Tyler Cowen on Food 04/23/2012

Welcome to EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org, where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. Today's April 16th, 2012, and my guest is Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. His latest book is An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. Tyler, welcome back to EconTalk.

Thank you, Russ.

I kind of felt like saying when I introduced this podcast, you know, we've had— this past week was on disability insurance, before that was on inequality, we've done a lot on the financial crisis. I felt like saying, and now for something completely different. We're going to talk about today the economics of food and your love of food. I want to start by asking you to talk about what a foodie is to you and what role food plays in your life.

Well, let's start with economics. Early economics is the economics of food. If you read Adam Smith, if you read David Ricardo. So a lot of the early economics I read was classical economics. So for me, economics has always been economics of food. But as a foodie, I'd say I started in my early 20s. My food upbringing was quite conservative. Decent quality, but nothing unusual, no real diversity. And I was living in Germany, a completely foreign food environment., and I started trying to make sense of it using economics.

And the rest is history. So what would you say— you have a food blog.

That's right, tylercowen'sethnicdiningguide.com.

And we'll put a link up to that, of course. And you spend a lot of time, it seems to me, which is maybe not possible given how much time you spend on other things, but you seem to spend a reasonable amount of time trying to find good food and eat it. Is, is that accurate?

I enjoy traveling around. I think it's very important if you live in Northern Virginia to be an anthropologist of suburbia and to focus on food and learn that one area very well is a good way of doing that. So I feel I'm doing social science and the notion of taking small things and studying them in great detail. Food for me is a window onto that perspective. Plus it tastes good.

And, uh, do you think you are unusual in how much you enjoy food, or would you say it's an intellectual experience, this combination of social science and the gustatory habit?

I'm not sure I would accept the distinction between the intellectual and the emotional side, but if you think of food, sex, and sleep as three primeval pleasures that virtually all human beings enjoy, I take the simple view that we should regard those things quite seriously, and the book is about one of them. Why should we not? It's in a sense that the higher realms of culture, which are maybe a bit phony in some ways relative to what we are compared to food, sex, and sleep.

Is the finishing of this book gonna change anything for you food-wise?

I've eaten more vegetarian food as a result of having written the book, and that's a good thing. That's the main change.

But is going forward, is your interest in food gonna change now that you've finished a book about this phenomenon?

Uh, less of my research will be about the history of food by quite a bit, but other than that, I don't think my life will change very much.

You're still gonna be interested in finding a really good barbecue place in South— in North Carolina.

Whatever it may be. Yeah, absolutely.

Um, I don't wanna lose this. Why have you become more vegetarian since writing the book?

I think it's unethical how we treat animals in factory farms. By eating less meat, you cut back on that, however minimally. It's also good for the environment to eat less meat.

Because?

Uh, there's a climate change problem resulting from a lot of animals which emit methane. The, uh, impolite word is fart. And if you have a vegetarian diet, to a greater extent, you, you make some minimal inroads on that problem.

By reducing the size of the cow herds of the world?

That's correct.

You're doing— you're making a personal— I understand you're not solving the problem, but you're not participating, and you're making a small incremental marginal, as we might say, change toward a different level of methane emission. That's what you're saying, right?

Yes. I don't feel it's ethically wrong to kill and eat animals per se, but I do feel that how we treat animals before killing and eating them is wrong.

Sometimes, or—

Sometimes, but in this country quite often.

And on the palate side, how have you found this change?

Vegetarian food makes much more sense when you eat spicy food. So one good way to become more vegetarian is simply to cultivate your own taste for spicy food. To just eat vegetables straight up, unless they're really very good, as you might find in Italy or France, in an American supermarket they're mediocre. It's not going to stick with you. So a greater vegetarian diet, to stick, it has to be somewhat incentive compatible. So think in terms of how you can spice your lentils or season your cauliflower.

Uh, are you a student at all of this, um, Paleo diet, uh, literature that suggests that we were— we evolved to eat meat and that overconsumption of carbohydrates, for example, is not good for us? In fact, maybe any consumption of carbohydrates, certainly sugar, is not good for us. Do you give any credence to that literature?

I read about it. I agree with some of it. I'm not convinced by a lot of it. Refined sugar, I think there's a lot of evidence it's bad for us. A lot of the paleo people are fairly anti-vegetable along some margins. I don't see the evidence that they're right there. I think they underestimate how quickly some parts of human evolution can occur, and the notion that we've had agriculture and lived in cities for quite a while now, I think they underrate. So I think if your diet has a lot of vegetables, even vegetables with carbohydrates, that's probably fine. I think, say, bread in moderation is fine. So the notion that you should just eat fruit, nuts, meat, cheese for the most part, I don't see that there's been a strong case backed by data made there.

Saying that you should or shouldn't eat fruit, nuts, and cheese?

The notion that you should only eat fruit, nuts, meat, cheese, and some number of other things basically low-carb diet. I've never seen a well-done statistical study showing that has a serious payoff.

But from interviewing Gary Taubes, I've become skeptical of this argument that fat is bad for you. And you do a couple of times in the book allude to the health effects of fat. Do you have a position on fat?

I haven't seen serious evidence that fat in moderation is bad for you.

Yeah, I don't think it is. I think it might be good for you.

I agree.

Interesting question. Now the book opens with a, uh, sort of a defense and an explanation of the state of American cuisine. Uh, we don't have a great reputation, Americans don't, as a great place to eat. Uh, so talk about some of that is true, some of it you suggest is not true. The part that's true, you have some interesting explanations for us, so talk about that.

Well, some of our bad reputation is an illusion precisely because America ships so many of its culinary products overseas. So if you're at a McDonald's in Europe, it's not necessarily the case that the raw materials come from the United States, but the idea of McDonald's does, and it's not very good. So in essence, foreigners are getting a lot of the worst of our food, and they overgeneralize somewhat. To actually live here and eat here, uh, is quite pleasant, I find. You have a lot of choice, and a lot of it's very tasty. And there's a lot of healthy food available pretty readily. So the overall picture has gotten much better in the last 30 to 40 years. But American food for a lot of the 20th century was quite grim. I think a few of the culprits are that the child is given too much authority in the American family, uh, Prohibition and World War II, which combined had very long lag effects actually. America doesn't become, among its elites, a wine-drinking culture comparable to Western Europe really until the 1970s., and that helps support a notion of quality food. And I think also cutting off most immigration in the 1920s had disastrous effects for American food. So the typical narrative is we have bad food because of corporations and big business and capitalism. And I wanna say, to the extent it's true we had bad food, a lot of it was the fault of the law— Prohibition and also immigration restrictions.

And then a cultural preference for children, which you didn't explain in the book, but the idea that Children like bland food in general, don't like exotic food.

They want soft and sweet, and that, that's death for really good food for the most part.

Yeah. Uh, you travel an immense amount, uh, relative to me anyway. When you are abroad, uh, Europe, you go to Latin America, uh, you go to Asia, are there American restaurants other than McDonald's? Are there places that— is there anything identifiable as American cuisine to foreigners other than fast food?

Depends what you count as an American restaurant. So if you go to the Caribbean, say, or Central America, you can find Pizza Hut, but it's not like Pizza Hut here. It's generally quite good, and people might go out for a special meal to Pizza Hut there. Is it American food? They've made it their own cuisine. And is pizza American to begin with? You can debate these points at length, but I would say Europeans in particular have crystallized this notion of American food, which A, doesn't exist, and it doesn't exist as American, and it becomes a sort of whipping boy for American mass society. But I think food here right now is quite creative. If I fly to Western Europe, I don't necessarily feel I'm going to eat better there than here right now.

But this question of American cuisine, I think the— you make, I think, one reference to the fact that it's a little bit like English cuisine. It's got a bad reputation that is not particularly well deserved. But I think when people think of American cuisine, they think of either these sort of quintessential American-ish foods— they're not really American— hamburger and hot dogs. Hamburgers and frankfurters are, I think, named after German cities.

Absolutely.

Uh, and pizza appears to be another import, but we've made them our own, I guess, in some dimension. But I think that's what Americans think of, at least when they want to come after living in a, in an exotic or foreign cuisine and they come back to America, they— what they miss or what they long for is hot dogs, hamburgers, pizza, things that for better or worse have become American. We'll get in a little bit, we'll talk about barbecue, which is somewhat— certainly has a very distinctive American set of versions, but there isn't a cuisine quite— that's American per se, other than it's enriched by that immigrant population when we let it in.

I would define it by the diversity and not by particular foodstuffs. So American cuisine is the ability to choose Indian or Sichuan or Mexican-American, whatever else. That's American cuisine.

Which again, obviously, is a result of that immigrant population.

Um, and it's strongest in the suburbs. So Europeans, they come to visit America They think they're gonna try the real American food. They're walking around the center of Boston, which is okay for food, uh, but it's not necessarily the best stuff. They never see the glories of the ethnic restaurants in the suburbs, and they go home rather disappointed, and they decide the critics of McDonald's were maybe right all along. That's a mistake.

And you talk in the book about the role of center city restaurants, which of course is where many tourists are gonna spend a lot of their time, versus suburbs. Why are the suburbs a decent place, or even often a great place, to eat in America?

The suburbs typically have better schools. Asians are attracted by better schools, so most of the best Asian restaurants in the United States are in suburbs. That's one big reason. But another reason is just you have lower rents, you have more space, there's more room for experimentation, you have more strip malls, and you get a richer mix. I wouldn't say it's richer than what's in Los Angeles, but the cities that do best actually do well by being suburb-like, such as parts of Los Angeles or Queens and Brooklyn in New York City.

—As you point out, if you're paying a high rent, you've gotta generate a lot of volume.

Hard Rock Café.

You can't cater to a niche clientele. You're gonna have to cater to a group that's fairly large.

Or be very expensive like the wonderful places on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but you can't go to those very often, if at all.

And you'd argue sometimes the food experience there is merely okay for the money and not great.

Well, for the money, I think almost always at those restaurants, the food tastes quite good.. But is it worth $300? Is it worth having to get dressed up? Is it worth the hassle of getting a reservation? Not obvious to me.

Or not to Tyler Cowen, but obviously there are people who are purchasing something other than the food at those places.

But no one can make it their daily food life, so you're still left with the other questions of what to do.

Now, you detail in the book a rather interesting experiment of spending, I think it was a month, shopping in an Asian supermarket. I'd like you to talk about why you did that and what it— how it affected you.

First, I think as human beings we all have status quo biases, so we have our ruts. We have our food ruts, we have our supermarket ruts. I thought by shopping at this Chinese market for a full month I could just get out of my ruts and see everything fresh. To me, it was also an experiment in information processing. The notion that I could walk into a store, not know how to find anything, and not be very good at figuring out how to find it This was exciting. Uh, it's a way of discovering the world anew. And so I did it.

It was great. A little bit like being a tourist, but close to home too, but much more radical than being a tourist. So what was that like? Why, why, I mean, I think the average person, when I, when I started that chapter, I thought was how interesting this is going to be, but it turned out to be quite interesting. Um, talk about some of the experiences you had in that, in that supermarket.

I found myself gravitating very quickly to foods I could see and touch because I knew how to find them.

So a lot of jars, you mentioned, that had labels that rarely— didn't always have English, and if they did, were hard to sometimes find the English.

Jars were hopeless. It was like Borges' Library of Babel. You knew that what you wanted was there, but you probably weren't going to find it. The greens were visible. You grab them. They're like half or a third of the price of elsewhere, much better selection. Dozens of greens there you wouldn't get anywhere else. All fresh, all delicious. Completely changed how I eat immediately. 6 types of bok choy.

Yes.

And I didn't even have to keep track of which was which. Just grab one, buy it, bring it home. It always worked.

And because they were always interesting and tasty. That's right. And talk about the seafood.

There were dozens of kinds of seafood. A lot of it I didn't recognize. Not all of it smelled fresh to me., but there was just far more choice than in a Giant or Safeway, and it was cheaper. And again, you would just see what looked good and ask for some, bring it home, sauté it, put on some garlic, some ginger, some olive oil, whatever. It was almost certain to taste good.

Any of that not turn out so well, that seafood?

Uh, no, it was fine, actually. I'm careful in what I buy.

There are a number of times in the book you refer to, uh, the virtues of cultures and cuisines that have different standards, uh, say, of preservation and health, uh, safety than, than America's, which is of course quite high for a variety of reasons, some admirable, maybe some not so admirable. Um, and you often talk about eating, especially abroad, as an adventure. Uh, and you've, you praise the virtues of it. Have there been any dark times from those adventures? You don't mention any of them in the book. Did you ever, uh, have you ever had some experiences abroad where you ended up prone for an extended period of time, or?

Two times I've gotten very sick. The last was eating a breakfast buffet in Zurich, Switzerland, and that was right before I was supposed to debate Jeff Sachs.

Not a third world country. Not a third world country.

I believe it was from the raw fish. I don't know, uh, but it went very badly. The other time was my first— The debate or the meal? The meal, the debate I won. In the mid-'80s, the first time I was in Mexico eating restaurant food, I got very sick. Since then, I've eaten street food and I've done fine.

Any advice for, uh, for those in exotic places for safety and who want to be adventurous but are a little bit anxious about what they're doing?

Well, cooked food is best. If you can see it, even better. I think street food is safer on average in most parts of the world. If you know a bit about municipal water supply, you'll be able to figure out a lot of things. I wouldn't eat a lot of street food in India, for instance, but in Mexico I think it's the safest food.

Going back to the supermarket, so you stuck with the— did a lot of greens. You ate some other things, you didn't just go greens and seafood. There were other— you did venture into the jars and other parts of the store, right?

Sure, if you're willing to spend the time, you can find what you want, delicious sauces and spices.

And how did it end up— you talk about some of the longer-term impacts of that 1-month experience. How has it changed you?

I think I have a better understanding now of if people are to eat more greens, it has to make sense for them economically and it has to taste good. And lecturing people about it is probably not going to work. And it worked for me immediately. I was a convert within an hour upon arrival. So, uh, I think there are some broader food lessons we could take from that supermarket that we also could take from India. If you go to a public function in India, the food is typically automatically vegetarian, and if you want meat, you can ask, they might be able to bring it, but it's simply assumed that tasty vegetarian food will be served. And when you're in India, your inclination is to want to eat more vegetables. So we could be more like that, either for health or policy reasons. For both, yeah.

Um, who else shopped in that supermarket?

It's mostly Asian and Chinese shoppers, but there's a pretty decent contingent of Latinos who shop there because it's cheap and there's a whole aisle with Latino goods. Interesting. So I also picked up Latino goods when I was there because, A, it was there, and that was something I understood much better to begin with.— you could always ask in Spanish because the staff of the store spoke Spanish, not Chinese.

And you did a little research on how reliably similar or different this store was compared to its counterpart in China, correct? That's right.

I interviewed some people from China.

And what did you find?

They thought it was remarkably similar in terms of what it offered, to the extent that they were surprised, but they thought the quality of a lot of the fresh items was not quite up to China. Here, there's a longer supply chain. In China, more of the food comes from right nearby.

And is it true— how would you— while we're on the subject of Asian food, we talked earlier about how American, presumably, tastes, income, other things change imported food styles when they come to America. You've presumably— I know you've eaten a lot of Mexican food in Mexico and the United States, and you have a very interesting chapter we'll get to later about why they're different and how they're different, but in general, with Asian cuisine, so a lot of Americans love Chinese food, they love sushi, they love Japanese food, they love Thai food. What will Americans find, what do Americans find when they go and eat authentic Chinese, Japanese, and Thai food?

Well, it's a big surprise to them. So a lot of the food in Thailand tastes quite bad. Because of the ingredients. Your median Thai meal might be better here. But that said, the peaks of Thai food in Thailand are far greater than here. Most so-called Chinese food in this country isn't Chinese at all. It's some strange hybrid. It's closer to American food. I think Sichuan cuisine translates the best because it's based on spices which can be dried and shipped to some extent, but Cantonese food doesn't really exist here at all. It relies too much on fresh seafood and good vegetables.

But through most of the, I don't know, the middle of the 20th century, Chinese food in the United States was Cantonese in some sense of origin, right? What, what was, why was it so bad?

Hi, in some hybrid sense, a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of goo, no sharp flavors. I grew up eating some of this. It just wasn't very inspiring. I guess it's, it was okay.

You could do worse. But a Chinese person eating that food would not have recognized it, presumably.

That's correct. And if you would have gone simply to an American seafood restaurant, say 1970, and ordered a plain piece of fish, you would be getting something closer to Chinese food than going to a so-called Chinese restaurant in New Jersey.

What about the meat-to-vegetable ratio?

You mean how it's changed over time?

No, about the United States versus China. Americans like meat. Meat's far more meatier. Absolutely. But seafood, you say, would not be that different in terms of ratio.

Depends which part of China, of course. But if you think of relying more on seafood and vegetables, you'll have gentler flavors. Sauces and spices will matter more. Subtleties will matter more. Meat is more overwhelming. American place to serve meat, there's your beef with broccoli, maybe some kind of sweet sauce on some of it. Brown. And there you go, brown. Yeah.

As you call it, I think you talk about the ubiquitous brown sauce. Let's talk about Mexico for a minute 'cause you spent a lot of time there and you highlight how distinctive Mexican cuisine is from American Mexican food even in American cities that have large populations of Mexican residents and particularly you focus on El Paso. A lot of interesting things there. Talk about some of those differences and why they're there.

Well, I made a number of trips to Mexico with the deliberate purpose of tracking down the Mexican food supply chain and actually visiting it, visiting it as it works. And then as a cook, I tried replicating dishes. And the thing I found, it surprised me a bit, is how much, how many of the differences spring from the meats and the cheeses. That Mexican meats tend to be richer in flavor and the beef will be dry-aged. And it's very hard to get that at a reasonable price in the United States. And the Mexican cheeses are gooier and richer. So if you can replicate for your own cooking Mexican meats and Mexican cheeses, you can actually come fairly close to a lot of Mexican dishes. But for legal and regulatory reasons, to do it the Mexican way in the United States, it simply doesn't work, and our Mexican food is very different, and typically it's worse.

Talk about the labor intensity of dry-aged beef. You describe— I didn't know anything about how dry-aged beef is actually created, but as you point out, it's created differently in Mexico than it is in the United States.

The way it's done in Mexico at a small scale is you simply put it out and wait till it starts turning green, and you have people monitor it and go out and, you know, shake off the flies. And it's not just labor intensive. It wouldn't pass FDA inspection standards. Yet I've eaten it many times. I'm perfectly fine with it. I would love to get it here. So far, US dry-aged beef is done in a more systematic, better regulated way inside of large institutions, and it costs a lot more. It can be several times more beef which is not dry-aged. So you can get it here, just is extremely expensive, and most supermarkets won't carry it.

Demand's not there. Yeah. So the meat's different, the cheese is different. Anything else that's important? Well, fresh fruit in Mexico typically is seasonal.

So when something's in season, it's fantastic. Otherwise you don't get it. So here you have more choice, but it's choice among mediocrities. There you're more likely to get things which are special, but you can't just walk into a Mexican Walmart and have all the fruits and vegetables you want year round the way you almost can do in the United States.

Let's talk about that general issue because it, it intrigues me that, you know, I'd say somewhere in the '80s and '90s it became a common belief that American produce, fruit and vegetables, was second-rate. And part of the reason was this idea that it had a lot of preservatives, it was available maybe year-round even, but not, but not very good. It seems to me, maybe it's an illusion, the choices that we have now. I, I'm assuming maybe that the, that that supply chain's gotten more efficient, but to me, the quality of fruit in the United States compared to 25 years ago seems greatly improved to me in the following ways. First of all, it's perfect, which of course consumers demand. You don't, you don't get a bag of, of apples of which half of them are kind of rotten and bruised and full of problems. They're all gorgeous. And if you don't like the bag, you can pick them out yourself and leave behind the ones that you don't like. And there's plenty to choose from when you walk into your average supermarket. And the variety of apples— when I was younger, you know, it was delicious, maybe McIntosh, maybe something else, I don't remember what the word. Now the profusion of apple selection and the relative Flavor in them seems much greater than when I was younger. Uh, citrus seems much better. Uh, a Costco navel orange is a magnificent thing. A red grapefruit there is spectacular. Um, has it gotten better? Am I imagining it?

It's gotten better, but I think it's one area which still lags behind. If you go, say, to Chile, which is now quite a developed country, and you get a fresh fig when it's in season, or strawberries, I think they're a full order of magnitude better than what you get here, even from a farmer's market. So we have a ways to go. California is much better than most of the rest of this country. The West is better than the East. We're getting there, but I'd say it's where we lag the most— fruits and vegetables. Even at a Whole Foods— I'm a big Whole Foods fan, but I don't think that much of their produce.

What would it take to make it better? Why isn't it? Do you have any idea why it's not as good?

Distance and freezing and transport and the desire to have it year-round are all problems to me. They're not problems to everyone. Obviously, they bring real benefits.

Yeah, some people are very happy to have it.

But I'd rather have less choice, higher quality, and pay a higher price.

You have a chapter on barbecue, one of your favorite foods. You have 3 rules for good barbecue, which are barbecue restaurants should open early, should be in a small town and go for the ribs, not the brisket. Why are those good, good rules?

If it's in a small town, the chance that they're skirting laws and regulations, or maybe the laws aren't there, is much higher. So you want some kind of classic barbecue pit, but this creates a problem with smoke. It potentially creates a problem with fire. In small towns, there's more likely somewhere you can put it. Harder to do in midtown Manhattan, and more likely there's a special deal with the fire chief where he overlook some irregularities. Places that open early basically run out of meat, and that's great. You eat barbecue in Mexico, the food is gone by 1 PM or sooner, and they don't, you know, reheat a new batch of it. That's it. Start eating at 10, maybe earlier. They bring it in from the countryside where it's been cooked underground. It's completely fresh. It's ready to go. Then it runs out. The stand closes up. End of story. That's the best barbecue.

So the, the issue is the, I think you describe it as a, uh, the cooking process begins the night before and it's not sitting around all day.

Right. So foodstuffs that are served very rapidly at very particular points in time and then go away, they tend to be better.

So you mentioned, for example, uh, fish tacos in Tijuana versus San Diego, same thing.

Why? Fish tacos in Tijuana, it's most likely something pulled out of the water. Uh, capacity for refrigeration, it's better now, but it's small taco stands. They're used to just getting in fresh supplies and serving them basically more or less right away, and it will taste very good. San Diego, you're part of this longer food supply chain where everything's regularized and you get a shipment and it's more likely that it's been frozen and it's handled by more people. It still can be good, but it's just not going to taste the same.

You ever wonder whether you have any romance about these issues that cloud your palate and assessment? Right? The sort of fresh out of the water, the fisherman himself is making the taco.

Does that ever cross your mind? I would gladly volunteer to do a blind taste test.

You're not worried about confirmation bias there?

Well, it would be a blind taste test.

Yeah, I mean in general. Not that it matters. I mean, it doesn't— in a way, it doesn't matter whether you're fooling yourself or not, right?

That it would be hard to run the test is itself an important point. To take the Mexican food and try to cross the border with it is not legal. And that, to me, says a lot.

And it's not legal because— just for health regulatory reasons?

Supposedly. And of course, there's a trade issue and a protectionism issue. Yeah, for sure. —But that fact to me suggests there is something to the difference.

Yeah, true. What's our biggest food problem?

Agricultural productivity in the last 20 years is going up at much slower rates than it used to. In the longer run, this means higher prices for food. It means more starvation. It means more malnutrition. This still afflicts many hundreds of millions of people in the world, very often young children. Half of the children in India below age 5 have malnutrition. That's awful.

How do we fix that?

There's not a single silver bullet, but having better local institutions. India itself needs more agribusiness. They need more economies of scale in agriculture. They need better roads so crops don't spoil as they're being brought to market. They need better fertilizer. They just need overall better governance, less corruption. To some idea of local attention to detail and monitoring and accountability and quality control, which is pretty good in a lot of countries and highly variable in India. And to solve problems like malnutrition in India or cholera in Haiti, there's many examples, it's a kind of slow building of institutions and trust and decentralization and market incentives brick by brick. It's just hard to do overnight, but can be done.

And in America, Malnutrition is not our main problem. Our main problem is obesity. That's correct, in terms of health. If you want to call it a problem, right?

But it is to some extent. Some people are voluntarily obese, but I think there are people who want to be thinner and find it hard to get there.

They need to cut out carbohydrates, Tyler, as I did. Works like a charm.

Well, I think any diet— think of it in economic terms.

It's kind of a joke, but kind of true.

No, it's not a joke. Draw a map with indifference curves. And impose any restriction on what you eat, whether it be due to religion or due to a view of a diet, any restriction will limit your optimal choice bundles and you'll consume less food. So there's a way in which any strict diet can have some positive effects, right? Not sure that's true. Um, not literally any, not a diet that said eat all junk food, but a lot of reasonable sounding diets work just by limiting your choice and then you want to eat less.

Yeah, as a kosher consumer, I'm not sure keeping kosher keeps you thin, just because I can't have the pork and shellfish that other people can eat.

So impose more restrictions.

I need to get stricter. So what might improve? Well, I guess there's two issues here. I don't believe I don't like to view obesity as a public policy problem. It's viewed that way, I think, by people who like to meddle in other people's lives. I understand the argument for it. I don't find it convincing as a policy issue. But there are, as you say, many people who would prefer to be thinner than they are, or at least that's what they say.

But some of them really mean it, in my opinion.

I think so. Yeah. So you have some creative ideas on that other than just restricting eating only white foods or not eating white foods or whatever those kind of restrictions that some people— eat grapefruits, you know. You have some ideas about using the price system to encourage us to do better.

Well, let's start with some simple empirics. The groups of people in the United States least likely to be obese are people who are quite wealthy, people who are quite well-educated, and Asians, as rough generalizations. Of course, there are many exceptions. So the more people become foodies and the wealthier society becomes, in the longer run, we are aimed in a good direction overall, and obesity rates seem to have leveled out. So I think there's grounds for cautious optimism about the future. And people becoming foodies probably will make this issue better rather than worse. I don't think there's a single cure overall. I don't think taxes on junk food have a big enough effect to make people less obese in a significant way. I think innovation from consumers, people deciding they want to be less obese and doing things like shopping at Great Wall, we will make some gains. Great Wall is your Chinese supermarket. That's right. I don't think there is a silver bullet solution. And again, I think a lot of people will actually end up willing to remain somewhat heavier to be able to eat what they want.

Do you think being a foodie makes you thinner?

There's a causal question, and there's a question of what we see in the data in terms of a correlation. But if you look at people, say drive out to West Virginia, a rural area, you'll see much more obesity than around here, and you'll see many fewer foodies. I understand causality is tricky, but I think as we move more in the direction of high education, wealthier, more interest in food in a serious way, this will be correlated with other good food and weight outcomes.

Let's turn to some of the environmental issues you talk about in the book, which are, are very interesting. I'm reminded of an article by Mary Eberstadt in the Hoover Review where she talked about how we used to have a lot of taboos and strong feelings of stigma and other attitudes towards sex. But at some point, food became the way we express our taboos and, and our preferences, and we're much less tolerant of people's food choices than we used to be, which is fascinating to me. And food, of course, is a way— your book is an example of it— that we often Express our identity through what we don't eat. Uh, we mentioned kosher. We talk— we could talk about vegetarians. That's of course not— that's just scratching the surface. There's within those two, there's all kinds of gradations and choices people make to identify in certain ways, uh, vegan being just an obvious example on the vegetarian side. Um, and it's a moral issue, not just a health issue, not just a, well, that's what I like or what I choose., and the environment being an area where people's food choices are increasingly, I think, part of their identity and their worries about the impact of what they're choosing for other people in the world. You start your discussion of this in a really provocative way by asking the question, who is the greenest man alive? And you give us 3 choices. So what are your 3— there are obviously more than 3, but 3 interesting choices for the greenest man alive?

Well, one is this fellow named Edward Begley who tries to burn as little fossil fuel energy as he can in his life, and he buys carbon offsets for everything. There are then some references to the Walmart Corporation and people who have worked for that, and they have done a lot to make their supply chain more efficient and less costly.

Shockingly less efficient. I mean, more efficient, right?

A big difference, yeah. Huge difference. That saved a lot of fossil fuel —no— and of course that's been driven by their self-interest. And I cite the example of a man who's trying to make a new kind of cement which is more carbon-friendly, and then finally an African pygmy who lives largely in the rainforest and hunts elephants and lives some kind of hunter-gatherer lifestyle at least part of the year and may have a shorter life expectancy and is much shorter and have a lower weight. Those are all candidates. For our greenest man on planet Earth.

And, uh, the winner is?

Probably the African pygmy. Yeah. Actually, Ed Begley consumes a lot more fossil fuel energy than he thinks just by being here at all or by living in a house. Yeah. So I don't think the ideal of being completely green really makes any sense. Resources are here to be used in some way. They should be used responsibly. Efficiently, and we don't always do that. I think in terms of property rights and internalizing externalities is the way to go, not some kind of absolute minimization of impact on planet Earth.

Yeah, I remember an essay that James— that Edward Wilson wrote on The line I'll never forget, he said, Darwin's dice rolled badly for the Earth. What he meant by that was that we became the dominant creature of the Earth. Could have been the cockroach. Cockroach thrives, but, but not the way we do. There don't have to be 7 billion human beings. He was saying that evolution could have taken a different turn. Then the Earth would be spared parking lots and fossil fuel. Fossil fuel would just stay safely cool in the ground, not turned into gasoline and kerosene and natural gas and all the things that we do to change the climate of the Earth. And his argument was the Earth would be better off. And I always thought, how does the Earth feel about that? I don't know— the Earth to me is not a sentient creature. Creature. I've never understood that argument, but— so I'm in the human side of asking the question of what can we do? Like killing ourselves, mass suicide would have some impact presumably on the environment, but if you're not gonna go that way, it's hard to— you're stuck either becoming a pygmy or something like sitting around in our loincloths over— not over fires, we'd have to huddle together and I don't know with what. Strange image to me, strange focus perspective.

That modern agriculture can support so many billions of people, it's the single biggest breakthrough in human history. Most lives are good lives. Yeah. Even in a lot of the poorer countries.

If you think people are important. Sure. Yeah. You do have to take that step, which I do, and I think you do too. —As you say, we have to be responsible. We don't particularly want to degrade the planet or destroy the planet or whatever that might mean, make it hard for future people to enjoy the planet or even our children or grandchildren to enjoy the planet. So you take on some of the ways that people presume are good for the planet and sometimes ask whether that's true.

You have some good things to say about plastic, for For example, plastic is often more environmentally friendly than having a paper bag, for instance. Because? Because it takes less energy to make it and to dispose of it. The studies seem to show pretty clearly plastic is better for the world. Plastic can even be better than having those reusable cloth bags. If you reuse those cloth bags, say, 200 times and up, and don't lose the bag, don't have to buy a new one, don't have the bag get torn, don't misplace the bag, then the bag, the reusable cloth bag, does seem to be better. But that's hard to do, and even then you're just at the break-even point. So the environmental virtues of plastic relative to a lot of alternatives are somewhat underrated.

My county, Montgomery County, has recently put a nickel charge on plastic bags. If you want a plastic bag, you have to pay a nickel. Um, and it's been fascinating to watch what people have done in response to that. Uh, my view is I'm, I, I like to pay the nickel. I kind of enjoy paying the nickel, even if I don't like where the nickel goes, which is to fund my county's activities. I kind of like the idea that I'm not going to change my bag habit for a nickel. I, I've, there's some pride left in me. My wife's very different. My wife has cluttered the back of her car with with cloth bags and various other mechanisms. I think she usually remembers to bring them in, but I talked to the cashier. Some people forget to bring them in. Other people are— their protest is to clutch all of the groceries to their bosom and carry them out to the car and sacrifice their time loading them one by one out of the cart into the back of their car. And then when they get home, which is something akin to Costco, by the way, they don't make it easy for you to, to get the goods en masse into your car. You've got to box them up in difficult ways. But I find that it's just— it's a fascinating thing. But you're suggesting that, uh, how to use the cloth bag a great number of times. That's right.

And a more effective way to help planet Earth is just to take fewer trips to the supermarket. Buy more when you're there, save up, your car will burn less gas. You're more likely to have some beneficial impact that way than, you know, trying to clutch it all to your chest and then eventually making more trips to the store.

And you also tout the virtues of stopping on the way to someplace you're already going, which is an obvious other way to—

That's right. But we're programmed to reject plastic, to think it's corporate. The adjective plastic is negative. Right, right. Like, he has a plastic personality. Yeah. So you feel good by rejecting plastic, but it's a way in which we pursue what I call mood affiliation rather than actually trying to be effective.

What about eating local, uh, the locavore movement? Is the idea that we should eat locally grown foods and fruits, vegetables, anything, um, is quite gaining in popularity quite a bit. What's your take on that?

Local food often tastes better, as I mentioned before, but transporting food is 10 to 15% of the energy cost of food. So to think that by making a stand on eating local you're addressing the main problem, you're not. A lot of the environmental impacts, the negative ones from food, come from eating meat. A lot of local farmers aren't very efficient. They make a lot of trips in their truck. They don't have economies of scale. Imagine you live in Albuquerque. Try eating local food there and think through your local water policy, and that's an environmental disaster. So eating local food can be environmentally better, but a lot of times it's environmentally worse, and it's in any case not the biggest issue.

And you, you talk quite eloquently about the challenge of trying to parse out for every product its transportation costs. It reminds me a little bit of Hayek and his, you know, his understanding of the role of prices in steering things, except for externalities, which are not trivial in these examples. The beauty of the price system is that the price captures the cost plus a little bit more, with a little bit more as the profit margin. So in general, prices tell you which things are produced most efficiently, holding quality constant. That's right. Um, but there are these externality issues. So your suggestion is that rather than becoming expert at, um, how your shirt's produced or, or how your, uh, uh, apple's grown, uh, you're better off— you're better off buying the cheapest one, and then policy-wise we should solve that externality problem through carbon taxation.

It seems to me one of the major externalities today is from climate change, and both fossil fuels and eating of meat— basically cows farting— are areas we could to some extent remedy with a carbon tax or methane tax, as the case may be. How would we do that? A carbon tax would be applied to fossil fuels. They would become more expensive. There would be an incentive to substitute I think there's a very good chance a carbon tax would not solve the problem of climate change, but I view it this way: the way the American budget is running, we will need more revenue from some sources. So we have the choice of taxing people's entrepreneurship or taxing something at the margin which has some negative externalities. So I prefer to put the taxes on those things that have the negative externalities.

Yeah, my worry among many is that— I mean, you have some very subtle and interesting arguments for how the tax might be shaped. In general, the political system is not so good at subtlety. And I also worry— Oh, I agree. —it's just going to add on this carbon tax to everything else, not going to substitute for anything.

But just to have a string of zeros as the estimate of the externality, that's politics too. It's not exactly where we are now, but that seems wrong to me.

We do have a carbon tax though, right?

Partly. There's a tax on gasoline. Various regulations, service carbon taxes.

You talk about 6 ways to be more effective. It's on page 183 of the book. Could you talk about each of them briefly in personal things people could do if they wanted to be— have an impact instead of eschewing plastic and buying local, maybe they could do some other things. Talk about those.

Well, one of them is to just make virtuous behavior more fun. So if you want to eat better, eat greener, whatever it is you're trying to do, lecturing yourself is of limited value. It has to fit into your self-interest. Simple economics point. If there's something you like and it's environmentally dangerous, I say try eating the very best of that. It may spoil your taste for the inferior product.

'Cause it's expensive. It'll slow you down.

So say you feel guilty about foie gras, a reasonable point of view, I would think. Just have the very best foie gras once and the less you try—

Which is how much roughly, maybe?

A lot. Go to Paris, have it. You won't crave American foie gras as much. Just give up refined sugar. It will also help the environment. Give it up as much as you can. I know it's in a lot of different processed foods, but you can eat an awful lot and avoid refined sugar. It's good for you. Just limit food waste. The notion that you buy things and they decompose— that also has a problem with regard to climate change. So just be more careful there. Don't buy things you're not going to eat. Minimize the number of car trips. There's one they asked me to cut out of the book, but in many ways it's the most important one, and that is spend a lot of money educating your daughter. Why? Women who are educated are likely to have fewer children. Now you might think this is good. Or you might think this is bad. I'm not convinced it's good. As I said before, I'm happy for there to be more people. I'm just saying if you have a single-minded obsession with making the world greener, what you can do that actually works is to either have fewer children or treat your children in such a way where they will have fewer children. Interesting. So as a man who has no biological children, I actually think of myself as much, much greener than a lot of environmental advocates. This doesn't have to be a good thing, all margins considered, but again, if you're just looking at how green are you, I don't actually feel that guilty for that reason.

It's— it opens up a lot more plane trips because you don't have biological offspring that are gonna be taking plane trips. Is that the—

And if you apply a zero discount rate to environmental evaluations, or a very low discount rate, If you're having no children or fewer children, then there are no children of yours to have children and so on. And the net impact over time of having children is quite substantial.

Yeah, I don't believe you should apply zero discount rate, but that's another— that's another—

but within the framework of what's being discussed, yeah, if you're worried about the very distant future as being something very real, again, I'm not saying one should do that,. But if you want to start with effectiveness, go there.

Interesting. Um, let's— big shift of gears. Okay, so that, that was fun, and I, I'd be interested in, uh, did you have to put up a fight? Did you try to put up a fight for that one?

No, I think my editor was right that it would have been viewed as a distraction. Yeah. And people would have read it in a variety of different ways that I didn't intend, like thinking that I'm blaming them for having kids or that they're wrong to want kids and It's not at all my view. I have long been, you know, pro-population, agreeing with Julian Simon and so on. But if you're just going to obsess over green cost, start there. Yeah.

So to shift gears, you give some advice on cookbooks and just some interesting things to say about cookbooks generally. I'm a big fan of cookbooks. I have a lot. And you point out many people who buy cookbooks don't use them. So I have a handful that I use, and I have, I don't know, 4 or 5 handfuls I never look at more than 1 or 2 times. What's your advice on cookbook purchases and consumption and why?

Like so much in life, especially with books, it's common we buy books for their symbolic values, including cookbooks, as a kind of memorial for having visited a restaurant or thought about a particular cuisine or gone on a trip. If you want it for that reason, fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking it's about the food. For most people, you should have, say, a half dozen cookbooks that you know quite well, and they present cooking in a conceptual manner, and you use the book to learn how to think about food. That a cookbook should be more like an economics book, actually, explaining how things work and how things fit together. And then you'll be able to create your own recipes with much greater facility. And some of your favorites are? Diane Kennedy's books are very good. Rick Bayless's books are very good. Fuchsia Dunlop, her books on Sichuan and Hunan cooking, they're fantastic. Again, those are relative to my taste, but I can vouch, objectively speaking, they are conceptual cookbooks that try to teach you how to think about the food.

I like what you had to say about cookbooks from famous restaurants and authors. I know you just mentioned earlier that you might be fooling yourself, but there's a particular aspect to it that you were critical of.

You can't duplicate the recipes and you can't get on a learning curve. And that's the goal, I think. That's right. 37 different things to do. The first time you try, you won't get it right, which is okay, but then there's no trial and error. Like, which one of the 37 did I get wrong? When there's a simpler, more conceptual recipe, you may screw it up, but then you know how to improve. And getting on that dynamic learning curve is a very economics idea.

I can't remember which cookbook it is that I have, or that I looked at, that had this characteristic, but it was similar to that. There were always very complicated things to do, and things would inevitably go wrong the first time, certainly, maybe every time for a long time. And I remember the step, the first step of the recipe was build a brazier. And I thought, trouble. I don't know what a brazier is exactly. I think it's maybe a hole in the ground with fire. But I mean, you know, it's not going to turn out well, this recipe. Close the book, turn the page, boop, just find something simpler.

And it has to do with our theory of how market competition works. In a Hayekian way, it's about local competition over particular margins, trial and error, and learning. That's how competition works. Not that two totally different firms doing 4,000 different things somehow slug it out in this big arena, and then at the end of it all, someone is left standing. There are small, gradual improvements based on learning, seeing what works, what doesn't.

You're saying— I don't understand the role of how competition entered into this cookbook discussion.

If you think about how market competition works, it's that you have people competing, doing relatively similar things, but with some variation on the margin. And there's something a bit akin to controlled experimentation and the ability to evaluate and compare rather than en masse evaluating one big thing with all its processes against another big thing.

So you're saying that the best strategy for improving your cooking, your home cooking, is to—

Take a lesson from Hayek on how market competition works.

Local trial and error. Yeah, and get a little bit better. That's right. And hope you're moving in a good direction. Do you watch cooking shows?

Usually I don't have time, so no. When I do turn them on, which I do periodically out of a sense of duty, I end up frustrated almost immediately. Because? They're not informationally dense enough for me. There's endless shots of things being put into pans and mixed around and chopped up, and they feel to me like a kind of drug administered to people to keep them in like a stupor.

I don't know. Why, why do you say that? The stupor part, the drug part. What, what, what's the— you think the educational component is so small?

There's variation in quality, but I think people turn on the TV for a few reasons. They turn it on to relax and they turn it on to have something to talk about with the person they're with, which is fine. But again, that means in some ways TV is not a great medium for food. Some of the cooking shows with competitions, even though you can't taste the food, I find those much more useful than the cooking shows. So something like Top Chef, where people dissect the food, I find that somewhat useful.

Yeah, to me, as someone who used to do a lot of fly fishing, it reminds me of— and I watch them cook. I don't have cable, which greatly limits my food—

It's like a TV diet. You watch less TV.

Exactly. That's why I do it. And I want my kids to watch less TV, so I don't have cable, but I do have regular TV. And with our current regular TV package, which has like 8 channels, uh, one of the channels is a PBS food channel. So I get Jacques Pépin and Julia Child, which is reruns of this glorious entertaining show where they banter back and forth in their peculiar personalities. And it's that I enjoy just for itself. Um, but I do watch occasionally, and to me it reminds me of, and cookbooks as well remind me of fly fishing. So fly fishing is something that you do sometimes. It's an expensive habit. It has a lot of technique. It has a lot of, uh, equipment, like cooking. And, uh, when I'm not doing the actual act of fly fishing, the two closest things is to watch someone else fly fish on TV in a place I'll never go, which again is very akin to the cooking show. I'm not going to use make some of these dishes, or to read about it. So cookbooks, uh, of course, cookbooks are more than just collections of recipes, as you point out in the book. There's tales and stories and childhood memories. And I think people who like food— and I think you're maybe an exception— people like consuming those either with their food, alongside their food, or when they're not cooking, or when they're not eating. So if you're not fly fishing, you read about fly fishing, you leaf through the catalogs of the waders that you might get next year or the fly you might acquire. And similarly, there's this incredible— I think for foodies, I think there's this obsession with equipment. And I don't know if you ever watch America's Test Kitchen, but they have a whole segment every show where they go through what's the best mandolin or the best grill top this or the best whatever. The best cheap knife, the— that doesn't appeal to you? Not that much.

I think I really am an exception, and I deliberately wrote this book to, in a kind of bracing way, give people an alternative perspective on how to process information about the world of food through a more analytic lens.

And you eat out a lot. How much time do you spend cooking at home? You cooking, because I know you cook a lot.

Uh, my wife doesn't cook much. If I'm not traveling, the chance that I'm cooking at home is 60%. It's just that I'm traveling, traveling a lot, and then it's hard to cook. So I enjoy cooking. Uh, I like to read cookbooks if they're good, and I like to go shopping for food ingredients. Uh, time is the constraint. Yeah, of course. Time at home.

The shopping for the food ingredients is a little like tying the flies, you know? That's right.

That's my version of that.

You're, There's an emotional, interesting intellectual mix of anticipation and—

yeah. And I feel like I'm getting something done, but maybe I'm just postponing getting things done. Yeah, no. And it's my way of achieving some balance.

Yeah, it's a very high-quality form of procrastination. That's right. Yeah, you can delude yourself into thinking you're making progress sometimes when you're doing those activities. Is there— you mentioned Mexican cuisine. Is that the dominant cuisine of your home cooking?

Indian, Mexican, Chinese, almost all ethnic, and just simple dishes like fish with lemon and sea salt, lentils. I think you said you have 4 woks.

Is that correct? That puts you above the median.

One of them went bad, so I guess now it's down to 3. What happened to it? Uh, just too much use. It's still there, but I'm not sure I would use it. It feels past its best days. Probably needs an overhaul.

Probably salvageable. Why do you have 4 woks?

Sometimes you need woks to store things. They're great for storage. Sometimes you need 2 of them on the stove at once. If one's being used for storage and 2 of them are on the stove at once, and then you need a backup just in case one of those goes bad, you need 4. They don't cost that much. Do you have a big stove? Uh, not big enough.

Some stoves are hard to put 2 woks on at the same time.

We can manage, but it's not that easy.

Have you been tempted to redo your kitchen and go, I don't know, we're super industrial?

And I've been tempted, but ultimately I believe it is definitely a distraction.

It's a form of consumption.

Yeah, I have no fetish for equipment at all. Totally practical perspective on equipment. The joy I get from it, like a really good sharp knife, it's there, but I view it as an expense, not a joy of purchase.

Anything closing you want to say about, um, what you might suggest people do more to get into the kitchen or out of the kitchen into better food? Any closing inspiration?

Well, in general, I would say this, again, going back to the linkage between food and economics, the notion that economists should at the micro level become extreme anthropologists about something— doesn't have to be food— I'm a big advocate of. If you make it food, one nice thing about that is it ties in with the rest of your life. You have to eat. There's some kind of economy of scope there. It helps you bridge cultures. There's a production angle, there's a consumption angle, there's a mass media angle, there's a literary angle. Of course, there's an economics angle, and you get all of those things at once. So I would recommend it to more people.

And then after that, maybe a book on sleep or something else. My guest today has been Tyler Cowen. Tyler, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Thank you, Russ. This is EconTalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more EconTalk, go to econtalk.org where you can also comment on today's podcast, and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for EconTalk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.