This is what happens....

... when economists with weblogs write about food.

Restaurant labels

The Farm Policy weblog had high praise for the "refreshing editorial" about restaurant labels in today's Wall Street Journal. The editorial favored FDA's recent voluntary calorie labeling proposal over the mandatory approach of Senator Harkin and Rep. DeLauro in Congress: "As sure as New Year's resolutions follow holiday gorging, watch for 'mislabeling' lawsuits." (Perhaps the Journal has a low opinion of the honesty of the restaurant chains.) The editorial continues, "Watch too, for prices to go up; a legislative labeling mandate isn't cost-free for restaurant owners."

I don't imagine the Journal's editorialists will be convinced by a link to the Center for Science in the Public Interest's report on restaurant labels (even though the CSPI report has a nice feature called "Who would guess?," which shows how difficult it is to estimate calories without labeling). Instead, I should quote the view of the Journal's own favorites at FDA at greater length than the editorial did, because it somewhat rebuts the restaurant industry's whining about costs:

The [Obesity Working Group] recommends that FDA encourage restaurants to provide more, and more readily available, nutrient content information at the point-of-sale. The restaurant industry has voiced concern that requiring nutrition labeling for all menu items is infeasible because recipes change frequently, and patrons often request customization of their meals and the number of options available for customization is large.... Nevertheless, the OWG believes that the restaurant industry could provide some level of nutrition information to its patrons to enhance their ability to make wise food choices. Calculating nutrition information may have been a difficult task for most members of this industry in the past, when such information had to be determined by direct chemical analysis. This task, however, is easier today because nutrient composition databases and software for labeling are readily available.

Or, to pick another fairly mainstream source, here are two of USDA's intrepid economists writing in Choices, the magazine of the American Agricultural Economics Association:

One of the most widely discussed information blackout zones is for food sold at restaurants and fast-food establishments. Although the 1994 National Labeling and Education Act requires that manufacturers include a nutrition information panel on the label of almost all packaged foods, it does not require any similar disclosure for foods purchased at restaurants—food away from home (FAFH). This information requirement gap may be increasingly important as a source of information failure. Not only are Americans consuming large amounts of FAFH, but the nutritional content of FAFH tends to be less healthy than foods prepared at home.

The revolution in eating out is one leading suspect in the obesity epidemic. Whether mandatory or voluntary, restaurant calorie labels should be widely adopted. That would be refreshing.

Obesity and hunger

Here is Reuters on the paradox of obesity and hunger. The article includes a rare media mention of the federal government's Healthy People 2010 objective, which calls for reducing the prevalence of household food insecurity to 6 percent.

Does WIC work? Yes, again

Marianne Bitler and Janet Currie have a good rebuttal to recent criticism of a long tradition of WIC research. Previous research has usually found that WIC (the special supplemental food program for Women, Infants and Children) improves birth outcomes. The criticism, including the "provocative" commentary of attorney Doug Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute, suggested that previous positive results might be due to "selection bias." In this account, WIC might falsely appear to be effective, because researchers are accidentally comparing outcomes for poorly motivated nonparticipants to the highly motivated (and implicitly better off) women who take the trouble to participate. But, in the new 2005 issue of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, a highly respected refereed journal, Bitler and Currie find exactly the opposite. The women who participate are those with the most severe needs, while nonparticipants may choose not to participate in part because they are better off and need the benefits less. If anything, traditional research approaches probably understate the benefits of WIC. The conclusion, at least for the effects of WIC's benefits for pregnant women, is the usual one: WIC works.

Supermarkets, food prices, and the poor

USDA's Economic Research Service today released the latest installment in a series of interesting reports over several years about food prices and the poor. The issue is more complicated than you might think. Everybody assumes the poor pay more for food than other people do, but is that true? For any category of food (say, "fresh meats" or "canned vegetables"), it turns out that low-income people generally pay less per unit than other people do, because of economizing behavior such as choosing lower-quality or less-desirable foods. When researchers hold everything constant -- comparing the prices paid for the same foods in similar stores, for example -- they still usually find no evidence that the system sticks it to the poor. But maybe that comparison is overcompensating and holding too much constant. It is certainly true that prices are frequently higher and quality lower in small corner stores than in suburban supermarkets.

The most novel contribution of today's ERS report, by Robert King, Ephraim Leibtag, and Ajay Behl, is to pay close attention to the reasons why grocery prices might in principle be higher in low income neighborhoods. Most importantly, it studies differences in retail operating costs and finds no evidence that stores serving the poor (i.e. having high rates of food stamp redemption) have higher costs than stores serving the more prosperous. If you have trouble believing anything but the worst about food prices in poor neighborhoods, consider a couple other twists the authors raise. For one thing, small traditionally managed (wholesale supplied) stores occur in the wealthiest neighborhoods as well as the poorest. Also, while food costs are higher for some urban stores that serve the poor, labor costs for such stores are lower.

The authors don't quite put their foot down and make a strong claim that there is nothing to worry about in food price differentials. Instead, they mildly state their conclusion with an if/then structure: "If the poor do pay more, factors other than operating costs are likely to be the reason." But, except for citing previous research on the well-established pattern that prices are higher in corner stores than in supermarkets, they seemed to find little evidence of discrimination.

The final paragraph asks some good questions, which might be taken as a warning to "be careful what you wish for." For low-income urban neighborhoods, the arrival of new and better managed supermarkets is as two-sided as other aspects of gentrification. It brings good things that newcomers and long-time residents alike have long desired, but it may do so by displacing less-efficient local retailers with a long history of service to the neighborhood.

Hunger, crowding, and other hardships...

... are widespread among families in poverty, according to a report today from Arloc Sherman at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Shedding light on the "snack tax"

I see that the USDA/ERS report on "snack taxes" was picked up by a tax law weblog this Fall. Kudos to authors Fred Kuchler, Abebayehu Tegene, and Michael Harris at USDA's Economic Research Service for shedding some light on this issue. Various forms of the snack tax have been proposed (for example, Battle and Brownell in 1996). The cleverest (like Nestle's book Food Politics in 2002) suggest spending a snack tax on nutrition education or physical activity programs. This feature provides a "heads we win/tails we still win" quality to the proposal. If the tax causes people to stop eating junk food, then it provides a health benefit to the public. If instead the tax has little impact on consumption -- which is what the ERS economists predict -- then it is all the better for generating revenue that... you guessed it... provides a health benefit to the public.