When Food Advocates Tell You What To Serve Your Customers

It was interesting to see Chili's re-rejigger their menu recently, eliminating a number of recently added healthier menu items to focus on the chain's traditional fare of burgers, ribs and fajitas.

Yet again, another well-meaning company, while attempting to "healthify" their menu, discovers their customers never went there for healthy food in the first place. Nobody goes to Chili's for quinoa and kale.

But Chili's recent about-face highlights a risk all companies face: not knowing the difference between what people say they want and what people actually want.

Or to put a finer distinction on it: what people who know what's good for us say they want, and what actual customers want.

Consider food policy experts like Marion Nestle or Michele Simon: both would love it, simply love it, if chains like Chili's and McDonald's were to offer far more "healthier" food options.[1] They've both put extensive public pressure on many of these companies, criticizing their current food offerings and demanding healthy items like salads, fruit, and so on. And even when, say, McDonald's does offer a healthier option, it never satisfies: Nestle and Simon will reliably say the company "hasn't gone far enough."

But here's the problem: Michele Simon and Marion Nestle aren't customers of these chain restaurants. Neither would be caught dead eating at a Chili's, much less McDonald's. Hilariously, Michele Simon even wrote in her book that she only enters fast food joints to use their rest rooms![2]

Which takes us to an interesting question: When a food policy expert campaigns for major menu changes at restaurants they'll never go to, can you come up with any reason--any reason whatsoever--why a company would bother to listen? If a food advocate wants to influence what companies offer their customers, is this really the way to go about it?


READ NEXT: The Consumer Must Be Protected At All Times
And: When It Comes To Banning Soda, Marion Nestle Fights Dirty


Amazon Links: 
Michele Simon's book Appetite for Profit
Marion Nestle's book Food Politics


Footnotes:
[1] Let's set aside for the moment the highly uncomfortable topic of how recent dietary science has turned upside down much of our views about which foods are healthy.

[2] See Appetite For Profit, page 197: "Another survey showed that nearly all U.S. adults, at one time or another (97 percent) eat at fast food restaurants. For those of us (like me) who only see the inside of a fast food joint on long road trips (and even then just to use the restroom), this statistic is a sobering reminder of how the rest of the nation eats."

If Big Food is So All-Powerful, Why Aren't They Increasing Prices More?

I was going through some old papers from my parents' home recently and, randomly, stumbled onto a page from an old weekly free newspaper I delivered in my early teens. Here's a blow-up of a tiny square of text from the bottom left corner of the paper's front page:

Not too shabby for my very first job!

Unfortunately, this post isn't about my beginnings in the business world. The truly interesting thing about this piece of paper was on the other side, where an old local grocery store listed sale prices for various foods:

William's was a smallish, family-owned grocery store, and it happened also to be my mother's favorite. She thought it had the best prices in town, and she shopped there consistently each week. Until it closed, driven out of business in the late 1980s by larger chain grocers.

But what's stunning about this ad is how little many of these prices have changed. Some prices are nearly the same today as they were in 1985: think chicken or frozen veggies. Other items--once you think about how long a period much time 32 years really is--represent surprisingly low levels of per-year inflation. For something to double in price in 32 years, you'd have to have an inflation rate of about 2.2% per year. Quite a few food items on this page (apple juice, Polish sauce, bacon, tomato paste) would fit roughly into that category or better.

Keep in mind, this is like a list of promoted items, which means prices you see in the photos above are sale prices. Compare these prices to sale prices today at a typical grocery store, and you'd find even less inflation.

And, sure, some products are significantly more expensive: today, onions in my store cost around $1.99 for a three-pound bag, haddock fillets cost perhaps some four times more, and now that Pabst has become a hipster throwback brand, forget about it, that price is off the charts. But those are exceptions. At the bottom of it all, it's quite stunning to see so little inflation in food prices over such a long period of time.

Now, there are plenty of food bloggers and food pundits out there who use "the greedy food industry is trying to make us all fat" as a default explanation for everything.

But if the food industry were really that greedy, wouldn't they raise prices far more relentlessly? After all, food is a basic necessity. We have no choice but to buy it.

If food companies were as all-powerful and domineering as many food pundits seem to think, why wouldn't all food prices go up at the rate of, say, university tuition costs, which have increased a haddock fillet-like three to four times over this same 32 year period? Makes you wonder who's really greedy, doesn't it?

Taking Away Our Fun

Readers, I want to share a brief exchange between a reporter and Berkshire Hathaway directors Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. It crystallizes the central debate between food advocates who want to limit access to things like soda and snacks--and those who want to eat and drink what they please without getting scolded.

[Andrew Ross Sorkin, CNBC reporter] "Warren, for the last several years of this meeting, you've been asked about the negative health effects of Coca-Cola products, and you've done a masterful job of dodging the question by telling us how much Coke you drink personally.

Statistically you may be the exception. According to a peer-reviewed study by Tufts University, soda and sugary drinks may lead to 184,000 deaths among adults every year. The study found that sugar-sweetened beverages contributed to 130,000 deaths from diabetes, 45,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease, 6,450 deaths from cancer.

...Again, removing your own beverage consumption from the equation, please explain directly why we Berkshire Hathaway shareholders should be proud to own Coke."

Buffett answers this rather obnoxious-sounding question in his own folksy way (if you're curious, you can see how he responds in the video and article here).

However, what really intrigued me wasn't Buffett's response. What grabbed me was Charlie Munger's answer as he unexpectedly jumped in:

[Charlie Munger] "I drink a lot of diet Coke. And I think the people who ask questions like that one always make one ghastly error that’s really inexcusable. They measure the decrement without measuring the advantage. Well that's really stupid. That's like saying we should give up air travel through airlines because 100 people die a year in air crashes or something. That would be crazy. The benefit is worth the risk.

And if every person has to have about 8 or 10 glasses of water every day to stay alive and it's pretty cheap and sensible and improves life to add a little extra flavor to your water and a little stimulation and a little calories if you want to eat that way. There are huge benefits to humanity in that, and it's worth having some disadvantages.

We ought to almost have a law in the editorial world--here I'm sounding like Donald Trump [NB: here Buffett laughs out loud]--where these people shouldn't be allowed to cite the defects without citing the offsetting advantages. It's immature and stupid." [Laughter, applause from crowd]

Now (finally!) to the point of this post. This answer, typical of 92-year-old Charlie Munger's blunt truthiness, crystallized something new for me about why people get so irritated and annoyed at "Food Police" type food advocates:

They come across like grim, humorless scolds trying to take away our fun.

Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and lots of other people really enjoy things like Coke, ice cream, candy, Doritos, and so on. These humble little things gives them pleasure, make them happy. Frankly, life ain't always all that fun, and many so-called consumer advocates--who seem to think they know better than we do what's good for us--sure do seem like they're trying to take away (or tax, or ban, or limit) something fun that we really like.

They seem like scolds! Like schoolmarms.

Before we go any further, however, let’s make one thing crystal, crystal clear. In this post I am not trying to say that food advocates are wrong. Not at all!

This isn't a discussion of food advocates and their policies. It is a discussion about the perception of food advocates and their policies. There is an enormous difference, mainly because of the sad fact that, for many people, their perception of a thing is more important than the thing itself.

So, imagine: If food advocates could seem a lot less schoolmarmish, a lot less like food policing fun-killers trying to take away our fun, wouldn't they achieve far more traction with their ideas and policies? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier for them to find support?

Which brings me to my final question, one I simply can't answer: Why don't they do this?

Readers, what do you think?


READ NEXT: Shopping at More Than One Grocery Store: Worth It, Or a Waste?

AND: Money Sundays: All-Time Favorite Charlie Munger Quotes

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Does Blaming "Big Food" Sell More Books?

In the last hundred or so years, miraculously, the food and ag industry have nearly solved the problem of food scarcity, a gigantic problem that's bedeviled humanity for nearly our entire history.

And yet, weirdly, many food intellectuals today shake their fists at "Big Food" and blame it for making us all fat! Talk about having an appallingly short institutional memory.

As examples, see any of Marion Nestle's blog, see Michele Simon's fiery book Appetite for Profit, or see former FDA commissioner David Kessler's book The End of Overeating. All of these authors dump the bulk of the blame for obesity at the feet of the food industry.*

It's as if the very moment there's plenty of food, somehow it's no longer our responsibility to think about how much of it we should eat.

Another way to think about this is to consider it from the standpoint of book sales: what would the average reading consumer rather buy: a book that tells readers they are responsible for the food they put in their bodies… or a book that tells readers it was never their fault in the first place?

Which message do you think the typical reader would rather hear?

Readers do you find this ironic at all? Or do you agree with the agri-intellectual argument that the food industry makes us fat?


READ NEXT: How to Resist Irresistible Food

* Jayson Lusk's excellent and well-argued book The Food Police is one of the vanishingly few books out there taking the opposite side of this debate, as well as articulating the disturbing and illogical implications of many standard agri-intellectual arguments. See my interview with Dr. Lusk as well as his intellectually omnivorous food industry reading list.





How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Raw Milk: The Irony

I don't have a dog in the fight on raw milk vs. pasteurized milk.

But from a food debate standpoint, raw milk is an utterly fascinating topic. Why? Because it shows how certain food industry issues simply do not line up into a clean political matrix, with a clear "left side" and a clear "right side" telling us what positions we should hold.

In fact, holding a generalized position on the overall food industry can put you on the wrong side of an issue when it comes to a specific food product.

Raw milk is one such product.

To illustrate what I mean, imagine a Brooklyn-based foodie who dislikes and distrusts Big Food, Big Ag, Big Corn and Big Soda and anything else with a capital B, including Wal-Mart and Monsanto. In her view, the food industry clearly puts profits before people, and it should therefore be more heavily regulated by the government. Probably much more.

Further, this idealistic foodie thinks we need to change the default food environment, which she believes contributes heavily to society's obesity problem. This is why she strongly supported New York City's large soda ban, and it's why she also believes we'd be far better off if the government went ahead and just banned HFCS too. In her view, strict policies and regulations like these are good things: they are for our benefit and for our protection.

Now, we may not agree with all of her views, but I think we can at least agree that, in general, her positions are internally consistent. And please note: we at Casual Kitchen are not passing judgment on the merits of these various positions in any way! Reasonable minds can disagree reasonably.

One day, however, this Brooklyn foodie learns about all the incredible merits of raw milk. She discovers, from scanning some websites, that raw milk is delicious, healthful, and far superior to pasteurized milk. She can't wait to become a regular raw milk drinker.

But to her horror, she discovers that her government is as strict with raw milk as it she wishes it would be with HFCS! In fact, the federal government mandates the pasteurization of milk and milk products--for our benefit and for our protection.

Worse, eighteen states strictly prohibit the sale of raw milk under any conditions--including her neighboring state of New Jersey. And even in her home state of New York, raw milk is strictly regulated. In New York it is entirely illegal to sell raw milk at retail stores--again, for our benefit and our protection. Raw milk can only be purchased at specifically licensed and regulated farms, and there are strict rules that these farms must follow, including prominently posting signs warning consumers that this milk does not have the “protection” of pasteurization.

"Wait a minute," she thinks. "Why does the government force pasteurization on us? And how can the government possibly decide it's illegal to buy raw milk? This makes no sense at all!"

Our Brooklyn foodie's confidently-held, generalized position on the overall food industry ended up depositing her on the exact wrong side of the debate over raw milk. She's discovered, to her intense confusion, that she wants a more heavily-regulated food industry--except when she doesn't. Hopefully she'll see the irony.

Readers, what do you think?


Read Next: Oppositional Literature: The Key Tool For Achieving True Intellectual Honesty


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

But What If Your Farmer Doesn't Want To Know YOU?

The First Lady has planted a garden, organic, of course, and the Department of Agriculture is spending 50 million or so on a program called Know Your Farmer. The effort is likely to disappoint: in fact, a suburban housewife determined to know this corn farmer is likely to be mortified by my looks, the way I smell, and my opinions. I can't imagine why any resident of Manhattan would want to know me, and, trust me, some of my neighbors are even worse.

...One of the assumptions implicit in all this local food stuff is that we farmers are dying to make a connection with our customers. In many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. All we want is to sell corn and to be left alone.
--Blake Hurst, farmer and president of the Missouri Farm Bureau

I borrowed this striking quote from The Locavore's Dilemma, partly because it had me laughing out loud, but also because it illustrates an intriguing point about the food and ag business.

Take a Brooklyn hipster (no, really, take one!). Imagine her, freshly done reading one of Michael Pollan's books, and deciding, firmly, that she wants to get "close" to her food. She’s gonna know her farmer, man. Now she'll make regular trips to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, take a weekly subway ride to Manhattan's Union Square Farmer's Market, and maybe even once a month line up a Zipcar Prius to drive up the Hudson Valley (staying within 100 miles of course) to visit an actual organic farm!

Hipsters are usually quite good at irony. But there's one question, ironically, that this hypothetical Brooklyn hipster never thought to ask: what if her farmer doesn't want to know her back?

You'd think this imaginary friendly farmer, if he really wanted to know this hipster and others like her, would take a job where he'd actually get to meet hipsters. He wouldn't farm at all! He'd work at the Apple Store. Or at Whole Foods.

If you take Blake Hurst's word for it, most farmers just want to farm. They didn't sign up to meet hipsters and agri-intellectuals. That's the reason other people sell, distribute and retail their food: because selling, shipping, distributing, retailing and hipster-meeting isn't farming.

Think about this a little bit. Does your farmer want to know you?

Are you sure?


Related Posts:
Thoughts On Recipe Development
An Interview with "Appetite For Profit" Author Michele Simon
A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People
Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

A Cup of Morning Death? How "Big Coffee" Puts Profits Before People

Readers, we simply must rein in Big Coffee. This industry is making billions in profits at the expense of our health.

How? Let's begin with the obvious. Experts agree: coffee produces a wide range of terrible--at times even terrifying--side effects and symptoms:

* It can cause severe hyperactivity in both adults and children.
* Side effects include halitosis, dehydration and tooth discoloration.
* Coffee is directly linked to increased blood pressure. In fact, just 2-3 cups daily can raise a person’s blood pressure substantially.
* This blood pressure risk can lead to other serious cardiovascular risks, including heart attack and stroke.
* There is a widely known--but strangely under-reported--link between coffee consumption and spontaneous bowel evacuation.
* When combined with sugar (an addictive substance linked to obesity, hyperactivity and even tooth decay) coffee becomes even more dangerous.

Toxins lurking in your morning Joe
However, no discussion of the risks of coffee is complete without addressing the most dangerous toxin lurking in your supposedly "safe" cup of morning joe: the chemical 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione 3,7-dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl -1H-purine-2,6-dione.

Let’s start off with something no one can object to: It is never a good idea to put anything into your body that you can’t pronounce. If there’s one truth about Big Food and all the processed crap they foist onto us it’s this: the most dangerous and unhealthy foods almost always have ingredient lists loaded with long and unpronounceable words.

We also know, beyond any doubt, that Big Food hides the use of dangerous chemicals and additives by giving them harmless sounding names. We've seen this insidious practice in the branded boxed cereals aisle, where both ingredient naming and ingredient manipulation techniques are used to mislead consumers into thinking a food has less sugar than it really does.

This is absolutely no different. The 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6 (3H,7H)-dione 3,7-dihydro- 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dione lurking in our coffee has all sorts of both known (and unknown) side effects:

1) Known sleep inhibitor. This chemical severely impacts our ability to sleep, and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of studies proving a link between insufficient sleep and all sorts of health and lifestyle problems, such as depression, obesity and a compromised immune system. It also leads to a much greater risk of traffic accidents and industrial injuries.

2) Known vasoconstrictor. It causes our blood vessels to become narrower, impacting blood supply to all parts of our bodies. As we've already seen, long-term heavy use of coffee can cause serious cardiovascular problems.

3) Known to be highly addictive. Many people drink coffee all their lives, little knowing that this beverage is a delivery mechanism for such a highly addictive and dangerous chemical. Many have argued that breaking an addiction to 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)- dione 3,7-dihydro- 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2, 6-dione can be as difficult as breaking an addiction to powerful narcotics like cocaine or heroin.

4) Known to have potentially severe withdrawal symptoms. As with any highly addictive substance, there are potentially dangerous withdrawal symptoms to be concerned about, including severe headaches, mood swings, irritability, drowsiness, spontaneous anger and impaired cognitive function. Once Big Coffee hooks us, they want to make sure it's as difficult as possible to get off the 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H- purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione 3,7-dihydro-1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine-2,6-dione train. Result? We remain steady, profitable consumers dying for our morning caffeine fix.

5) Known fatality risk. Most importantly--and most horrifyingly--in large doses, 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)- dione 3,7-dihydro-1,3, 7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6-dione can be fatal.

Unholy alliance
As someone who cares deeply about public health advocacy, I simply cannot fathom why the FDA and our government haven't taken steps to protect defenseless consumers from this dangerous beverage. Could it be that all isn't as it seems in the hallowed halls of our government?

It could be. Did you know that the largest coffee brands found in our stores--household names such as Maxwell House, Folgers and Starbucks--are owned by gigantic, powerful, multi-billion dollar companies? Many suspect Big Coffee is in some unholy alliance with the government, covertly limiting efforts to regulate what has become an extremely profitable cash cow.

Despite these risks, the powerful companies behind Big Coffee will do anything to sell us more and more of this clearly dangerous beverage. Today, coffee is served in gigantic serving sizes, with twenty ounces now the norm. In the 1950s, this would be enough to serve three people! No one needs that much coffee.

It's clear: by themselves, consumers simply don't have the tools or the weaponry to resist Big Coffee’s enormous marketing machine. Therefore, in order to convince people to stop drinking a known dangerous beverage, something must be done to change the default coffee-drinking environment. Clearly, the time has come for some sort of tax--or better still, a ban--on large coffee sizes. We will do whatever it takes to rein in this greedy, powerful industry.

And yet given all the dangers, given all the health risks and given all the damaging side effects of this beverage, Big Coffee isn't required to put even the tiniest warning label on what they sell. Even something as simple as...

WARNING: this product contains 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine-2,6 (3H,7H)-dione 3,7-dihydro- 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine-2, 6-dione, which is linked to hyperactivity, high blood pressure, stroke, heart attack and spontaneous defecation. In large doses 1,3,7-trimethyl- 1H-purine-2,6 (3H,7H)-dione 3, 7-dihydro-1,3,7- trimethyl-1H-purine-2, 6-dione can be fatal.

...written in a reasonably readable font size, would only cover half of the outside of a basic 7-ounce coffee cup. Is this too much to ask? Apparently it is--when Big Coffee is involved. Obviously there's far too much money at stake to take even this tiny step forward to warn unsuspecting, uneducated consumers about the danger lurking in their daily morning beverage.

Clearly, Big Coffee puts profits before people. They simply do not care that their efforts to thwart badly-needed regulation put us--and our children--at risk. It's time to stop these powerful corporate interests from running rampant, and it's time to eliminate this dangerous beverage from our diets and our daily lives.

We've got to stop Big Coffee from exploiting us.


* NOTE: The preceding was satire. If you're not sure WHY it's satire, please read this post. And then this post.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. Do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site! You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

The Secret Financial Life of Food

I began to follow the [food] commodities market more closely. After only a few weeks of scrutinizing the ups and downs of the market, I was amazed by the fragility of the same commodities that sit so sturdily on the supermarket shelf. Take coffee, for example. Within the space of a few weeks, the price of coffee was buffeted by tropical storms and early frosts that threatened to crimp crop output. Then came an onslaught of a disease that threatened crops across much of Latin America, where the majority of coffee beans grow. The commodity price soared as a shortage was predicted. Finally, a wily spectator who had "cornered the market" unloaded mass quantities of coffee, driving prices back down. There was no run on jars of Folgers at the grocery. The price of my daily latte didn't fluctuate by even a penny.

This is an excerpt from a striking little book by Kara Newman called The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets.

This little blurb about coffee futures makes you realize how insulated from reality we consumers are. We're completely protected from all the drama and price fluctuations of a commodity we completely take for granted. All we have to do is just head to the store or Starbucks... and there's our coffee, sitting there waiting for us. And the price is the same as always.

There is an entire industry out there putting this product on our shelves for us, and we consumers don't have to trouble our pretty little heads with any of these supply/demand worries. Heck, we don't even know about them--after all, how would we see something that we don't see? Kind of incredible if you think about it.

One takeaway that sticks in my mind is how incredibly lucky we are as consumers. It can be deceivingly easy to complain and wring our hands about the "greedy" food industry. But thinking through the example above gives me, if anything, a feeling of gratitude.

Readers, what do you think?



Related Posts
The Worst Lie of the Food Blogosphere
How to Own the Consumer Products Industry--And I Mean Literally Own It
An Eight Point Manifesto Against Big Food

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Banning Food Advertising Won't Do What You Think It Will Do

It's no secret that the USA--and most of the developed world--has an obesity problem. And in order to fight this trend, there are calls from various food policy advocates to limit or even outlaw various types of food advertising. Some food pundits have called for ending food companies' efforts to advertise to kids. Others have called for limits to the marketing and advertising of soda, candy and junk foods. Still others have called for limits to corporations' rights to free speech.

The logic is this: if we stop those companies from advertising unhealthy food, people won't eat so much of it.

On some level, there's a lot of sense here. But I want Casual Kitchen readers to think a little deeper on this issue. Things are not always as they seem.

And as a culture and as a society, we have a very short memory, and we tend to overlook or ignore unintended consequences of a policy that seems reasonable on its face. So instead of approaching this issue by considering the constitutionality of limiting advertising, or by considering civil liberties aspects of this debate, I'm going to approach the issue from a radically different angle. I'll share an example from the past to illustrate what really happens when we ban marketing and advertising for a specific product. I have a suspicion that it might help balance today's debate on junk food marketing.

Most readers here at Casual Kitchen have never seen a cigarette ad on TV. Why? Because in 1971, cigarette advertising was banned on television and radio in the United States. It turned out to be the first of many steps towards eliminating all tobacco company advertising and branding activity, and over the next two decades, more and more marketing outlets were deemed off-limits. Now, cigarette makers can't even sponsor sporting events, or even display their logos on T-shirts or hats.

You can easily argue that there's nothing wrong with this. But here's the most soul-crushingly counterintuitive thing about banning tobacco marketing and branding: it's also great for the cigarette companies.

That's right. They love it.

Wait. How can I say that with a straight face?

Here's how: imagine you're a new consumer products company--let's say a shampoo maker--and you have new shampoo brand you'd like to introduce into the market. How do you tell consumers about it? You advertise. You spend money (millions, eventually perhaps billions of dollars) to establish your brand. The battlefield for market share, in other words, plays out in the media. That's how companies reach us and that's how new competitors enter the market.

So now, in an era where cigarette companies can no longer advertise or market (and in some countries their products can't even have any distinctive labeling or branding at all), the existing players in the market are essentially guaranteed, by government fiat, a permanent established brand position.

Ergo, no more new competition, ever.

These advertising and marketing limitations actually protect them. The Marlboro Man will dominate forever because he's been grandfathered in, while regulations eliminate any possibility of a new brand ever competing with him. Better still, there's no need for the existing players in the marketplace to pre-emptively spend millions and billions of marketing and advertising dollars to defend their market position. They can't! The new rules make it so there will never be any new players to defend against anyway. (By the way, would you like to guess where that unspent marketing money goes? It goes to shareholders in the form of profits and dividend payments.)

It bakes your noodle just to think about it.

Now, I know the analogy between the cigarette and food industries isn't perfect. For one thing, cigarettes are dangerous, so it's possibly oxymoronic to think "competition" in the cigarette industry could be "pro-consumer." You might argue that, well, maybe the world doesn't really need a new cigarette company. Perhaps it's a good thing to have high barriers to entry, high prices, and no new competition.

Trust me, the existing cigarette companies are 100% in agreement with you.

So, what's the conclusion here? First, be careful what you wish for. Banning marketing or advertising in the food industry will only serve to protect and enrich the companies already in business. It stifles pro-consumer competition and keeps prices artificially high.

Cigarettes are one thing. But we need food to live. We want a highly competitive marketplace to keep prices reasonable, rather than artificially inflated. If we screw everything up by banning future food advertising and branding, there won't be new companies coming along with new, healthier and better alternatives. Do we really want to stifle this?

One final thought. If we actually do someday make the mistake of banning or restricting food company advertising, I have one important piece of advice: invest in the companies already in the marketplace. Regulation raises the barriers to competition--and those companies just got a profitable dose of government-sponsored protection.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Rules For Thee, But Not For Me

Readers: Set aside your opinions and preconceptions on food policy for a brief moment and read the following (not entirely hypothetical) dialog:

Person A: There's got to be a way to stop all these greedy corporations from making soda. They spend billions on advertising. They waste [science-y sounding number] liters of water for every liter of soda they produce. Worst of all, they exploit us for profit, and they're making us all fat!

Person B: Well, okay, don't drink soda then.

Person A: But this isn't for me! It's for people who don't know any better. These drinks are incredibly unhealthy, and there are uneducated people out there who don't even know it! We have to change our standards to get away from these liquid calories... we've got to do something!

Readers, what's your take on Person A's thought process? Do you consider it to be empowered? Logical? Do you consider Person A's behavior here to be arrogant in any way--or even narcissistic?

There's a lot happening in this short conversation, and I want to hear your take on the dynamics that you see. Share your thoughts below!

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In Defense of Big Farms

Anyone who bites into a rock-hard California tomato in February and compares it to a sweet Jersey tomato in August quickly learns an indisputable truth: there are certain things large-scale agriculture can do, and certain things it can't.

And that's one of the many reasons everyone enjoys driving over to the local farmstand to buy produce. Not only are you supporting your local economy, you get a tomato that, well, actually tastes like a tomato.

But what happens during a drought, or a flood, or a poor year for crops in your part of the country? What happens when there's a shortage of local food?

I'll share one recent, and sobering, example of what happens. Remember the rice shortage of 2008? Most Americans don't, for reasons we'll get to in a moment. But sadly, this shortage created severe problems in dozens of countries around the world. In fact, nations like Senegal and Haiti faced skyrocking rice prices, food hoarding--even food riots.

But in the USA, almost no one remembers. Why? Because our ag and transport industries adapted so quickly that consumers hardly noticed. In fact, the only evidence of a rice shortage in our local grocery stores here in northern New Jersey was a brief limit of two 20-pound bags of rice per customer. And within two weeks, rice in our local stores was in oversupply and put on sale at 50% off.

Remember: this was a shortage severe enough to cause food riots in some countries. And while there was plenty of panicked media coverage of the horrors of the rice shortage, I never saw a single article discussing how our food industry adjusted to it so effectively.

Admittedly, Big Food and Big Ag can be hilariously easy targets to criticize. To the most paranoid among us, they represent everything wrong with America today: Big Food makes irresistible snacks as part of a master plan to fatten us all up, while Big Ag secretly grows genetically-modified produce, soaks it in e. coli for good measure, and then drives it cross-country in an orgy of fossil fuel consumption.

But this perception is parody, not reality. Today, the options available to American food shoppers have never been greater: the average American grocery store carries some 55,000 items, and in the dead of winter you can find anything from organic California raspberries at $6 a pint to regional potatoes at 59c a pound. I'll leave it to you to decide which is the better value.

In short, food is available to us in a range that is simply unimaginable to our grandparents' generation. And at the same time, American consumers are reaping the benefits of a full-blown renaissance in local food. A truly robust food industry -- one that can handle spot shortages, manage uncooperative regional weather, and adapt to the natural fluctations of food production -- needs to have both local and large-scale food production to work properly.

That's how we can protect the food needs of a nation of 300 million people.

A shorter version of this post ran in Dirt Magazine.

Survivor Bias: Why "Big Food" Isn't Quite As Evil As You Think It Is

Lots of food writers and bloggers, myself included, love to criticize Big Food. It's such an easy target. After all, shouldn't everyone be against an industry that earns billions by force-feeding us unhealthy foods?

Of course, you can only make a statement like that (and keep a straight face) if you view the world with a conspiracy-theory mentality. If that's your primary mindset, stop reading this post right now. Because I am about to suggest an alternate explanation for the realities of the food industry--one that doesn't involve the a priori assumption that our destiny is under the control of an evil cabal of greedy food lords.

A warning though: this explanation involves a quick detour to statistics class, and a quicker detour through my former career on Wall Street. But in just a short few minutes, you'll see that someone else is behind the curtain selecting the foods on our grocery store shelves.

My quick detour starts with a financial question: what happens to a mutual fund that really sucks? (Don't worry, this will be brief. I promise.)

Well, a mutual fund can get away with suckola performance for a few years, but if it significantly underperforms its peer group for much longer, it will be closed down and killed off. It gets pulled from the newspapers, its performance record vanishes, and it gets washed down the memory hole as if it never existed.

Here's the point: this regular mercy-killing of bad mutual funds creates a deeply misleading picture of past performance. Since the worst-performing funds are regularly removed from the data set, the past performance of mutual funds in general looks better than it actually was. What you see isn't really a true picture of past performance--it's just the past performance of the survivors.

Statisticians call this phenomenon survivor bias, and it gives a whole new meaning to the expression "past performance does not guarantee future returns." (Even though I left Wall Street more than a year ago, I still throw up in my mouth a little bit whenever I hear that awful, awful phrase.)

Okay. The point of this article isn't to tell you to be suspicious of the mutual fund industry, that's just a freebie side benefit you get from reading a food blog written by a retired Wall Street analyst. The point is to apply this concept of survivor bias to the food industry, and specifically to the foods sitting on our grocery store shelves.

Many of us like to think that all the deliciously unhealthy foods in our grocery stores are there because evil food companies engineer them that way on purpose. What we don't see, and what few of us think about, are all the foods that weren't quite popular enough with consumers, and were therefore killed off. The food industry is littered with the corpses of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of foods that have come and gone. Just like underperforming mutual funds, these unpopular or ill-conceived food products die off because they didn't perform well.

If you were to look over the thousands of foods that came and went over the past 50-75 years, you'd find foods of all types. Some would be healthy, some extremely unhealthy. Some would be terrible and tasteless, some would be delicious but for whatever reason unpopular. Some of these foods never made it past regional test markets or focus group testing. Some had huge ad budgets behind them, while some quietly came and went with no ad spending at all.

In every case, however, what really mattered was this: consumer demand was insufficient to support the products that didn't survive. And so they died. The remaining foods on our grocery stores shelves, however unhealthy they may be, are the product of survivor bias. It's quite simple: the foods most heavily demanded by consumers always survive.

So, who's really behind the curtain choosing the foods on our grocery store shelves?

It's us. We are behind the curtain. That's right: fattening and unhealthy foods are on our store shelves because we put them there.

This is why consumers have such a critical role in deciding what is available to us in our stores and markets. Exercise your power by spending your money accordingly.

Readers, share your thoughts!

Note: I owe a debt of gratitude to two exceptional books by Nicholas Taleb: Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan. Both were instrumental in helping me think through issues raised in this post. Things are not always as they seem.


Related Posts:Who's Watching the Watchdogs? Ethical Problems in the "Ten Riskiest Foods" Report By the CSPI
The Pros and Cons of Restaurant Calorie Labeling Laws
How to Give Away Your Power By Being a Biased Consumer
Brand Disloyalty
A Rebuttal of "The Last Bite"

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

How to Whine About "Big Food"

Big Food is an easy target. Too easy.

No one can deny that Big Food deploys armies of scientists who design irresistible snacks engineered for maximum deliciousness. And doesn't the industry spend billions of dollars on pernicious advertising that compels us to buy and eat their fattening snacks and treats? And what about all those toxic fruits and vegetables they greedily soak in pesticides, splash with e. coli for good measure, and then truck thousands of miles across the country (burning fossil fuels all the way) to unsuspecting people like you and me? Consumers are totally helpless against such a powerful enemy.

Seriously, if Big Food really cared, they'd fill grocery store shelves with healthy foods rather than processed, salted, sweetened and fat-laden foods. Wouldn't they? Of course those wouldn't exactly be "snacks" and nobody would buy them, and, well, that might put a dent in the industry's grand scheme to make us all too fat to move, but if you think about it, it's all just more proof that they sell us all those unhealthy, irresistible snacks out of pure venality.

Conspiracy theories are fun, aren't they? Once you've preemptively decided someone or something is greedy and bad, you can explain away almost anything. And the arguments always sound compelling because few people recognize, and fewer people challenge, circular logic based on a flawed premise.

And complaining about a greedy industry (or government, or our education system, or capitalism, or socialism, or the Dutch, or anyone and anything but ourselves) enables us to pass off a big chunk of our personal responsibility. It enables us to hold the limiting belief that the challenges of managing our diet and our health are out of our hands and beyond our control.

Just accept that you're totally powerless against that bag of chips or that box of cookies. Admit your impotence and cede your will, and it won't be your fault you ate them--it's those greedy bastards at Big Food.

With such powerful forces arrayed against us, how do consumers stand a chance?

Readers, what do you think?

Related Posts:
15 Creative Tips to Avoid Holiday Overeating
Ten Strategies to Stop Mindless Eating
Why Spices Are a Complete Rip-Off and What You Can Do About It
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!