Freakonomics Radio - 53. How American Food Got So Bad

Episode Date: December 13, 2011

Tyler Cowen points fingers. There's plenty of blame to go around.

From APM, American Public Media, and WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio on Marketplace. Here's the host of Marketplace, Kai Risdahl. Time now for a little bit of Freakonomics Radio, that moment in the broadcast every couple of weeks where we talk to Stephen Dubner, the co-author of the books and the blog of the same name. It is the hidden side of everything, as it usually is. Dubner, it's good to talk to you. Good to talk to you, Kai. And I have a question for you, if you don't mind. Of course. That's kind of the way these things go, isn't it? On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate America's food? I'm curious to know.

America's food? Oh, okay. Big topics. 7.3. Yeah. all right. So is there a right answer or a wrong answer? No, there's no right answer. I was curious to know because you know why? We love to complain about our food. Yes. And for those who like to complain, there's a new book coming out called An Economist Gets Lunch by Tyler Cowen.

And he explains how, he puts it, American food got bad. And some of the explanations are really interesting. For starters, he blames prohibition. A lot of good restaurants, they make a lot of the profits on the drinks. When you shut down their ability to sell wine, beer, other drinks, basically it put them all out of business. Those quality restaurants, within a period of a year or two, they vanished. But prohibition was like 80 years ago, man.

It is true. But many profound effects have distant causes, as I've tried to teach you, Grace Hopper. So, no, actually, it's not that. Anyway, but, you know, we did bounce back. But what we did is we bounced back in volume of restaurants. But a lot of them were diners and cafeterias. Cowan says that we began to cater more than any other nation to our children's palates. Compared to a lot of Asian cultures or European cultures, when it comes to the food scene,

very often in America, the child is in charge. And that, again, means soft and sweet and gooey. So you've got soft, sweet, and gooey taking center stage, plus, Cowan argues, a lack of new flavors. Now, can you guess why we didn't get any new flavors? A lack of new flavors. No, I got nothing. Immigration. That's the argument. Or really the lack of immigration.

So the Immigration Act of 1924 set quotas in this country that weren't lifted until the 60s. More immigration generally means more food innovation. You know, everything, spices, ingredients, know-how, strategies. And we weren't getting a lot of either of those. Well, let me throw another one at you, though, just for the heck of it. What about convenience, right? We were in the 40s and 50s, a more mobile society. We wanted convenience.

We wanted frozen. We want to drive through all that good stuff. That's exactly right. And Cowan, he says that this is interesting. It's kind of a byproduct of World War II, which is that during the war, out of necessity, we had to learn to can and package and transport food on a much bigger scale than ever before. And then when the war ended, we kind of, we liked our spam. We hung on to it and all those processes that came along with it. What's interesting, though, is that in Europe, World War II had exactly the opposite effect. It shut down a lot of transportation. It shut down a lot of borders. So people ate very locally. They would grow things in their gardens. You know, they might even eat the family pet, do things that we might not find that tasty or that pleasant.

But the result in Europe was to make things more local, not less. All right. So now that I think about it, the family pet is probably like a cow or a pig, not Fido, right? Depends on your family. I can't speak for your family. And local makes sense, too, right? It does. And, you know, American food now, Cowan and just about everybody else argues, is on the upswing. And a big part of that is this local movement, the idea that we should all eat more local food, maybe all local food, which might taste better often. But as a solution to the food future, the idea

of feeding more and more people around the world nutritious and affordable food, Cowan argues that the locavore movement is a little bit snobbish and a lot impractical. The biggest food problem in the world today is that agricultural productivity is slowing down. And for a lot of the world, food prices are going up. And for that, we need more business technology and innovation, not locavoreism. You are going to get such hate mail, can I tell you? Well, I think we should direct the hate mail to you this time after the turkey breast incident, if you don't mind. I'm still hearing about that.

Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics.com is the website. A couple of weeks, huh? Talk to you soon, Kai. Thanks.