E246: New Book: Learning food economics makes ALL economics easier

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I’m Norbert Wilson, a professor of public policy at Duke university and director of the world food policy center. Now, I am an agricultural economist by training and today’s podcast, we will explore a creative and down-to-earth book titled Food Economics. Now stay with me, gentle listener. I already can sense the wave of anxiety, math anxiety, and discomfort with economics. but hear me out. To make the food system work for everyone, we must understand the economics of food, agricultural production, business decisions, consumer behavior, and of course, government policies. Tufts University Professor, economist William Masters, and Allegheny College economist and nutritionist Amelia Finaret, developed a wonderfully engaging textbook that is friendly for readers and learners who do not love math or who have a complicated relationship with economics.

Interview Summary

So let’s start at the very beginning. Why did you write this book?

Will: Well, I’ll start. I love the subject. And I love the opportunity to work with Amelia on something. And we talked about taking the course that she was a Teaching Assistant for and making it into a textbook. And finally being able to do it has been revelatory. I’ve learned a lot, learned a lot from Amelia, learned a lot from the process of writing. The motivation really is because the topic is so compelling. As you said, food economics is crucial to whether people can afford to and do have the material requisites of wellbeing, as the original definition of economics put it. And so, food is this really distinctive, strange thing that’s, as I say, often hidden in plain sight. It’s something that many economists want to teach about, but don’t really know much about. And many people who work in food without economics would like to use some economics. So, putting the two together has been definitely a situation where two plus two is more than four. Putting the two together is something new and different.

Amelia: I think also that food is a very special type of good. And so, when we’re talking about economics we talk a lot about goods and services. And food is a special type of good in that you have to have it to live. And we also really found during the process of writing the book, as Will talked about, more and more examples that many of the fundamental lessons of economics can be learned with examples from the food system. So, we think that using a topic like food, which really resonates with a lot of our students, is a great way to teach econ and it can get them more excited than learning about widgets.

I am really intrigued by this, and I want to pick up on this idea that food is special and that is something I think is a critical part of what you all are doing. But I also heard something new in this idea of using food as a pathway into economics. So, as you know, folks react really strongly to economics because of math or a disdain for capitalism or other issues. Why do you want people to understand the economics of food?

Amelia: So food is something that all of us make choices about multiple times a day. And there’s very few other things, maybe about our time management overall, that we make choices about so frequently. But food is one of those things that we make choices about multiple times every day, all of us. And that’s whether it’s about producing the food, doing something else to the food or consuming the food. And economics fundamentally is about understanding and analyzing those choices and those behaviors. So, people, of course, are going to be confused sometimes about how to make those choices. And that’s one of the biggest and most important discussions in public health: how do we encourage folks to make better food choices? People are also just very confused because there’s so much different information floating around. So, what we wanted to do is to provide an economics perspective of food choice because economics is really great at analyzing choices. And this, of course, helps people connect what’s something that’s personal to them, which is making those kind of frequent food decisions. Even if they’re not thinking about it, they really are thinking like an economist frequently about food multiple times every day. And then connecting it to this discipline of economics to understand the formal logic of how we analyze those choices.

Will: And I would add the opportunity that we’ve had in teaching economics to people who didn’t like economics, chose not to do it, and wanted to do public health nutrition instead. For me, at Tufts in the Friedman School, and also with students from agriculture – I taught previously at Purdue students who didn’t like economics because they wanted to work in agriculture – I really want to demystify a lot of what became a kind of high jargon of fancy language. For example, in economics, people would speak of an individual “optimizing.” And we just don’t say that. Instead what we say is people are doing the best they can with what they have, and often it’s the least bad of their options. Similarly, economists talk about an equilibrium, but it’s not a “nice” thing. It’s just a prediction of a model of an explanation. So, much of our task here, I think, is to demystify economics for students, but also to help economists find a better language because economists use that off putting technical jargon way too much to talk to each other. And that really harms our ability to communicate with people who, as you said, might have a disdain for the outcome, for example. They don’t like the way capitalism is turning out and they want the vocabulary to change it. And we hope the book can provide that.

I really appreciate this. Picking up particularly on Amelia’s comment, I remember as a student at the University of Georgia, I had an amazing intro to agricultural economics teacher. His name is Joseph Broder. And he got me excited about this idea of how people make choices. And we were talking about it in the food and Ag space, and I just started to see that happen everywhere. I realized that this was a powerful tool to help me understand the choices that people were making and the choices that maybe they wanted to make but couldn’t because they were facing different constraints. So, I really appreciate this effort of what you all are trying to do in this text. That raises the question of who do you really want to read this text? I mean, who was your target audience and why those individuals?

Will: So, the number one audience is instructors, to make it easy for them to teach this material. Someone who comes from economics, works on some other topic, can teach a course in food economics just by picking up the book. A student who is assigned the book can get an explanation that is perhaps richer in detail with more examples. And then we also provide a lot of data analysis in the book that a student can read on their own. But I honestly believe that quite a few general readers can find it attractive to just pick it up and flip through it. When I wanted to learn about general nutrition, just vitamins, minerals, reading a nutrition textbook was actually great. And I hope that this textbook is something that people can just pick up and flip through. You can, because it’s open access, you can just search for a word in the book, and you can flip around and see what catches your eye. And I hope people find that experience interesting and enlightening and useful.

Amelia: And I think the book could be used by students, undergraduate and graduate students, and their instructors for all different kinds of courses that intersect with the food system. So, not just straight up economics courses, but also courses on the food system, maybe even on sustainable agriculture, on public health nutrition. And I think that, you know, for those courses, certain chapters could be selected and used in a course. So, we hope that people can use it really as flexibly as they want. Yeah, and then we also think that for economists who never learned about the food system, that it might benefit them as well, because we really do give a complete picture of what the food system is, what it looks like with all kinds of data. And they maybe haven’t thought about, you know, economists know econ, of course, but they maybe haven’t thought about the food system and how it’s kind of a unique sector. And this I think would help them really to formalize that for themselves too.

This is helpful. I’m going to bring up a different group of people who I think could be interested in this text. How do you see someone going into a department or ministry of agriculture or food or development agency, seeing policy differently based on the work of this text?

Amelia: In terms of the policy aspects of the book, the material in each chapter can intersect with different types of food policies. So, for anyone who works at a ministry of health or a ministry of agriculture who’s developing food policy, they might use the book to see, “okay, well, what am I going to be able to tell qualitatively? What will happen if this policy is implemented?” Of course, if they want to understand something about quantitative change, they would need to gather data and do some statistics and econometrics. But if they want to make a sketch of “okay, well, if I implement this policy, here’s what I can expect qualitatively to happen to prices and quantities and imports and exports.” They can definitely do that using the material from this book. I think that it might also help because it spans everything from production to consumption and health, it will allow policymakers to really see those connections between those aspects of the food system. So not just consumers, and not even just consumers and farmers, but also thinking about input markets and food manufacturing and processing, as well as retail. I think that it gives that kind of that whole picture of the food system, which could be really helpful to those policy makers.

Will: Another aspect of ‘whole picture’ thinking that we tried to instill in the second half of the book is just showing a lot of data. And in particular, zooming way out so that we show all of the data. We believe, I think with pretty good evidence, that when people choose a case study, choose a narrative, choose an example, there’s a lot of selection effect there. And when you zoom way out, as we do in the second half of the book to show scatter plots and line graphs, I think policy makers will see whatever decision they’re making in that quantitative context. They’ll get the qualitative insight that Amelia just described, plus the overall context. And that will really guide decisions, we hope, towards a more mindful and well-informed kinds of choices.

Now, that’s I think really powerful. And there’s something else that’s unique about this text is, you mention it, it’s open access. And so that’s really different for a textbook. And because it’s open access, that means it’s free for everyone. So as an economist, I have to ask, what does that mean? How do you make it free for everyone? So why did you choose that approach? And then this book also does something else a little differently. It doesn’t use extensive citations or footnotes and references. What was your thinking in that approach?

Will: Great question. I’ll talk about the open access and Amelia can talk about the structure and the tone, the voice. Open access was an opportunity that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided because of their support for the Agriculture Nutrition Health Academy that I’ve been privileged to be a founder of, to create a community of researchers. The Gates Foundation does support open access fees that are quite high. For this book, it’s $20,000, but the grant was willing to pay that. The total royalties that Amelia and I might’ve earned is very small compared to the effort in writing the book. And so, we really wanted to take advantage of that grant to have people be able to just click on the link and read the book. It takes all the delay and the challenge and the difficulty our and makes access seamless as well as free. So, it’s not just low cost, but also low time transaction difficulty. You can put it on any device and refresh. You know pick it up on your phone, pick it up on any laptop at any time. And that makes a big difference, we hope.

Amelia: Yes, the lower the barriers are for students to read the better for sure. And in terms of the structure of the book and having kind of the sprinkling of sources within the narrative text, what we really wanted was to create kind of a just a seamless narrative. So, we didn’t want readers to have to flip to the end to see about where the sources were. But we kind of describe key thinkers, key economists, and also experts in other fields whose work has really influenced economics within the narrative text. And so, we feel that this kind of helps it flow better. And we also put all the data citations right next to the figure so that you can click out to that source and see the data yourself when the data are updated. You know, students and readers could make their own charts with that same data. So, for the data visualizations, all the citations are right there, ready to go. And then for anything else that you might include normally as a reference, it’s all woven into the narrative. We also have a handbook chapter that has more than 300 citations for the health side of the literature. So people can use that if they want a guide to published papers that are individual studies.

Great. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity and really a unique way of contributing to both the educational component, but also sort of this idea of outreach of what university professors do. So it sounds almost like more of a public service than I would think we would normally look at a textbook. I gotta ask this question, because you start and you end with a poem about kiwis. Not the small animal or the people from New Zealand, but little furry fruit. So why do you do this? What are you trying to tell us through this poem?

Amelia: I mean, I think first is just to demonstrate that economics can be really fun. And also that the food system can be kind of confusing. Right? And that’s right in the title of the poem. Why are kiwis so cheap? This was Will’s poem. I’m going to let him talk about other reasons why you wanted to put it at the beginning and then at the end.

Will: Yeah, the question came from a journalist asking why are Kiwis so cheap because they come from the other side of the world, right? And when I first got the question, I thought it was a kind of a silly question. And I didn’t want to answer pedantically. And I had just written a sort of doggerel poem for my brother’s birthday. I had like doggerel poetry on the brain and I was thought – I could just write a fun little poem. So, there you go.