(A) Experts and the Food Police
Men convinced of their sagacity have always presumed to know what types of foods other people should eat. Pythagorus (570 - 495 BC)—credited with inventing the Pythagorean theorem you surely learned in high school—had his own school of philosophy / religion. He insisted that his students never eat meat, or, for reasons no one understand, beans.(S2)
...to eat beans is a crime equal to eating the heads of one's parents.
—Remark made by a member of the Pythagorean sect.
to eat the bean is to devour human flesh, to behave like a wild beast, to condemn oneself to a type of
life that stands in extreme opposition to the Golden Age.
—Detienne, summaring the Pythagorean philosophy of eating
Today, we know that beans are among the most safe, inexpensive, and nutritious foods. With the hindsight of the our age, Pythagorus' eating regime seems ridiculous.
One of the most famous philosophers in ancient Rome was Musonius Rufus (1st century AD), and he recommended that people eat the same food as slaves. His reasoning was that slaves appeared to be the most robust and healthy men throughout the empire, so surely their food must be superior. This food would be largely vegetarian and sourced from the cheapest ingredients—which would have been the type of gruel made famous in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. What Musonius did not recognize what that the hard life of a slave would have quickly killed all but the strongest. Slaves always appeared healthier than Roman senators because the weaker slaves would die quickly from neglect, whereas sickly children of Roman Senators would be nursed and pampered.(R1)
So the wisest of people often presume to know what others should eat, but they are often wrong, and this is true even in our scientific age. This doesn't mean that scientists today cannot lend us good eating advice. Surely, the recommendation to pasteurize milk before drinking it, and the warning to cook meat thoroughly has saved many lives. The recommendation by nutritionists today to eat more fruits and vegetables, if followed, would probably improve public health. However, even today much of the advice given to us by scientists, food authors, and other leaders have little scientific basis. We have been told that being overweight detracts from our health, yet studies find that, unless one is very obese, being overweight can actually increase your lifespan.(E1) For decades we have been told to keep our salt intake less than 2,300 mg per day, but the Institute of Medicine recently announced that this recommendation has no scientific evidence.(S3) Of course, unfounded warnings about salt are nothing new. The inventor of graham crackers (Sylvester Graham (1794-1851)) was a crusader against masturbation, and his suggestions to resist the urge included denying oneself of salted meats.(O1)
Although many experts are often over-confident in what they actually know, who else are we to turn to for good eating advice? Surely there are some honest experts who have something to teach us, but how do we know which experts to listen to and which to ignore?
In the past this was largely a personal judgment, but now that the government considers one of its functions to be encouraging healthy eating, this is a matter of public concern. Pythagorus and Rufus had to convince people to adopt their diet. The experts of today want to force (or as we will see, "nudge") their preferred diet upon us through government programs. Such experts are referred to by agricultural economist Jayson Lusk as the "food police", but most economists would call them paternalists, as they seek to make decisions for the less informed in the same way that a parent decides for their child. Paternalists include NY mayor Michael Bloomberg, who wants to ban sodas larger than 16 ounces (a ban parodied in the Parks and Recreation clip below) , and Robert Lustig, who wants sugar to be deemed as harmful as tobacco.
If the food paternalists know what they are talking about perhaps they will help us eat healthier, but if they do not, they are a nuisance and may actually detract from public health.
Video 1—The Food Police on Parks and Recreation (September 27, 2012)
(B) Food Paternalism
In a free democracy, we imagine that firms should be able to sell whatever foods they like, and consumers should have freedom to purchase what they like. As long as the exchange is voluntary and doesn't impact other people (for example, assuming the food manufacturer doesn't pollute surface waters), it is no one else's business what you eat.
At the same time, democracies regularly pass laws restricting what people eat. It often seems that people make choices that are not in their long-run best interest. People eat foods believed to cause health problems in the future. Smoking causes long cancer and sugar causes obesity. Do those people making what seems to be foolish choices really know what they are doing, or do they want the help of the government in deciding what to eat? Should a democratic government take an active role in influencing eating habits? Below are three thoughts on this question (1) paternalism (2) libertarian paternalism and (3) libertarianism. While they are placed in the context of food, these are really issues about the role of government in general.
Before proceeding, I want to emphasize one essential fact. The idea of paternalism has nothing to do with preventing a person from hurting others. It is concerned with preventing people from hurting themselves. Whether you approve of paternalism then depends on whether you think a government, and their tribe of experts / elitists, can make better decisions for a person than the person themselves. It also should be noted that we are talking about adults only. Most everyone agrees that parents should be paternalists in regards to their children.
(B.1) Paternalism—when government, informed by elitists/experts, design regulations with the goal of forcing people to choose certain foods, usually by taxing, regulating, or banning certain foods.
Let's meet the quintessential food paternalist, Robert Lustig, who is trying to use the courtroom to regulate sugar like we regulate tobacco, using the argument that it is addictive like tobacco.
Figure 1—Meet the Food Paternalist, Robert Lustig
Lustig believes that our bodies react to some types of calories differently than others. Specifically he believes that sugar calories alter our biochemistry to make us hungry and lazy in ways that fat and protein calories do not. As a result, he says, the ubiquity of sugar in the Western diet is making Americans sick, obese, and bankrupt.
But Lustig does not stick to explaining his reasoning and raising public-health awareness. “Education has not worked. Labeling has not worked. And they’re not going to work,” he told me in his characteristically emphatic way. “Education hasn’t worked for any addictive substance.” According to Lustig, we need to accept that America’s obesity problem can’t be fixed by a Puritan resolution by each individual to eat fewer calories. To fix America’s obesity problem, we need a regulatory framework for selling and serving less sugar-laden food.
Out in the hall he said, “If we keep thinking about obesity in terms of personal responsibility, we’re not going to work our way out of it.”
...
That’s why Lustig is going to law school.
In many ways, Lustig seems better suited to the bluster of the courtroom than the fastidiousness of the lab. His talks and his book are extensions of the truth. (As he writes in Fat Chance, obesity-related “diseases are eating away our health care dollars faster than we can print the money to pay for them.”) He hasn’t done much original research on this topic, which drives his endocrinology colleagues crazy. His sloppy errors leave experts wanting to, as one told me, “stick knitting needles” in their eyes.
For the past six months Lustig has been working with the San Francisco Office of the City Attorney, considering possible mislabeling actions against various food products, kicking the legal tires on failure-to-warn claims. The great white hope—Lustig’s dream—is that sugar policy and litigation will follow the path of tobacco. For many years that path included abject failure. First lawyers tried bringing suits for product liability on behalf of sick individuals. That didn’t work. (Too hard to show cancer was from cigarettes alone.) Then they tried failure-to-warn claims. That didn’t work either. (Manufacturers argued that smokers assumed liability when they lit up.) What finally worked were lawsuits by states arguing that cigarette manufacturers were triggering huge public health costs.
The suits against Big Food have largely been stalled at the failure stage. In 2009 a federal court in California tossed out a case accusing PepsiCo of false advertising, that Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal contains no real fruit. (The judge’s ruling: you’d have to be an idiot to ever think the cereal “contained a fruit that does not exist.”)
But recently lawyers—including Don Barrett and others who landed huge settlements from R. J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris in that successful third wave of tobacco litigation—have been taking a different tack. They’re not suing big manufacturers for making people sick or alleging that junk food is healthy. They’re nailing producers for not following the rules.
—Weil, Elizabeth. March/April 2013. "Is Sugar the Next Tobacco?" Pacific Standard.
Paternalism just sounds bad, doesn't it? And doesn't Lustig sound a little to dramatic, or perhaps someone looking to make money by suing food manufacturers?
But there are settings when paternalists can go much good. Our society supports institutes of health and medicine, and helps particularly bright people become doctors and scientists, so that they can discover ways to improve public health and pass this information down to the citizens.
How does this information actually get passed down to the people? The ordinary American is too busy to read the New England Journal of Medicine, and many do not read the whole newspaper on a daily business. Instead, we delegate great responsibilities to governments to take scientific discoveries and use them to establish enlightened public policies. When the feeding of rendered sheep carcasses to cattle started producing cases of Mad Cow disease, the ordinary American did not want to research the issue themselves. They looked to government to pass the necessary measured to protect them from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (what Mad Cow disease is called when it infects humans). Likewise, we don't want to investigate ourselves whether the rice we buy contains high levels of arsenic; most of us want the Food and Drug Administration to do the testing for us and to prevent rice with alarming arsenic levels from reaching the grocery stores.
When the most famous doctor in the world, Dr. Oz, announced on the Oprah Winfrey Show that Americans need to consume more fiber, he was probably right. If we listened to him most of us would have better health. Notice though that Oz did not ask the government to force us to consume more fiber, and there is a big difference between a recommendation and a command.
Because many people do not read the news, government force is a way to communicate important dietary information. When the government forbids you from driving faster than 75 mph on an interstate, that also communicates that driving faster than 75 mph is unsafe. When government forbids restaurants from serving raw ground beef (in the Chech Republic restaurants can actually do this, though the customer must sign a waiver first) that is another way of communicating the dangers of raw beef, and probably shouldn't do so at home either. However ludicrous Bloomberg's soda ban might seem, it generated so much controversy that some people for the first time realized that sodas are very high in calories.
Lately a number of experts have sought a middle-path, where they try to force us to eat better foods while making it apppear that we ourselves made the choice voluntarily. They refer to themselves as Libertarian-Paternalists, meaning they attempt to "nudge" us, not shove us, around.
(B.2) Libertarian-Paternalism—when government, informed by elitists/experts, use behavioral economics to "frame" choices such that people still have freedom of choice, but are more likely to choose foods experts / elitists believe is best for their them and society at-large.
Behavioral economics is the intersection of economics and psychology. These "framing" activities include taxing fatty foods, requiring information like calorie content to be posted in menus, banning certain sizes of foods (think Bloomberg's ban on sodas larger than 16 ounces), being clever about how choices are expressed in words, and deliberately altering the manner in which choices are presented, to name a few.
Video 2—Nudging You Until You Behave Correctly (The Colbert Report)
Libertarian-paternalism is the big fad right now. Many people have been convinced that clever psychological tricks can trick people to behaving a certain way while still preserving the appearance of consumer freedom. Much of its popularity can be attributed to the book Nudge, a book so popular it inspiring a new agency in the United Kingdom's government! The agency is referred to as the "Nudge Unit", but is formally called the Behavioural Insights Team. In 2013 President Obama announced he would also create a "nudge squad" to shape behavior in ways Obama and his experts deem desirable. Their expressed goal is to, "find innovative ways of encouraging, enabling and supporting people to make better choices for themselves." Notice they use the words "encourage", "enable", and "support", suggesting they do not force anyone to do anything.
Figure 2—The book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and
Happiness
(From page 157) Libertarian paternalists see countless opportunities for improving people’s health. Social influences could obviously be enlisted: if most people think that most people are starting to avoid unhealthy foods, or to exercise, more people will avoid unhealthy foods and will exercise. As we have seen, people who know obese people are more likely to be obese themselves; weight loss can be contagious too. Framing matters: people are more likely to engage in self-examinations for skin and breast cancer if they are told not about the reduced risk if they do so but about the increased risk if they fail to do so. Doctors are crucial choice architects, and with an understanding of how
humans think, they could do far more to improve people’s health and thus to lengthen their lives.
...
(From page 1) A friend of yours, Carolyn, is the director of food services for a large city school system. She is in charge of hundreds of schools, and hundreds of thousands of kids eat in her cafeterias every day. Carolyn has formal training in nutrition (a master’s degree from the state university), and she is a creative type who likes to think about things in nontraditional ways.
One evening, over a good bottle of wine, she and her friend Adam, a statistically oriented management consultant who has worked with supermarket chains, hatched an interesting idea. Without changing any menus, they would run some experiments in her schools to determine whether the way the food is displayed and arranged might influence the choices kids make. Carolyn gave the directors of dozens of school cafeterias specific instructions on how to display the food choices. In some schools the desserts were placed first, in others last, in still others in a separate line. The location of various food items was varied from one school to another. In some schools the French fries, but in others the carrot sticks, were at eye level.
From his experience in designing supermarket floor plans, Adam suspected that the results would be dramatic. He was right. Simply by rearranging the cafeteria, Carolyn was able to increase or decrease the consumption of many food items by as much as 25 percent. Carolyn learned a big lesson: school children, like adults, can be greatly influenced by small changes in the context. The influence can be exercised for better or for worse. For example, Carolyn knows that she can increase consumption of healthy foods and decrease consumption of unhealthy ones.
—Sunstein, Cass R., Richard H. Thaler. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Pages 157
and 1, respectively. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT.
Libertarian-paternalism can be effective at changing what people consider to be "normal", which in psychology is referred to as framing. If Bloomberg's ban on sodas more than 16 ounces went into effect people could still buy two twelve-ounce drinks, so the ban would not have changed people's ability to drink more than 16 ounces of soda at a time. However, there seems something excessive about buying two separate sodas, and if the ban is enacted, over time, 12 or even 8 ounce sodas might become the "new normal". If that is the case people may then desire only 8 ounce sodas, and consuming less calories, they might lose weight.
The best illustration of changing the new-normal can be seen with seatbelt laws and smoking bans. Both were derided as excessive paternalism at the time—a case of government encroaching on too many freedoms. Now, however, most people seem grateful of the smoking ban, and using seatbelts has become such a habit we put them on without even thinking. What seems like government force now can become a voluntary choice later.
Video 3—Discussion of Paternalism on Real Time With Bill Maher
(B.3) Libertarianism—when consumers are given the freedom to choose whatever they like, without the direct or indirect control of experts, and when businesses are given the freedom to frame choices however they like.
Figure 3—Food Police by Jayson Lusk (ag economist at OK State)
The Department of Agricultural Economics is fortunate to have the world's most famous libertarian in the area of food—Dr. Jayson Lusk (who is one of my best friends, by the way). His book criticizing paternalism in all its forms, Food Police, has received worldwide acclaim and has made Lusk perhaps the most famous living agricultural economist. To promote his book and articulate his thoughts he appeared on the Stossel show on March 7, 2013. This appearance is shown in Video 4, below. Not only does Lusk place a high value on consumer freedom, but he believes many of the good-intentioned policies intended to promote health either have no effect or detract from health—but I'll let Lusk defend his views in the video. Students who find Lusk's work interesting may want to subscribe to his blog.
Video 4—Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at OK State, appears
on Stossel to talk about the food police(S1)
Libertarians obviously place a very high value on consumer freedom, but when you listen to Dr. Lusk make his arguments it is clear that he is also skeptical whether experts really know as much as they claim, and skeptical of whether experts can control people as precisely as they believe. He mentions in the video that calorie counts do not change consumer behavior and fat taxes can actually harm consumers. When it comes to Bloomberg's ban, Lusk also cites a study showing that the ban could actually increase soda consumption (as people are prohibited from buying sodas larger than 16 ounces, they may instead buy two 16 ounce sodas and consume more than before the ban).
For Lusk and other Libertarians, the three main reasons government should play only a minor role in influencing eating behavior are
- respect for individual freedom,
- skepticism regarding whether experts really know as much as they claim, and
- the eagerness in which governments will craft policies that have no scientific basis.
Video 5—Food paternalism debate on sitcom Workaholics
Parting thoughts...
In reality, we are all food paternalists some of the time. No one thinks adulterated food should be legal, and we applaud government's role in preventing the spread of Mad-Cow disease by restricting what cattle should be fed. We are all libertarian-paternalists at times, in that we want people to have the freedom to buy cigarettes, but we like to discourage smoking by taxing it. Much of the time we are libertarians, in that we generally believe McDonalds should be allowed to sell us fatty french fries, if that is what we want.
The question isn't whether (1) paternalism (2) libertarian-paternalism (3) or libertarianism is superior. What we should really ask is, in which settings are each of the three philosophies best? An effective democratic government should be flexible, and we are fortunate to have three competing philosophies to choose from.
References
(E1) Engber, Daniel. May/June 2013. "Pound Foolish." Pacific Standard. Pages 14-15.
(O1) Ogle, Mareen. 2013. In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: NY, NY.
(R1) Rufus, Musonius (30 – 100 AD). Musonius Rufus: Lectures and Sayings. Translated by Cynthia King in 2011. Self-published at CreateSpace and available at Amazon.
(S1) Stossel [television show]. March 7, 2013. “Myths, Lies, and Complete Stupidity.” John Stossel [host]. Fox Business News.
(S2) Spencer, Colin. 2000. Vegetarianism: A History. Four Walls Eight Windows: NY, NY.
(S3) Smith, Rod. May 20, 2013. "IOM questions soidum goal." Feedstuffs. Page 3.
