Finally saw Food, Inc.

So I finally watched Food, Inc. (long overdue); I came in with a somewhat skeptical attitude and felt similarly afterward (perhaps that says more about me than about the film). It makes some good points – for example, Kevin’s Law should pass, and much of industrial livestock production looks gross. I don’t object at all to the muckraking style (in the fine tradition of Upton Sinclair). But I felt much of the movie was grafting broader populist themes like “corporations are bad” and “our political system is broken” onto the agriculture and food world, rather than making nuanced and well-argued points that are specific to the latter.

Monsanto might be crossing the line when they attack someone like Moe Parr with litigation (emphasis on "might" - Monsanto has its own side of the story). But the broader argument that “farmers have saved seed for thousands of years” is specious given the importance of intellectual property to spurring innovation. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans could not have gone from 2% market share in 1996 to 96% market share in 2007 without offering really substantial benefits to farmers, benefits that could never in a million years have been developed through traditional seed selection and breeding. So while wrongful prosecution is not OK, enforcing the contract farmers who use Roundup Ready seed sign to not save their seed is fine with me.

My biggest disagreement with Michael Pollan et al is with how they disparage “efficiency” and are blasé about food prices (“good food costs more”). In the movie they even show a poor Hispanic family that wants to buy broccoli and pears, but they’re too expensive, so they get Big Macs instead. Michael Pollan’s response is “we need a system in which the bad food costs more than the good food.” I am all for ending ag subsidies (dare we hope the word is moving in that direction?), which are one weight that tilts the playing field. But moving to less efficient staple crop production methods will only increase prices and take up more land, resulting eventually in more deforestation and environmental degradation (particularly in the developing world), not to mention more malnourished people. And it won’t even bring broccoli within the purchasing power of the Gonzalez family. In fact, it’s easy to imagine a more extensive production system increasing the value of land and thus the price of all food crops, healthy or not.

”Reductionist science” and development

I like two things in particular about Chris Blattman’s response to Aid Watch’s diatribe against Millenium Villages.

First, he does a great job of concisely synthesizing the opposing philosophies on development (Sachs vs. Easterly, if you will):

We wouldn’t be testing the fundamental premises: the theory of the big push; that high levels of aid simultaneously attacking many sectors and bottlenecks are needed to spur development; that there are positive interactions and externalities from multiple interventions.

The alternative hypothesis is that development is a gradual process, that marginal returns to aid may be high at low levels, and that we can also have a big impact with smaller, sector-specific interventions.

Second, he nails the flaw in the simplistic critique that MVs prove nothing because they’re not subject to rigorous evaluation (e.g. randomized impact evaluations):

To test the big push and all these externalities, we’d need to measure marginal returns to many single interventions as well as these interventions in combination (to get at the externalities). I’m not sure the sample size exists that could do it.

This reminds me of Michael Pollan’s critique of “reductionist science” in nutrition in his books – single development treatments (or nutrients) can be tested in isolation, but what if they have complex interactions with one another? The combinatorial explosion of trials you’d need to rigorously test all of these interactions renders the traditional scientific method helpless to mortals.

This, in turn, reminds me of business. Good businesspeople have no illusions that they’ll ever have rigorous certainty that they are making the right decision; but they have to make those decisions anyway.

How to apply this to development, I’m not sure (after all, “who decides who decides?”), but the reductionist science analogy was a new thought that I was excited to share.

The food-healthcare connection

Michael Pollan connects the healthcare debate to food:

To listen to President Obama’s speech on Wednesday night, or to just about anyone else in the health care debate, you would think that the biggest problem with health care in America is the system itself — perverse incentives, inefficiencies, unnecessary tests and procedures, lack of competition, and greed.

No one disputes that the $2.3 trillion we devote to the health care industry is often spent unwisely, but the fact that the United States spends twice as much per person as most European countries on health care can be substantially explained, as a study released last month says, by our being fatter. Even the most efficient health care system that the administration could hope to devise would still confront a rising tide of chronic disease linked to diet.

That’s why our success in bringing health care costs under control ultimately depends on whether Washington can summon the political will to take on and reform a second, even more powerful industry: the food industry.

This is, of course, Pollan talking to his own pet cause… but in this case it makes a certain amount of sense.

I found this interesting:

Recently a team of designers from M.I.T. and Columbia was asked by the foundation of the insurer UnitedHealthcare to develop an innovative systems approach to tackling childhood obesity in America. Their conclusion surprised the designers as much as their sponsor: they determined that promoting the concept of a “foodshed” — a diversified, regional food economy — could be the key to improving the American diet.

All of which suggests that passing a health care reform bill, no matter how ambitious, is only the first step in solving our health care crisis. To keep from bankrupting ourselves, we will then have to get to work on improving our health – which means going to work on the American way of eating.

I think the battle between the proponents and critics of industrial agriculture will be fought on many battlefields for a long time.

Green meat

Few creatures would seem as beneficent as the cow. Properly grazed and groomed, it gives us burgers and brie, boot leather and fertilizer. Lately, however, radical green groups and celebrity vegans like Paul McCartney have made cows out to be weapons of mass destruction: not only has their meat caused an epidemic of hypertension and heart disease, but they also trample rainforests, trash the soil, and foul the air with greenhouse gases.

That's the beginning of a Newsweek article called "The Cow Turns Green". The article could have used some stronger fact-checking (its feed ratios for chicken/pork/beef are off, and I find it hard to believe that cattle grazing accounts for 72% of Canada's GHG emissions), but it highlights the macro environmental issues with meat production - GHG emissions and land use/deforestation - and mentions a few initiatives by governments and businesses to address these problems before the environmental - not to mention PR - damage gets much worse.

The article also nails the reason why meatless Mondays in the developed world won't solve the problem alone:

Even if everyone in the rich nations swore off meat today, consumption would continue to soar, thanks to the burgeoning middle classes of China, Brazil, and other nations. Brazilians today eat 89 kilos of red meat and poultry a year, nearly triple the per capita consumption of 15 years ago, while the average Chinese citizen consumes close to two and a half times more meat than he did in 1990.

This is something I feel Michael Pollan and disciples in the U.S. often ignore when promoting lower-intensity food production systems - the U.S. is a major food exporter and if it exports less, that slack will have to be picked up elsewhere in the world. See my comments at U.S. Food Policy for one discussion along these lines.

I was interested to learn that the much-maligned (by Pollan and others) corn-and-soy diet may also be a culprit in increasing livestock emissions:

The owners of the Stonyfield Farm in Vermont found they could improve health and boost milk production in the herds, and reduce methane emissions, by eliminating the soybean- and corn-based feed that became popular during the bumper harvests of the Green Revolution. Instead, they give their cows old-fashioned flax and alfalfa, which are packed with nutrients and benign fatty acids.

Sounds win-win. Overall, greening meat is one of many things that will have to be part of the climate change solution for agriculture, which along with deforestation (for which ag is largely responsible) contributes ~30% of global GHG emissions today, as well as a number of other environmental problems.

Food prices are a double-edged sword

Higher food prices are good for farmers and bad for poor consumers, particularly those who live on the edge of undernourishment. This is totally tautological, but the Michael Pollan/Vandana Shiva side of the food debate appears to ignore this frequently by decrying the low costs of industrial production as an unadulterated, obesity-causing evil.

As real food prices fall over the last half century, undernourishment as a proportion of world population was cut almost in half (22% to 13%), and then it spiked recently due largely to higher food prices.

That's all (but I expect to link back to this post frequently as this comes up all the time).

The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

That's the name of a new piece by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst in The American. As I mentioned, I haven't finished The Omnivore's Dilemma yet, but I still found this an interesting and well-written rebuttal, appealing on both logical and emotional dimensions. Here is a sample of the latter:

He was a businessman, and I’m sure spends his days with spreadsheets, projections, and marketing studies. He hasn’t used a slide rule in his career and wouldn’t make projections with tea leaves or soothsayers. He does not blame witchcraft for a bad quarter, or expect the factory that makes his product to use steam power instead of electricity, or horses and wagons to deliver his products instead of trucks and trains. But he expects me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. He thinks farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families. I would not presume to criticize his car, or the size of his house, or the way he runs his business. But he is an expert about me, on the strength of one book, and is sharing that expertise with captive audiences every time he gets the chance.

Well-versed in both the recent literature on the organic debate and the trials and tribulations of everyday farming, Hurst details a number of ways in which Pollan's "solutions" would be impractical or ineffective. He then closes with a reasonable appeal:

Farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I'm still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm "industrially" to feed the world, and by using those "industrial" tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

I wouldn't say Pollan has been refuted, but this is a high-quality contribution to the debate.

Via Chris Clayton.

Myth-busting: How much oil does the US really import from the Persian Gulf?

I'm reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (long overdue, and overall a great book, even though I don't agree with everything). One common meme he perpetuates that I find very irritating, though, is the one that says the U.S. gets all of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Here are the real numbers. For most of the last two decades, the Persian Gulf as a whole has supplied <20% of total U.S. imports, and Canada has been the single largest source (~16%). Saudi Arabia and Venezuela are tied for second at ~13.5%, with Mexico (12.2%) and Nigeria (7.4%) not far behind.

Not to mention that in declaring that chicken feed is Joel Salatin's only outside input, he conveniently ignores electricity and fuel. But I'm sure once I've finished the book I'll have a much longer set of gripes, so until then...

Update: To give the complete picture, imports accounted for 59% of total U.S. petroleum consumption in 2007. This means the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia were responsible for 9.5% and 6.5% of total U.S. oil consumption in 2007, respectively.