Linky Friday #105

Michael Drew in reply to Michael Drew says:

Also form Ozimek:

Another issue in [Bittman’s] piece is the lumping together of unhealthy meat consumption with a general dislike of industrial food:

This first weird thing is that he throws fairness into this mix. What is he even talking about here? Would the externalities of meat consumption be lower if farm workers received a higher wage? Sure, a small amount less might be consumed due to higher prices, but this would amount to a trivially small tax. Second, he again includes nutrition into the mix as an externality problem.

Really? Ozimek seems to be willfully not understanding Bittman here.

I’m going to go in something like reverse order. While Ozimek was closer to right about Bittman’s points about health externalities above, here he is just not reading the sentence he is critiquing. Bittman is not there talking about about health costs with “externalities.” He’s talking about any and all externalities of industrial food production (which, in honesty, is basically all food production). So: pollution; carbon emissions from factories and transport – all the things Ozimek later goes to chide him for not talking about as externalities. Again, here’s the sentence: “all the products of industrial food consumption have externalities that would be lessened by a system that makes as its primary goal the links among nutrition, fairness and sustainability.” He’s not qualifying what those externalities are there; he’s including them all.

Then, on Bittman’s prescription. Really, Adam? If meat production (and production includes the process of getting meat to market) were made truly fair to workers worldwide, the price increases that would result “would amount to a trivially small tax”? That’s not the sense I get when I hear most economists talk about proposals like that. And fairness is a broad category: we might say that under fairness would fall one aspect of the argument against the kinds of agricultural subsidies that helps make meat production in the U.S. cheaper than it would otherwise be. My sense is that the price increases that would result from pursuing fairness throughout industrial food production systems would not be trivial.

But fairness is not all Bittman calls for – rather, he wants “a system that makes as its primary goal the links among nutrition, fairness and sustainability.” We’ve covered fairness; let’s consider sustainability. Let’s assume by that Bittman basically means excessive contribution to human-caused climate change (an externality, so there if nowhere else are your externalities that “all the products of industrial food consumption have.”). I consider it something of a pipe dream to ever really include that cost into prices in general. But let’s it could be and it were done. That would seriously affect systems that get meat onto your supermarket shelves in the quantity it is, and offered to you on menus for the price that it is. Is Adam still going to try to tell me that price increases here will be minimal?

So then let’s think about the links of those two – fairness and sustainability – with nutrition. Bittman’s view is the “industrially produced” food tends to be less healthy for you than… foods made through some other kinds of processes. I know that’s probably a contentious view and I don’t fully share it, but in ways I do think it’s plausible. And a system that injected fairness and sustainability into food production processes think plausibly might spur food production toward those other processes.

More concretely and certainly, “a system that makes as its primary goal the links among nutrition, fairness and sustainability” – that injected fairness and sustainability into food production processes in a substantial way – would almost certainly raise the price of meat in general, and red meat particularly, and probably lead to reductions in consumption of them. I don’t think anyone would deny that this would improve our nutrition. That’s the kind of link Bittman is rather clearly talking about here.

And let me just say. I’m no Bittmanian myself. I’m pretty skeptical of the idea that a lot of industrial foods are that much more unhealthy than the same basic agricultural product had it been processed differently. (Obviously I don;t deny that there are effects of food production processes, but I think their extent doesn;t always justify the emphasis on them). And I pretty much absolutely want to keep eating steaks and burgers for the same prices that I currently eat them for. I don’t have that much desire to see Bittman’s vision realized.

But I don’t have much truck with people like Adam Ozimek who condescendingly act like it’s an incoherent or practically misconceived vision. There are any number of details as to why it might not be able to work, and there are certainly reasons of entrenched economic and political interests why it won’t come to pass. But in it’s broad outlines it is perfectly coherent, and by all means it’s clear enough what Bittman is basically talking about. Ozimek is not dense, so it looks to me like he is rather feigning denseness with Bittman here.Report