“Food people need to pick their issues,” says Tyler Cowen, an
economist, blogger, and connoisseur of cheap, ethnic eats in the
Washington, D.C., metro area. “I think the issues that are important to
pick are meat and antibiotics.”
Issues that are not important, in Cowen’s view? Eating local, going organic, eliminating GMO crops.
Cowen’s new book, An Economist Gets Lunch,
takes a series of unorthodox stands on the best way to eat well while
improving the world. It reads like a how-to guide for adopting Cowen’s
particular brand of conscientious eating and tosses aside certain
closely-held tenets of foodies and environmentalists. Locavorism gets
the hardest rap, and agribusiness an unusual amount of praise.
It’s occasionally aggravating, particularly since Cowen often cites details without research to back them up. (In the great dish-washing debate,
for instance, he advocates for hand- over machine-washing but
apparently wasn’t aware of the energy and water-saving advantages of the
dishwasher.) Still, it’s worth considering the points on which he
aligns with traditional food gospel and the points on which he differs.
Taken together, they offer a reasonable, alternate vision for how to
approach these issues.
