Yale’s Psych 123: Food for Thought
We spend a lot of time thinking about food at my house. We read about food. In particular we are fond of Michael Pollan’s work on the subject. So, we’re very aware of the dysfunctions of food culture, economics, politics, and policy, particularly in the U.S. (for thoughtful posts in those areas visit Ezra Klein’s Food Archive).
So it seemed likely I’d enjoy Yale Psych 123, Kelly Brownell’s course on the psychology, biology, and politics of food. And I did. But I recommend starting with Pollan’s books The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (I see he now has another book on food I haven’t yet read: Food Rules). They will provide most of the background that Brownell covers in the first half of his course but in a personal, narrative style that I found a little more engaging. With Pollan’s work as background, you can jump to lecture 12 of Psych 123.
I admit I listen to podcats in general and Open Yale Courses (OYC) content in particular for entertainment, not just for information. (All my reviews of OYC offerings are under the Yale tag.) Brownell’s course is packed with information and took a more entertaining turn in the second half in which his passion for his subject comes to the fore. His strong opinions about food policy are evident in later lectures, and a good way to entertain is to take a strong position.
Two parts of the class stood out as particularly interesting to me. The first occurred in the seventh lecture when Brownell described the starvation that occurred during the World War II siege of Leningrad. He read from The Great Starvation Experiment by Todd Tucker, which is worthy of a lengthy quote:
It was November 1941. The people of Leningrad were beginning the hungry winter, the coldest winter ever in the city with a proud history of miserably cold winters. … Hitler formulated an elegant plan, … [a] siege [that] would last 872 days….
As the siege dragged on, the temperatures plummeted to -40 degrees. The people collectively remembered that some wallpaper paste was made from potatoes. Wallpaper was stripped away from the living rooms and parlors of Leningrad, the paste scraped into pots and boiled into soup, a soup that tasted much more like paste then potatoes. Leather too could be boiled into a gelatinous mess that could briefly satisfy the sharpest pangs of hunger.
By 1943 the siege entered its second year, all the animals, wallpaper paste, and leather had been consumed. The people descended into a rare kind of hunger, a hunger that tested even the most fundamental taboos, people began eating corpses. …
By the beginning of 1944 as even corpses and children became scarce there were reports of people cutting off their own body parts and eating them in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger. The Red Army broke through the German lines on January 27, 1944 and the siege was lifted. In all, a million Soviets had starved to death in that city, more then a thousand per day. People were forbidden both officially and unofficially, from ever speaking of the cannibalism that took place during the siege. The Soviets had learned, to a frightening extent, how much the availability of food allows civilization to occur.
That’s powerful stuff. Much less powerful but just as interesting is the guest lecture by Stephen Teret (number 19), an expert in the application of litigation as a tool for the promotion of public health. He’s a very entertaining lecturer and tells some humorous stories. Listen to his lecture alone for a bit of edu-fun.
I also like one of Brownell’s final assignments. He asks students to write and try to publish an op-ed on a food-related issue. As someone who believes in the power of the 650-word blog post/op-ed, I think this is an excellent assignment. If you can’t make the case for one idea in a piece of that length you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to pay attention to you. (I write this with awareness that this post is approaching 900 words. We can’t win them all.) If any of Brownell’s future students wish to publish their op-ed on this blog, send it my way and I’ll consider it.
Throughout the class, but particularly in the final lectures, there is much made about the parallels in the evolution of culture and policy between food/obesity and other threats to public health like guns, alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Brownell and other champions for better nutrition through policy view victories in other arenas as models for what might one day be achieved for food.
Perhaps. But food is fundamentally different from those other threats. Everyone must eat. Not everyone must use a gun, drink alcohol, use drugs, or smoke. Moreover, food choices are intricately bound with socio-economic and cultural forces in ways that differ from some of the other threats mentioned. For these reasons, changing the culture and policy of food will be more challenging than that of, say, cigarettes. I’m glad folks like Brownell and Pollan are trying, but I think victory is a long way off. A good first step is for more people to pay attention to their work, including you.
Debunked Food Theory
I once had a theory that there are two mutually exclusive categories of food: one comprised of foods that go with garlic, the other with foods that go with chocolate.
I was wrong. I can think of one dish and one sauce that could (and sometimes does) contain both and taste good.
Any guesses?
Restaurant Table Turnover
I’m on a blog break this week and all posts are reruns. The next new post will appear in the new year. This post originally appeared on 4 June 2009 on The Finance Buff. Visit the original post for comments.
Recently, my wife, friends, and I went into The Big City on a beautiful spring evening to see Leonard Cohen in concert. It was a superb show and a splendid night. The concert began at 8PM, as did many other theatrical and musical events in the area. Like many others, we were in the market for pre-theater dinner.
We arrived downtown around 6:30PM and found the restaurants packed with lines out the doors. We put our name on the list at a Malaysian establishment and were told it’d be a twenty minute wait. We killed the time with a stroll and then returned to wait for our table. By 7PM we were still waiting and I began to get concerned. I don’t like to rush through dinner but it seemed like we’d have little choice.
To take my mind off my concern, I began to observe the parties that were seated but seemed to be finishing, or had finished, their meals. They all seemed needlessly slow and casual. Some checked their watches. A few double checked that they had their theater or concert tickets. I saw an economics problem.
Those who were nearly done eating had an hour to kill before their shows. Their objective was to kill the time, which they could do by stretching out their dining experience. Those of us who were waiting to eat had the opposite problem: we would have to use that hour efficiently to eat and get to the theater on time.
The economist in me thought, “If only I could walk up to one of these slow-pokes and offer them some money to give up their table we could all be made better off.” Perhaps someone done with his meal would gladly accept $10 to move on. I probably would have been happy to spend that much to get the table more quickly. But there is no such market, not because it is illegal, but because nearly everyone would consider it gauche. We just don’t do that sort of thing, at least not in America, or not in The Big City anyway.
With more time to kill I contemplated the implications of such a market. A table auction might break out. The proprietors might participate to increase turnover. The incentive for early diners would be to linger longer in order to take advantage of the premium on tables that would occur about one hour before show time. How unpleasant and stressful I would find such a market!
Thus, I convinced myself that a market for tables based on financial transaction would not be helpful. The current market, driven by social norms and etiquette works quite well and, perhaps, could not be improved upon. As I completed my thought experiment about pre-theater diner table auctions the host led us to our seats. It was a good, albeit quick, meal and the price for the seat was just right.
Thoughts on an Ex-Turkey
This afternoon, as I have on this day for the last several years, I drove to a small organic farm in the verdant White River Valley north of Mount Rainier and picked up the Thanksgiving turkeys that I will cook for my family tomorrow. Their lives were neither nasty nor brutish. If they were short, well, two out of three ain’t bad.
Such great concern for the welfare of food animals in life and glib indifference to the fact of their death is the target of a column by philosophy professor Gary Steiner in last Sunday’s New York Times. Steiner claims that today’s conscientious omnivores simply fail to consider whether it is wrong to kill animals for human consumption. Speaking for myself, at least, I can say that Steiner is wrong. I have not failed to consider whether killing and using animals is wrong. I simply do not grant the premise.
Steiner attributes two straw-man arguments to unapologetic omnivores, one religious, and one based on intelligence. But he fails to consider that those who don’t already share his moral intuitions require no further justification than eating and using animals and their products confers enormous utility. In favor of his moral intuitions, he offers a parable by Isaac Bashevis Singer in which the protagonist recognizes the equal dignity of a scuffling mouse. It’s not an argument. But even if entertained, it cuts the opposite direction.
If we are not on a different moral plane than animals, why should we show any greater compunction about killing animals than any other animal that derives utility from doing so? If we are no better than the lion, why should we be obliged to behave as the lamb? This is one paradox of ethical vegetarianism. Perhaps there is a sound argument that resolves it. But I have not heard it from Steiner.
In the meantime, I’ll enjoy my free-range, organic, heirloom turkeys with a clear conscience–and gravy.
Pre-Theater Dinner Auctions
This post originally appeared on The Finance Buff and has been included in the Economy and Your Finances Carnival on OneMint.com.
Recently, my wife, friends, and I went into The Big City on a beautiful spring evening to see Leonard Cohen in concert. It was a superb show and a splendid night. The concert began at 8PM, as did many other theatrical and musical events in the area. Like many others, we were in the market for pre-theater dinner.
We arrived downtown around 6:30PM and found the restaurants packed with lines out the doors. We put our name on the list at a Malaysian establishment and were told it’d be a twenty minute wait. We killed the time with a stroll and then returned to wait for our table. By 7PM we were still waiting and I began to get concerned. I don’t like to rush through dinner but it seemed like we’d have little choice.
To take my mind off my concern, I began to observe the parties that were seated but seemed to be finishing, or had finished, their meals. They all seemed needlessly slow and casual. Some checked their watches. A few double checked that they had their theater or concert tickets. I saw an economics problem.
Those who were nearly done eating had an hour to kill before their shows. Their objective was to kill the time, which they could do by stretching out their dining experience. Those of us who were waiting to eat had the opposite problem: we would have to use that hour efficiently to eat and get to the theater on time.
The economist in me thought, “If only I could walk up to one of these slow-pokes and offer them some money to give up their table we could all be made better off.” Perhaps someone done with his meal would gladly accept $10 to move on. I probably would have been happy to spend that much to get the table more quickly. But there is no such market, not because it is illegal, but because nearly everyone would consider it gauche. We just don’t do that sort of thing, at least not in America, or not in The Big City anyway.
With more time to kill I contemplated the implications of such a market. A table auction might break out. The proprietors might participate to increase turnover. The incentive for early diners would be to linger longer in order to take advantage of the premium on tables that would occur about one hour before show time. How unpleasant and stressful I would find such a market!
Thus, I convinced myself that a market for tables based on financial transaction would not be helpful. The current market, driven by social norms and etiquette works quite well and, perhaps, could not be improved upon. As I completed my thought experiment about pre-theater diner table auctions the host led us to our seats. It was a good, albeit quick, meal and the price for the seat was just right.
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