I'm not much of a gourmand, but I do love to play with food. Well, food data, anyway. So when I happened upon the Food System Factoids blog, I totally pigged out.
The menu may not be for everyone, but if you have a craving for analyses of food pricing trends, or evaluations of carbon emissions from U.S. agriculture, you'll find plenty to satisfy.
Take, for instance, this post on the relative change in prices of soft drinks and processed fats vs. fruits and veggies. The data's a bit old now, but what a story. From 1985 to 2000, the real, inflation-adjusted cost of fresh fruits and veggies went up almost 40 percent, while the costs of soft drinks went down by nearly a quarter.
Putting the numbers in context: a dollar's worth of Coke in 1985 cost just over 75 cents in 2000. But a dollar's worth of apples or broccoli rose to almost $1.40.
So the incentives are pretty clear: given that median incomes didn't rise that much over that period, and poverty rates remained constant, there were quite a few folks who pretty much had no choice but to trade apples for Coke. No wonder Americans grew so much heavier over the period.
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Comments
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Delay And Deny Posted 6:59 am
23 Mar 2007
Like most Gristers, you have an inverted view of human nature. You assume that the prices were maninpulated by some "Evil Invisible Hand" of the Illuminati.
Could a more prosaic explanation be that people like drinking sweetened beverages and don't like eating fruit (or vegetables)? Therefore, demand for colas was high, producers made more, and costs went down through efficient manufacturing. Meanwhile, demand for fruit was low, and they are hard to make and transport and refrigerate so their costs went up.
BTW -- there is some evidence that the fructose in fruits can be just as damaging as any other sugar in terms of high blood pressure and so on.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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Laurence Aurbach Posted 7:41 am
23 Mar 2007
Distorted markets reduce demand for produce crops
Government support for producing grain and oilseed crops comes in many forms, from money invested in public universities and government agencies to research such crops, to subsidy payments that make up for low prices, to continued promises of increased export markets for these crops. Produce crops, in contrast, receive a much smaller level of government support and risk management. As a result, more grains and oilseeds are produced than should be in a properly functioning agricultural economy. While a farmer might generate a higher return in the marketplace for crops such as vegetables, lack of government support for these crops--especially when weighed against support for commodity crops--makes growing vegetables a much riskier proposition.
Incentives for CAFOs over pasture-raised livestock
... By keeping the cost of corn and soybeans artificially low, U.S. farm policy provides an indirect subsidy to grain-fed livestock in what are called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs.
... If left on their own, most livestock, particularly ruminants like cattle, would not seek out corn and soybeans. Nor, for that matter, would they seek out factory-style habitats, antibiotics or hormones. Similarly, when consumers are given the choice, they prefer options like hormone-free milk and antibiotic-free chicken. By enabling the production of below-cost feed grains, current U.S. farm policy creates an unfair market advantage to centralized industrialized livestock production over diversified sustainable livestock production.
And from a sidebar titled, "Who benefits?: The role of the food industry":
Given the negative impacts of our current cheap commodity policy on public health, farmers, rural communities and the environment, it would be prudent to examine who benefits from our commodity-focused agricultural system. The primary beneficiaries of cheap commodities are food processors, manufacturers and retailers. As mentioned above, cheap inputs--in the form of added fats and sugars--mean lower production costs.
From this perspective, it makes sense that highly processed food products are so ubiquitous, as these generate the most profit for the food companies, retailers and others involved in the food production chain. It is also no wonder that food companies spend such large sums of money advertising these products. The USDA's $333 million budget for nutrition education can hardly compete with the billions of dollars the food industry spends advertising the very products nutritionists are telling us to avoid. In the U.S. alone, Pepsi spent over $1.2 billion on advertising in 2003.
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VTpowderhound Posted 7:48 am
23 Mar 2007
1st, I agree that you can't necessarily say that just because candy bars & soda are less expensive than veggies, that's why veggie consumption is way down, etc. That's part of it, but not the whole story.
But 1st of all, you suggest that demand for fruit was low, and that's part of the reason for the price increase. That's wrong; low demand leads to lower prices, not higher prices. Although you are correct that higher transport & energy costs do raise the costs of distributing fruit, and those costs get passed on to the consumer.
2nd, your assertion that fructose from fruit is (possibly) just as bad as refined sugar/high fructose corn syrup is waaaay out there. You can;t throw that assertion out there without a link to something that backs that up, and I'm guessing that study is highly suspect. People are not getting Type II diabetes from eating too much fruit, that's for damn sure.
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Delay And Deny Posted 8:55 am
23 Mar 2007
Some fruits have very high glycemic indexes:
If you take a look at the glycemic index (GI), a measure of how fast carbohydrate foods (which include fruits) are converted in the body to blood glucose, you??ll see that there are big differences between fruits.
You wrote:
But 1st of all, you suggest that demand for fruit was low, and that's part of the reason for the price increase. That's wrong; low demand leads to lower prices,
Wow. Did you, like, miss out on the Industrial Revolution? Demand can create low prices if there's a case where mass production reduces per unit costs. Example: if there are a lot of acres devoted to fruit because of high demand, farmers will -- until the point of decreasing marginal utility -- be able to, say, use the same tractor more efficiently, and so on. Also transportation costs per unit can decrease with more units. Example, there will be more farms so that the chance of one being close to you would cut the distance travelled for the fruit.
But, yes, for a product that has fixed, unchangeable costs, price would do down with demand.
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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Delay And Deny Posted 9:04 am
23 Mar 2007
It is not a super rich area, so there are many low cost restaurants serving foods of many lands.
One of my favorites is India Combo (http://www.indiacombo.com/ ). They have an all you can eat buffet for $6.95 -- including freshly baked nan bread. The food is fresh and delicious with all kinds of veggies and sauces and potatoes and tandoori chicken, fresh fruit and salad. All fresh and healthy.
I go there all the time. I keep thinking -- man, a poor person could go here every day and stuff themselves on delicious, nutritious food for lunch and then snack later on.
But you know what? As many people as go there, the number that are going to Jack In The Box up the street is probably 2 orders of magnitude more.
Is the FDA preventing people choosing this healthy low cost choice? Is George Bush standing there with his finger pointing up the street to McDonalds? Or is it just human nature, and people not wanting to use their brains.
It's plain to me -- it's all in our memes...
The Texeme Construct offers international text memetics construction and textcasting services. http://www.you-read-it-here-first.com
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GreyFlcn Posted 9:43 am
23 Mar 2007
Or in other words, your tax dollars paying for pork barrel spending for ADM.
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Jason D Scorse Posted 11:38 am
23 Mar 2007
My one quibble with the thrust of the article is the view that somehow poor people are so poor that they have no choice but to buy junk food. In some cases that's true, but I know plenty of not so poor people who eat little but junk and there are plenty of lower income people that have money for cellphones, cars, big tvs, and new sneakers so don't forget that they have choices and chose priorities too.
J.S.
I teach environmental economics and blog at http://www.voicesofreason.info. I am a proud liberal, who stands on the shoulders of giants.
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SMLowry Posted 5:17 am
24 Mar 2007
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Nucbuddy Posted 7:33 am
24 Mar 2007
Did someone suggest otherwise? The United States has 300 million people.
By the way, Socio-Economic Status (SES) and healthy-diet-choice are positively correlated.
gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000455.html
There is overwhelming evidence that obesity and SES are inversely related. Lower SES means more cheap pre-packaged sweets and fats and less healthy eating. Unless you want to argue that blacks are an exception to this, or that blacks aren't disproportionately lower class, why would you think duende's statement was ignorant in the least? (In fact, "More than 60% of African Americans are overweight, compared to 54% of the general U.S. population", which actually means that AAs are less likely to be obese than whites if we control for SES (actually if we look at the figures black men are probably less likely than white men to become obese if we controled for SES, but black women have an exceptionally odd curve which suggests a genetic component to me.).
Also, SES and IQ are positively correlated. Linda Gottfredson has focused much of her research on the influence of IQ upon health-competency and health-outcomes.
udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints
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