David Zetland has an interesting take on that 40% of American food is wasted paper.
[I]t seems possible to switch all production to organics:
- We can have enough, even with 40 percent lower yields.
- Higher prices would reduce demand for food, and thus obesity. (They may cause people to switch to cheaper foods, but those tend to be better for you — rice vs meat — if you ignore the idea that steakhouse diners will switch to McDs.)
Of course, this will not happen through regulation or a wholesale change in people’s demand for food. It could happen if water or carbon use was taxed: that waste uses 25 percent of fresh water and 300 million bbl oil; that’s not even counting methane resulting from rot.
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There soon may be a lobby for healthier eating. Pollan argued in a recent editorial that big insurance will fight for better food policy when the see how it affects their bottom line. Perhaps they will be more successful than other less powerful lobbying groups. I’m not so sure that demand would change that much, even if unhealthy food was made more expensive. More at Biofortified in High Health Care Costs Lead to Healthier Eating?.
Well, except rice ISN’T more nutritious than meat. If people want healthy foods (e.g. produce) to be inexpensive, the ag subsidies will need to be flipped around.
David did not say rice was more nutritious than meat. He said rice was better for you than meat.
As for flipping ag subsidies around, wouldn’t it make more sense to both abolish the subsidies completely and factor as many of the externalities as possible into the cost of food?
I’m no ag economist, but I’m inclined to only manipulate markets where we really understand the implications. How would you incorporate externalities into the cost of food? like carbon taxes?
I’m no ag economist either, but it seems to me that if, say, a carbon tax were applied to transportation fuel, then the price of any goods, including farm goods, that had to be transported would shift to reflect the cost of transportation. That would internalize one externality pretty effectively, and people might discover that carrots trucked across the country in giant but efficient truck trailers are still cheaper than those brought from a few miles away in an inefficient pickup. Who knows? (An ag economist, presumably.)
Other costs, such as downstream pollution from feedlots or intensively sprayed field crops might be harder to tax, but not impossible.
If you want your food choices to benefit the environment, especially in North America, the single biggest change you can make is to give up red meat one day a week. That suggests that the costs are actually well known, and that transportation and greenhouse gas emissions are among the most important of those externalities.