I’m Norbert Wilson, a professor of public policy at Duke university and director of the world food policy center. Now, I am an agricultural economist by training and today’s podcast, we will explore a creative and down-to-earth book titled Food Economics. Now stay with me, gentle listener. I already can sense the wave of anxiety, math anxiety, and discomfort with economics. but hear me out. To make the food system work for everyone, we must understand the economics of food, agricultural production, business decisions, consumer behavior, and of course, government policies. Tufts University Professor, economist William Masters, and Allegheny College economist and nutritionist Amelia Finaret, developed a wonderfully engaging textbook that is friendly for readers and learners who do not love math or who have a complicated relationship with economics. Interview Summary So let’s start at the very beginning. Why did you write this book? Will: Well, I’ll start. I love the subject. And I love the opportunity to work with Amelia on something. And we talked about taking the course that she was a Teaching Assistant for and making it into a textbook. And finally being able to do it has been revelatory. I’ve learned a lot, learned a lot from Amelia, learned a lot from the process of writing. The motivation really is because the topic is so compelling. As you said, food economics is crucial to whether people can afford to and do have the material requisites of wellbeing, as the original definition of economics put it. And so, food is this really distinctive, strange thing that’s, as I say, often hidden in plain sight. It’s something that many economists want to teach about, but don’t really know much about. And many people who work in food without economics would like to use some economics. So, putting the two together has been definitely a situation where two plus two is more than four. Putting the two together is something new and different. Amelia: I think also that food is a very special type of good. And so, when we’re talking about economics we talk a lot about goods and services. And food is a special type of good in that you have to have it to live. And we also really found during the process of writing the book, as Will talked about, more and more examples that many of the fundamental lessons of economics can be learned with examples from the food system. So, we think that using a topic like food, which really resonates with a lot of our students, is a great way to teach econ and it can get them more excited than learning about widgets. I am really intrigued by this, and I want to pick up on this idea that food is special and that is something I think is a critical part of what you all are doing. But I also heard something new in this idea of using food as a pathway into economics. So, as you know, folks react really strongly to economics because of math or a disdain for capitalism or other issues. Why do you want people to understand the economics of food? Amelia: So food is something that all of us make choices about multiple times a day. And there’s very few other things, maybe about our time management overall, that we make choices about so frequently. But food is one of those things that we make choices about multiple times every day, all of us. And that’s whether it’s about producing the food, doing something else to the food or consuming the food. And economics fundamentally is about understanding and analyzing those choices and those behaviors. So, people, of course, are going to be confused sometimes about how to make those choices. And that’s one of the biggest and most important discussions in public health: how do we encourage folks to make better food choices? People are also just very confused because there’s so much different information floating around. So, what we wanted to do is to provide an economics perspective of food choice because economics is really great at analyzing choices. And this, of course, helps people connect what’s something that’s personal to them, which is making those kind of frequent food decisions. Even if they’re not thinking about it, they really are thinking like an economist frequently about food multiple times every day. And then connecting it to this discipline of economics to understand the formal logic of how we analyze those choices. Will: And I would add the opportunity that we’ve had in teaching economics to people who didn’t like economics, chose not to do it, and wanted to do public health nutrition instead. For me, at Tufts in the Friedman School, and also with students from agriculture – I taught previously at Purdue students who didn’t like economics because they wanted to work in agriculture – I really want to demystify a lot of what became a kind of high jargon of fancy language. For example, in economics, people would speak of an individual “optimizing.” And we just don’t say that. Instead what we ...
