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Category: Food

Published February 12, 2011

On Mark Bittman’s Future Food Manifesto (Updated)

A few weeks ago, the New York Times‘ Mark Bittman wrote a column entitled “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” in which he offered his thoughts as to how to “make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring.” Bittman’s suggestions are very much in line with the expectations and beliefs of the bien-pensant, as befits someone writing for the newspaper of record, but some of his suggestions were highly impractical.

I wanted to discuss his column earlier on but other more pressing events happened in terms of food policy which I chose to discuss first, and this has been a busy week, so my apologies for the lateness of these comments.

Among Bittman’s thoughts were:

Continue readingOn Mark Bittman’s Future Food Manifesto (Updated)
Published February 11, 2011

More Miscellaneous Food Policy Links

  1. Every time I start wondering whether I really need to subscribe to The Atlantic when I barely have enough time to keep up with all the other things I have to read, the magazine manages to sink its hook into me again. This time around, it did so with an interesting, well-written article by B.R. Myers on foodies and foodie-ism.
  2. Bryan McDonald has a good post about the potential link between food prices and political unrest.
  3. One more from The Atlantic: Megan McArdle has a good post discussing Mark Bittman’s comment on the new USDA dietary guidelines.
Published February 9, 2011

Miscellaneous Food Policy Links

I would love to take the time to discuss each of these items in detail, but Tuesdays are my big teaching day — I teach my section of the core undergraduate micro class for Public Policy Studies majors during lunch, and I teach my law and economics seminar after dinner — and yesterday was the day of the first prelim in my micro class. And today, I am moderating a panel on global agricultural markets at a conference at the Fuqua School of Business, so here goes:

  1. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations issued a warning that drought in China may considerably reduce the amount of wheat available on world markets. As Krugman notes, it’s not because China is largely autarkic (or self-sufficient) when it comes to wheat that this will not put pressure on the prices of other food staples. After all, various commodities are substitutes for or complements to one another, and prices rarely if ever change in a vacuum.
  2. Speaking of Krugman, I completely agree with him when he says that there is little to no evidence that speculation on food markets caused the current price spike. I am also a skeptic as to whether speculation and arbitrage will solve the world food problem given the transaction costs Krugman mentions. It could very well be, however, that speculation and arbitrage remains the best we can do to attenuate food price fluctuations.
  3. Center for Economic and Policy Research (a liberal, Washington, DC-based think-tank not to be confused with the academic London-based Center Centre for Economic Policy Research) co-director Dean Baker had an excellent, long post about how the Washington Post is systematically confused about the role of the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Ben Bernanke, in causing the food price spike, with thanks to my colleague Don Taylor for orienting me towards this post.
  4. Institute for Development Studies director Lawrence Haddad (whose paper with Alderman et al. I assign to students in my development seminar every fall semester)  had a post on how to make agriculture more helpful in attaining better nutrition for people in developing countries.
  5. From Tom Paulson, an  example of the causal claims I warned against in yesterday’s post on whether food prices caused Tunisia and Egypt.