Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Does high pay equal "undue inducement"? An experiment by Sandro Ambuehl

 Here's an experiment about repugnant transactions, by Sandro Ambuehl.

Ambuehl, Sandro, "An experimental test of whether financial incentives constitute undue inducement in decision-making." Nature Human Behavior (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01817-8

Abstract: Around the world, laws limit the incentives that can be paid for transactions such as human research participation, egg donation or gestational surrogacy. A key reason is concerns about ‘undue inducement’—the influential but empirically untested hypothesis that incentives can cause harm by distorting individual decision-making. Here I present two experiments (n = 671 and n = 406), including one based on a highly visceral transaction (eating insects). Incentives caused biased information search—participants offered a higher incentive to comply more often sought encouragement to do so. However, I demonstrate theoretically that such behaviour does not prove that incentives have harmful effects; it is consistent with Bayesian rationality. Empirically, although a substantial minority of participants made bad decisions, incentives did not magnify them in a way that would suggest allowing a transaction but capping incentives. Under the conditions of this experiment, there was no evidence that higher incentives could undermine welfare for transactions that are permissible at low incentives.


From the conclusions:

"Given the potentially high costs of preventing voluntary transactions, experiments paralleling those reported here should be conducted in the field. Unless their results differ drastically from the current ones, the rules and guidelines restricting incentives due to undue inducement concerns should be reconsidered."

Sunday, February 18, 2024

When "demand can't keep up with supply"

Headlines catch my eye more often than subheadlines, but the story below was the exception that proves the rule (a confusing saying in itself, until you realize that "proves" can mean "tests" as in proof reading...) 

The WSJ reports that pork producers are having a problem that is usually associated with some kinds of production in planned economies: demand can't keep up with supply of pork. It makes you wonder if prices are also an issue...

We’re Not Eating Enough Bacon, and That’s a Problem for the Economy. The American pork industry has become so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply.  By Patrick Thomas

"The American pork industry has a problem: It makes more tenderloin, ham, sausage and bacon than anybody wants to eat. 

"From giant processors to the farmers who supply them, they are in a predicament largely of their own making. They made production so efficient that demand can’t keep up with supply. "

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Thanksgiving cranberries (brought to you by the Ocean Spray cranberry cooperative)

 The WSJ has the story:

These People Are Responsible for the Cranberry Sauce You Love to Hate  By Ben Cohen

"Ocean Spray['s...] farmers are responsible for 65% of the world’s cranberries. It’s not a publicly traded company. It’s not a traditional private company, either. It’s a cooperative founded nearly a century ago and owned by roughly 700 families. 

...

“The mindset and attitude that we need to come up with something is the spirit of what farmers do,” Hayes said. 

"It’s not exactly Apple, but that kind of innovation is baked into the world’s most valuable cranberry business. Ocean Spray wouldn’t have $2 billion in annual sales if it hadn’t adapted and produced new ideas at several critical junctures in the past century.

...

"The cooperative was started in 1930 by “three maverick farmers,” as Ocean Spray calls its founders. One of those entrepreneurs was Marcus Urann, a lawyer who purchased a bog in Massachusetts and went looking for ways to preserve cranberries and sell them year-round. His experiments led him to come up with something: He invented cranberry sauce in a can. The market for canned products soon became so large, and the competition in the cranberry industry so fierce, that Urann came up with something else, banding together with two farmers to establish Ocean Spray. 

...

"The model for Ocean Spray, Dairy Farmers of America and Land O’Lakes became popular because of a 1922 federal law that exempts cooperatives from antitrust regulations, allowing farmers to pool their resources for scale and collective power."

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

The international market for squid (and how squid came to be calamari...)

China's fishing fleet plays a giant role in the international market for squid. The New Yorker has the story:

THE CRIMES BEHIND THE SEAFOOD YOU EAT.  China has invested heavily in an armada of far-flung fishing vessels, in part to extend its global influence. This maritime expansion has come at grave human cost.  By Ian Urbin in collaboration with the Outlaw Ocean Project.

"In the past few decades, partly in an effort to project its influence abroad, China has dramatically expanded its distant-water fishing fleet. Chinese firms now own or operate terminals in ninety-five foreign ports. China estimates that it has twenty-seven hundred distant-water fishing ships, though this figure does not include vessels in contested waters; public records and satellite imaging suggest that the fleet may be closer to sixty-five hundred ships. (The U.S. and the E.U., by contrast, have fewer than three hundred distant-water fishing vessels each.) 

...

" The country is largely unresponsive to international laws, and its fleet is the worst perpetrator of illegal fishing in the world, helping drive species to the brink of extinction. Its ships are also rife with labor trafficking, debt bondage, violence, criminal neglect, and death. “The human-rights abuses on these ships are happening on an industrial and global scale,” Steve Trent, the C.E.O. of the Environmental Justice Foundation, said.

...

"Vessels can now stay at sea for more than two years without returning to land. As a result, global seafood consumption has risen fivefold.

"Squid fishing, or jigging, in particular, has grown with American appetites. Until the early seventies, Americans consumed squid in tiny amounts, mostly at niche restaurants on the coasts. But as overfishing depleted fish stocks the federal government encouraged fishermen to shift their focus to squid, whose stocks were still robust. In 1974, a business-school student named Paul Kalikstein published a master’s thesis asserting that Americans would prefer squid if it were breaded and fried. Promoters suggested calling it “calamari,” the Italian word, which made it sound more like a gourmet dish. (“Squid” is thought to be a sailors’ variant of “squirt,” a reference to squid ink.) By the nineties, chain restaurants across the Midwest were serving squid. Today, Americans eat a hundred thousand tons a year.

...

"China has invested heavily in its fleet. The country now catches more than five billion pounds of seafood a year through distant-water fishing, the biggest portion of it squid. China’s seafood industry, which is estimated to be worth more than thirty-five billion dollars, accounts for a fifth of the international trade, and has helped create fifteen million jobs. The Chinese state owns much of the industry—including some twenty per cent of its squid ships—and oversees the rest through the Overseas Fisheries Association. Today, the nation consumes more than a third of the world’s fish."


Saturday, August 12, 2023

Repugnance watch: British satire considers cellular agriculture in human meat

In The Conversation:

The British Miracle Meat: how banning repugnant choices obscures the real issue of poverty  by Renaud Foucart

"A provocative Channel 4 satirical programme, The British Miracle Meat, has led to hundreds of complaints to media regulator Ofcom. The mockumentary depicts ordinary Britons facing the cost of living crisis selling thin slices of their tissue to an innovative factory that uses it to grow lab meat.

The show was inspired by Jonathan Swift’s satire A Modest Proposal (1726), in which the author of Gulliver’s Travels suggests poor Irish people sell their children for food. The Channel 4 show’s creators wanted to make viewers think about the effects of the cost of living crisis, as well as the future of food.

Viewers were left baffled, however, seeing the show as promoting cannibalism. In the UK, it is illegal to sell human organs and other tissues. But in economics, we teach our students the theory of “repugnant markets” – those in which disgust or distaste lead governments to ban certain transactions rather than tackling the underlying economic reasons for them."

Sunday, June 18, 2023

Black market for mustard in Bogotá

 The NYT has the story:

Colombia’s Mustard Lovers Grow Desperate Amid Saucy Shortage of Dijon. Colombians are scrambling to find the beloved French condiment as a new health law removes it from shelves  by Genevieve Glatsky

"In Colombia, a new illicit product is on the rise. Desperate consumers are sneaking it in suitcases from abroad, hoarding it in their homes, paying outrageous prices online and lining up at clandestine locations to buy it.

"The contraband? Dijon mustard.

"A new health law intended to improve Colombians’ diets — which are heavy on meat and fried food — has led to the disappearance of a host of fare from market shelves, including the French delicacy of the condiment world.

...

"Inspired by a push by the Pan American Health Organization to address high rates of cardiovascular disease in the region, Colombia’s Health Ministry in 2020 imposed limits on high-sodium products, with the measure taking effect last November.

...

"Mustard must have less than 817 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams. A jar of Grey Poupon Dijon mustard has nearly three times that ratio."

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Markets in human milk, placenta, and feces

I've blogged earlier about markets for breast milk, but here is an article that considers them also in connection with placenta and feces: 

The Law of Self-Eating—Milk, Placenta, and Feces Consumption by Mathilde Cohen, Law, Technology and Humans, 3(1), pp.109-122.

"Milk, Placenta, and Feces 

"Since antiquity at least, there have been markets in human milk. Until the twentieth century, they relied primarily on wet nurses hired (or forced) to nurse infants directly on the breast.14Ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pharmacopeias called for human milk as a therapeutic substance to treat burns as well as ailments affecting the ears, eyes, and genitals.15Traditional Chinese medicine  employed  human  milk  in  a  variety  of  preparations  to  cure  diseases,  such  as  debilitation,  arthritis,  rheumatism, voicelessness, amenorrhea, eye infections, and poisoning.16

"Today, markets in human milk continue to thrive.17Such markets assume two main forms: 1) informal markets through which people give or sell their milk peer-to-peer via their social circles or online; and 2) formal markets whereby profit or non-profit organizations, such as milk banks and commercial human milk companies, collect, process, and distribute milk to hospitals and a few outpatients for a fee. Human milk is sought after by three main categories of consumers: infants, adults, and researchers.

...

"Placenta

"Human placentas are used for spiritual, nutritional, medical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic purposes. Placentophagy, or the act of eating one’s placenta after childbirth, has been practiced in the Global North since the beginningof the home-and natural-birth movement in the 1970s.22It is not an unprecedented phenomenon. Indeed, historian Jacques Gélis reported that:

    "Placentophagy, the custom of eating the newly expelled placenta,     has existed at various times amongst people of very different         cultures. From the sixteenth century onwards, European travellers to     the new world were much struck by this custom, which they         unfailingly reported.23

"According to Gélis, placentophagy was also practiced in Europe; however, “doctors and churchmen  were  more  and  more repelled, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, by this custom . . . so ‘repugnant to humanity."  In the past decade, placentophagy has reemerged as a mainstream practice in the U.S., where it has been described as “anew  American  birth ritual.25

"Few randomized controlled trials have corroborated the benefits of placentophagy. However, placenta eaters are motivated by the hope of obtaining nourishment, hastening post-birth recovery, warding off postpartum depression, facilitating lactation, as well as spiritual motives, such as connecting with the baby and the environment. Placentas can be eaten raw or cooked."

...

"Minimally processed placental membranes have significant commercial and medical potential to treat, among other indications, eye diseases and acute and chronic wounds. The for-profit American company MiMedx also “grinds up amniotic tissue from placenta into an injectable product to treat tendinitis, strains, and other ailments.”29Much  like  human  milk,placentas  are increasingly seen as reservoirs of stem cells and thus are attractive to the field of regenerative and tissue engineering, and, more recently, as potential sources for treating coronavirus patients."

...

"Feces

"Excrement is typically regarded as disgusting; however, the medical use of human and animal feces has a long record. Heinrichvon Staden notes that:

"Most prominent among the ingredients in the Hippocratic pharmacological ‘dirt’ arsenal is the excrement of various animals. ..  .  the  belief  in  the  therapeutic  usefulness  of  excrement  was  shared  by  ancient  Mesopotamian,  Egyptian,  Greek,  Chinese, Talmudic, and Indian healers. . . . There is, therefore, abundant evidence that . . . ‘excrement therapy’—was a cross-cultural phenomenon extant already in the ancient world.32

"In Chinese medicine, human feces were used 1,700 years ago as a “suspension by mouth for patients who had food poisoning or severe diarrhea.”33

"Fast forward to the twentieth century, the community of microorganisms that dwell in the human gut has been shown to play a crucial role in human health. Fecal microbiota transplantation (“FMT”) was first identified in the modern scientific literature in 195834and has rapidly grown in popularity since the early 2010s. FMT consists in the delivery of processed stool from a healthy donor into the intestinal tract of a sick person via an enema, colonoscopy, naso-duodenal tube, capsules, or other means. As microbiologist Mark Smith and his colleagues noted, “the goal is to displace pathogenic microbes from the intestine by re-establishing a healthy microbial community.”35FMT  has  proven  strikingly  effective  in  treating Clostridium  difficile, a potentially lethal infection that most commonly affects older adults in hospitals or in long-term care facilities, typically after the  use  of  antibiotics."

...

"Despite these differences, milk, placenta, and feces share two sets of core similarities that justify their grouping in this analysis. First, milk, placenta, and feces are tissues that can be severed from the body without harm or risk of harm. Notably, milk and feces  are  replenishable  bodily  substances,  while  the  placenta  is  a  transient  organ  expelled  from  the  body  during  childbirth. Thus, far from constituting “corpse medicine”42(i.e., medicine that uses human materials obtained from dead bodies), the use of such substances can be characterized as living food or medicine. There are also no adverse health effects associated with the act of donation. Quite the opposite, good health requires that people eject the milk, placenta, and feces they produce from their bodies.  

...

"Second, these three products have similar channels of circulation, including via private, domestic consumption, peer-to-peer markets, medical and research institutions, and global markets in foods, drugs, and cosmetics. This wide scope for circulation is possible due to the potential for DIY treatments alongside higher tech uses involving special processing and expertise. Milk, placenta, and feces are collected, processed, and distributed by banks similar to other tissue banks; however, aspiring consumers can  also  obtain  milk,  placenta,  and  feces  and  use  them  on  their  own.  Unlike  blood  transfusion  or  organ  transplantation,  no professional expertise or complicated equipment is necessary to achieve basic forms of consumption. Milk, placenta, and fecescan be obtained directly from their producersafter some screening (or not) and consumed as is or minimally processed at home. Conversely, bio-banks systematically screen donors, subjecting them and their samples to a battery of tests, before processing their  products  in  various  ways;  for  example,  by freezing,  thawing,  pooling,  enriching,  freeze-drying  (in  the  case  of  milk), irradiating (in the  case of placenta), encapsulating (in the  case of stool). This is a fast-evolving field.

...

"No uniform perspective  has emerged on the  legal  classification of the  various body materials consumed by humans. In this respect, milk, placenta, and feces provide a case in point, as they do not fit neatly within the standard legal classifications for comparable products, such as foods, drugs, tissues, cosmetic ingredients, or waste products. Different countries have adopted contrasting legal regimes—or no regimes at all—to regulate these substances.

...

"In  the  so-called  post-colonial  era,  the  law  of  self-consumption  illustrates  the broader phenomenon of a “jurisprudence of disgust,” to use an expression that Alison Young developed to describe the legal censorship of provocative or “obscene” artwork.71A  significant  dimension  of  contemporary  law  making  can  be  characterized  as  a  response  to  what  is  considered disgusting around or among us, which reflects an endeavor to confine and tame what repulses us. This is particularly obvious in the context of what legal scholar Kim Krawiec calls “taboo trades” (and economist Alvin Roth dubs “repugnant markets”); that is, the exchanges and transactions of products that are considered culturally immoral and uncaring, such as those involving organs, babies, sex, drugs, and corruption."

Monday, March 13, 2023

Artificial breast milk may be on the cellular agriculture horizon

 Cellular agriculture isn't just aspiring to produce meat; now breast milk is queueing up as a (still distant) possibility.

The New Yorker has the story:

Biomilq and the New Science of Artificial Breast Milk. The biotech industry takes on infant nutrition. By Molly Fischer

"New ventures in the world’s oldest food reflect our era’s enthusiasm for tech-based solutions to perennial human problems."

...

"The process of making breast milk in a human body begins during pregnancy, when hormonal changes prompt mammary cells to multiply. After delivery, two of the pregnancy hormones—estrogen and progesterone—drop off, while prolactin remains. This spurs the mammary cells to draw carbohydrates, amino acids, and fatty acids from the mother’s bloodstream, and to convert these raw materials into the macronutrients required to feed a baby. In Biomilq’s case, the mammary cells come from milk and breast-tissue samples provided by donors, and the cells multiply in vitro under the care of a team of scientists tasked with keeping them “happy.” The cells are then moved to a hollow-fibre bioreactor—a large tube filled with hundreds of tiny porous tubes that are covered in a layer of the lab-grown cells. As nutrients flow through the small tubes, the cells secrete milk components into the large tube, where they collect.

"Describing the results as “milk components,” not “milk,” is a crucial distinction. Biomilq has demonstrated that its technology can produce many of the macronutrients found in milk, including proteins, complex carbohydrates, and bioactive lipids, but it cannot yet create them in the same ratios and quantities necessary to approximate breast milk. Other elements of breast milk are beyond the scope of the company’s ambition. A mother’s antibodies, for example, are present in her milk, but they aren’t produced by the mammary cells, and, because Biomilq’s product will come from a sterile lab environment, it won’t offer any kind of beneficial gut bacteria.

...

"“It’s as fraught as abortion,” Jacqueline Wolf, an emeritus historian of medicine at Ohio University and the author of a history of breast-feeding and formula in the U.S., aptly titled “Don’t Kill Your Baby,” told me. “There’s almost nothing that raises more social issues than infant feeding.” Wolf dates the emergence of what became known as “the feeding question” to the eighteen-seventies, when mothers across the country began raising concerns about their milk supply. “The big change that was sparked by urbanization and industrialization was suddenly having to pay attention to a mechanical clock,” she said. Earlier infant-care manuals had advised feeding a baby when he showed signs of hunger. Now medical advice put infants on feeding schedules as rigid as railway timetables. But, as Wolf pointed out, “to build up a milk supply, you need to put the baby to the breast often, especially in the first few months.” The women complaining that they lacked sufficient milk were not, as one theory had it, suffering from the ill effects of too much education during puberty. Rather, they were following advice unwittingly engineered to fail.  

...

"By the nineteen-forties, most mothers were giving birth in hospitals, where orderly routine—babies in nurseries, bottles on schedules—often took priority over the personal attention required to initiate breast-feeding. 

...

"Commercial infant formula from brands such as Similac and Enfamil took off in the fifties—a modern amenity that sat comfortably alongside Betty Crocker cake mix and Cheez Whiz. (Formula had also made it easier for women to work outside the home.) At the same time, the decade saw the rise of some of breast-feeding’s most influential evangelists. The La Leche League was founded in 1956 by seven Catholic housewives in the Chicago suburbs who wanted to create a forum for breast-feeding mothers to share questions and advice. La Leche occupied a tricky cultural position, at once radical and conservative: on the one hand, it encouraged women to claim control of their bodies and to defy voices of institutional authority; on the other, the intended result of this rebellion was a world in which a mother’s place was unequivocally at home.

...

"Meanwhile, the alternative to breast-feeding—formula—began to take on a sinister light. An industry that had presented itself as a best friend to mid-century mothers showed a different face in its dealings abroad. New reports linked Nestlé’s aggressive marketing of formula to infant deaths in the Global South, making the case that the company’s product had been pushed on families who lacked the resources (such as clean water) to bottle-feed safely. Instead of a scientifically perfected modern convenience, formula became “The Baby Killer,” in the words of one influential pamphlet. A years-long global boycott of Nestlé ensued. In 1981, the World Health Organization adopted a resolution that aimed to ban the promotion of substitutes for breast milk. The U.S. was the only country in opposition. (Today, Nestlé stresses its compliance with W.H.O. code.)

...

"products intended to provide complete infant nutrition (that is, formulas) must clear more hurdles than other foods. A new product must, among other things, undergo what are essentially clinical trials, which can involve recruiting hundreds of babies to participate.

...

"The distribution of human breast milk has traditionally taken place at nonprofit milk banks, and recent attempts to introduce commerce into this transaction have stirred controversy. In 2014, a company called Medolac, selling shelf-stable human milk, announced that it would expand its milk-bank program in Black communities in Detroit. The plan was scrapped after backlash from community groups and activists, who called out the company for its low pay in comparison with its pricing and for reinforcing historical injustice. (At the time, the company denied allegations of exploitation.) Biomilq seems keen to avoid any impression of similar obliviousness. Egger told me that the company has encouraged employees to read Andrea Freeman’s “Skimmed,” an account of racial inequities perpetrated by the formula industry. And even as Biomilq describes itself as “women-owned” and “mother-centered,” it also notes that “lactation is not only for cisgender biological mothers.” 

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Related posts on breast milk.

Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Donkey meat for sale on Amazon: is a donkey a horse in California?

 Is a donkey a horse in California, where state law prohibits the sale of horse meat for human consumption. In particular, the 1998 law states:

"This measure prohibits both the slaughter of horses for human consumption and the sale of horsemeat for human consumption in California. In addition, horses could not be sent out of California for slaughter in other states or countries for human consumption. Under the measure horses include any horse, pony, burro, or mule."

I'm neither a lawyer nor a linguist, but, for what it's worth, "burro" is the Spanish word for donkey.

Wired has the story:

Amazon Has a Donkey Meat Problem. "The online retailer sells products meant for human consumption that contain donkey meat. A new lawsuit claims that’s illegal in California."

"A legal complaint filed in California last week by the law firm Evans & Page on behalf of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, a nonprofit, claims Amazon’s continued sale of these donkey-based products is more than distasteful—it may be illegal.  

"The Center alleges that Amazon’s distribution and sale of ejiao violates an obscure California animal welfare law called the Prohibition of Horse Slaughter and Sale of Horsemeat for Human Consumption Act. The 1998 ballot initiative, known at the time of its passage as Proposition Six, makes the sale of horsemeat for human consumption a crime on the grounds that horses, like dogs and cats, are not food animals and deserve similar protections. The Center is arguing that, under the statute, horsemeat is defined to mean any part of any equine, including donkeys. 

"For Frank Rothschild, director of the Center for Contemporary Equine Studies, the law is clear: Donkeys are equines, and the sale of ejiao for human consumption in California is illegal. “We are a scientific organization and not in the business of national advocacy. We want the defendants to stop selling ejiao because it’s illegal,” he says. “That’s the law.”

"Bruce Wagman, an attorney unaffiliated with the complaint who has practiced animal law in California for 30 years, says that while the center presents a reasonable argument, it’s unclear whether a judge would agree because the law’s wording leaves room for interpretation. “Horsemeat is not really defined in the text of the relevant statute,” he says. “But the spirit of Proposition Six is absolutely to prevent equines, including donkeys, from being slaughtered for people to consume. Period.”

"The complaint demands that Amazon stop selling ejiao immediately. If a judge ultimately finds Amazon in violation of the law, the state of California could fine Amazon for each sale. This type of regulatory pressure is not unprecedented. In 2018, prosecutors in three California counties accused Amazon of violating a 2004 state law banning sales of foie gras. In a settlement, Amazon agreed not to sell the fatty goose liver in California and paid $100,000 in civil penalties. "


HT: Jacob Leshno

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My other posts on consumption of horse meat, and foie gras.

Saturday, March 4, 2023

Illegal to sell fur coats in California

 The NY Times has the story. (And you still can't eat horsemeat here.)

Fur Sales Are Illegal in California. Does Anyone Care?.The popularity of fur products had been diminishing in the state even before the new ban. By Max Berlinger

"a law banning the sale and manufacture of luxury pelts like mink, sable, chinchilla, lynx, fox, rabbit and beaver that went into effect in California in January has so far been largely met with a shrug 

...

“There was a bigger ripple when Chanel stopped selling crocodile.” 

"With California’s mild climate and eco-conscious reputation, some have said that a ban on fur sales in the state is more of a symbolic gesture than practical measure.

"The statewide ban, the first of its kind in the country, codifies what was a growing movement happening at the city level in recent years. (Los Angeles, West Hollywood, San Francisco and Berkeley had similar bans before.) This law extends the city bans already in effect in some areas across the country’s most populous state, one that, despite certain clichés, encompasses a wide variety of landscapes and political affiliations."

**********

Here's the bill, California Assembly Bill 44, which forbids sale or manufacture of new fur products (but permits sale of existing garments):

"This bill would make it unlawful to sell, offer for sale, display for sale, trade, or otherwise distribute for monetary or nonmonetary consideration a fur product, as defined, in the state. The bill would also make it unlawful to manufacture a fur product in the state for sale. The bill would exempt from these prohibitions used fur products, as defined, fur products used for specified purposes, and any activity expressly authorized by federal law."

Friday, February 10, 2023

Human evolution in the last 12,000 years, in PNAS

My loose impression is that, not so long ago, scholars of human evolution discounted recent changes in the human genome, pointing out that maybe the frequency of lactose intolerance had been altered by the domestication of cattle, goats, and sheep, but suggesting that recent changes (i.e. since the invention of agriculture) were rare. This may have been an anti-racism perspective, or it may be that new data have changed this view, but indeed it seems to have changed.

Gene changes in recent milennia offer a window on how human patterns of interaction, regarding food acquisition and preparation, and communal living, may even cause changes in human biology.  

Here's a special feature on the subject, at the PNAS:

Special Feature: The Past 12,000 Years of Behavior, Adaptation, and Evolution Shaped Who We Are Today

"The authors of this Special Feature focus on challenges pertaining to dietary and nutritional quality and adequacy, resource inequality, interpersonal conflict and warfare, climate change, population trends, demographic transitions, migration, mobility, infectious disease and the rise of novel pathogens, and the transformative circumstances of human biology over the last 12,000 years.

Monday, January 2, 2023

Synthetic biology and the ethics of eating (Virgina Postrel in the WSJ)

 Remarkable changes will keep coming.  Here's Virginia Postrel in the WSJ on how changes in the food supply might influence both repugnance towards meat eating and towards technology:

Synthetic Meat Will Change the Ethics of Eating. Consumers will soon be able to dine on chicken and other animal proteins grown in a factory, upending the way we think about nature and technology  By Virginia Postrel

"Most Americans aren’t about to give up chicken, but we’d rather not dwell on where it comes from. In the not-too-distant future, however, the trade-off between conscience—or ick factors—and appetite may no longer be relevant. Instead of slaughtering animals, we’ll get our meat from cells grown in brewery-like vats, with no blood and guts. In November, that science-fiction vision came a crucial step closer to reality when the Food and Drug Administration gave its OK to the slaughter-free chicken from Upside Foods, a San Francisco-based startup originally known as Memphis Meats. The company must still work with the Agriculture Department to establish inspection procedures and win labeling approval. It plans to first offer the meat to high-end restaurants.

...

"Synbio executives talk like animal lovers and environmental activists. But synbio is still a form of engineering, a science of the artificial. As such, its ethical appeal represents a significant cultural shift. Since the first Earth Day in 1970, businesses large and small have emerged from the conviction that “natural” foods, fibers, cosmetics, and other products are better for people and the planet. It’s an attitude that harks back to the 18th- and 19th-century Romantics: The natural is safe and pure, authentic and virtuous. The artificial is tainted and deceptive, a dangerous fake. Gory details aside, the “factory” in factory farming makes it sound inherently bad.

"Synthetic biology upends those assumptions, raising environmental and ethical standards by making them easier and more enjoyable to achieve."

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Some commentators on her WSJ article criticized it as "woke propaganda."

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Earlier:

Tuesday, November 22, 2022