Yummr

Date: 10/29/2008 4:01 PM
Subject: Controversial Restaurant Opening Near Campus

I've just been told that a restaurant called the Heart Attack Grill is going to be opening near campus. Their slogan is "Taste Worth Dying For!"
Anyone who finishes the Triple Bypass Burger gets pushed out to their car in a wheelchair by the Naughty Nurse waitresses.
I read an article saying that the Quadruple Bypass Burger has 8,000 calories. Isn't America fat enough already?? Hopefully someone on the faculty can help keep this idiocy away from our campus.

-X

Dear X:

I care a lot more about losing our liberties than I do about our bulging waistlines. Americans should be free to eat 8000 calorie burgers and ogle all the naughty nurses they wish, and busybodies like you have no right to tell them otherwise.

Please do not solicit me again with such nonsense.

Bob Lawson

Congratulations to Paul Krugman on winning this year's Nobel Prize in Economics.

In celebration, I thought I would post a short essay Krugman wrote about food in England.  He uses a little economic theory to try to explain why the food in England was so bad until recently:

For someone who remembers the old days, the food is the most

startling thing about modern England. English food used to be

deservedly famous for its awfulness--greasy fish and chips,

gelatinous pork pies, and dishwater coffee. Now it is not only easy

to do much better, but traditionally terrible English meals have even

become hard to find. What happened?

Here's the whole thing.

A tomato for current events:  There's a strain of tomato called the "Mortgage Lifter."

The Mortgage Lifter tomato was developed in the early 1930's in Logan, West Virginia by a radiator repairman, M.C. "Radiator Charlie" Byles. Without any experience in breeding, he made a successful cross of four of the largest tomatoes he could find - German Johnson, Beefsteak, an Italian variety, and an English variety. Radiator Charlie sold the first seedlings of his new tomato in the 1940's for one dollar each to customers who drove up to 200 miles for his famous plants that bore tasty tomatoes averaging two and a half pounds. With these sales, Charlie managed to pay off his $6,000 mortgage in only six years, and so the tomato was named Mortgage Lifter.

HT to Greg Mankiw for the info.

Property rights are arguably one of the most important rights that keep our society functioning.  In the digital age, its getting harder to enforce non-material or Intellectual Property rights.  Stuff is copied left and right with the click of a button.

Intellectual Property rights are intended to foster an environment for people to come up with good inventions, works of art, and literature.  Theoretically, if everyone was just going to copy them, there would be little incentive for you to come up with ideas.

Critics of IP rights say that they provide an unfair temporary monopoly, and that everyone would be better off if ideas were allowed to be copied so they can also be improved.

I was thinking today about food recipes.  Its very difficult, if not impossible, to put a copyright on a food recipe.  I'm wondering, what can we learn about the exchange of recipes in the intellectual property debate?

Except for those secret recipes your grandmother keeps locked up, recipes are being copied all the time.  California Pizza Kitchen claims to have invented the BBQ Chicken Pizza, but did they really?  If they didn't, is it unfair to the person that did invent it that they are profiting from a similar recipe?  With the free exchange of recipes, I would think that we get more innovation and creativity throughout.

Comments and thoughts are welcome.

Economist and foodie extraordinaire Tyler Cowen reviews the popular book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" in Slate magazine. 

This book seems very interesting.  It sounds like it teaches a lot about the evolution of food production in the past to the present.  I like Pollan's idyllic "man as gardener," it sounds satisfying to grow my own food.  However, that very idea is enabled by the industrialized economy.  I'm sure his criticisms of industrial agriculture have merit, but actually adopting his alternatives sound scarily to me like mass starvation and population control.  Here is an excerpt from Cowen's critique:

The problems with Pollan's "self-financed" meal reflect the major shortcoming of the book: He focuses on what is before his eyes but neglects the macro perspective of the economist. He wants to make the costs of various foods transparent, but this is an unattainable ideal, given the interconnectedness of markets. Often the best ways to solve environmental problems are invisible and not available to the consumer in the supermarket aisle. We can tax or regulate offending activities, such as fertilizer runoff or the bad treatment of animals. But we cannot always tell how much environmental evil any given foodstuff contains.

Here's a little quote from Art Carden:

Vidal Sassoon defied hairstyling conventions and was hounded by regulators and bureaucrats because of certification problems. This raises a question: if we had a government boards of culinary standards the way we have boards of cosmetology, would we get innovations like barbecue nachos with the speed that we do? I'm inclined to think not.

Go here to read the whole thing. He starts off with an experiment mixing Pho and BBQ Pork.

Australia is now considered the "fattest nation in the world," dethroning America from its proudly held title. 

I could argue all day that using BMI to calculate obesity figures is terribly inaccurate, but I'll spare you that for now.  Get out there and stuff your faces America!

Here's a great post over at the Freakanomics blog where Agricultural Economist Daniel Sumner takes reader questions about farm subsidies, buying local, and other econo-foodie issues.  Here's a snippet:

Q: Are there any good arguments that support farm subsidies? If so, to what extent and in what manner may they be justified?

A: No.

My longer answer is here.

I look at a dozen suggested rationales for farm programs and reject them all except the last one — which is we have farm programs because we have had them for 75 years and people are afraid of even thinking about a world without subsidies.

Tyler Cowen asks an interesting question about mandated calorie counts on NYC restaurant menus:

I immediately searched for the item with the highest calorie count (it involved butter and lobster, for breakfast). I thought "no way will I get that" and ordered a bagel with lox and cream cheese. Yes, I know about anchoring and behavioral economics. Is not one equilibrium that every restaurant puts an especially high calorie item on its menu, so that people feel virtuous in ordering something else?

Calorie counts are required by law to be printed on menus in the big apple in a font size at least that of the price and name of the item.  For some reason, this is ONLY required by chain restaurants with more than 15 locations nationwide. 

But..according to George F. Will:

McDonald's exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans' upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants -- average annual sales, $2.2 million -- are owned by franchisees. McDonald's has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.

 Health issues aside, McDonalds has had a positive economic impact for many ordinary people. 

HT Don Boudreaux