out of Thai Xing on Florida Avenue in the city, too.

Mmm…Chili

Obama visits U Street classic Ben’s Chili Bowl. Previous Ben’s coverage here.

It’s also my understanding that Ben’s will make an appearance in the upcoming US film adaptation of the British miniseries State of Play.

Department of Good Ideas

Back before Christmas, The Washington Post had a story about how the “Obama Administration May Tie Improved Nutrition to Food Assistance Programs.” In other words, instead of just ensuring that people have food (i.e., calories) they’d be trying to give people assistance in acquiring healthy food.

That would definitely be a good thing to do. Fortunately, the contemporary United States doesn’t have a substantial starvation problem. But unfortunately, we do have substantial problems around malnutrition and obesity. Our food assistance programs were designed in an earlier era when that balance of considerations was different, and were conceived in large part as a bailout of sorts for food producers rather than designed to best serve the interests of the programs’ clients. Reforming the system to help target people’s genuine food-related needs for better nutrition rather than more calories could do a great deal of good.

By Request: Pasta Mia

NattyB has an unusual question:

Why do yuppies like to line up for food?

Like seriously, is Pasta Mia in Adams Morgan that good? Or is it just some trendy boho fad.

Keeping in mind that I’m speaking only for myself, I think the main attraction with Pasta Mia isn’t that it’s “that good” but that it’s good and it’s cheap relative to the portion sizes. That and the fact that it’s in Adams-Morgan where a lot of people like to go out but there aren’t a ton of good dining options. Personally, I have up the whole going out in Adams-Morgan habit years ago, and probably haven’t been to Pasta Mia since 2004, but that’s my recollection of the appeal.

The other thing Pasta Mia has going for it is a relative lack of competition. Since A.V. Risorante Italiano closed there’s nothing else in the main part of the city existing in that kind of casual Italian/Italian-American culinary space. That’s too bad, because this is a style of food that lots of people like to eat. Now in some respects that’s okay because these pasta dishes are probably something a lot of us are relatively comfortable cooking for ourselves at home, but still it’s a real gap in the city’s culinary landscape. A lot’s been done in recent years to bring new restaurants online specifically in the pizza genre but pasta is good, too!