food

Business Insider: The Secret To Getting A Great Meal Is Placing The Right Order

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This article originally appeared in Business Insider

When an economist goes out for lunch, he doesn’t think twice about putting the waiter on the spot. He asks what the server likes to eat, then flaunts some knowledge of the cuisine.

The idea, says economist Tyler Cowen, is “to ask in a way that [the waiter] will believe that you’re serious and informed and won’t steer you down the wrong the path.” It’s his tried-and-true method for avoiding dull meals.

“Half the dishes there will be so-so or average,” says Cowen, so ask the waiter point-blank, “What are your specialized regional dishes? You want to get the waiter out of the mode of viewing you as a mainstream consumer in white bread America.”

Cowen prides himself on eating dangerously and encourages consumers to visit ethnic hole-in-the-walls, where they’re almost guaranteed to order something surprising. You won’t get flavorful bi bim bap at corporate chains like California Pizza Kitchen, so he makes it a point to suss out his neighborhood’s ethnic haunts. “Typically, they’re in clusters,” he says, “The competition forces them to be good.”

Avoiding tourist haunts and staying closer to the suburbs are two other ways to find great joints. Think: Indian cuisine in Astoria, Queens versus “Indian Row” in New York City’s touristy East Village. “You can tell an ethnic place is good when it’s hard to get to and local people are eating it,” he says.

The author of ”An Economist Gets Lunch” first made a name for himself with his blog, Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, where for the past two decades he’s written on all things food and reviewed the best gems in Northern Virginia from Ricos Tacos Moya II to Bangkok Golden Thai.

Yet Cowen admits he wasn’t always a foodie. Growing up in Northern New Jersey, his parents mainly ate pizza and hamburgers, so it wasn’t until he moved to Europe that the economist finally broke from tradition.

“How you approach food is related to how you approach life,” he says. “It’s the notion of being curious. The blend of the quest, taste, surprise and interaction is that when they all come together, it’s just magical. It often happens when you travel but it can happen at home.”

The New York Times: World Hunger, The Problem Left Behind

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times

The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture.

The green revolution has slowed since the early 1990s, and it has become harder to bolster crop yields, as I have discussed in my book, “An Economist Gets Lunch.” And recent research by Dani Rodrik, a professorof international political economy at Harvard, indicates that agricultural productivity improvements are among the hardest to transmit from one nation to another.

For all its importance to human well-being, agriculture seems to be one of the lagging economic sectors of the last two decades. That means the problem of hunger is flaring up again, as the World Bank and several United Nations agencies have recently warned.

Consider Africa, which is often considered to have turned a corner and to be headed toward steady growth. The expansion of the African middle class and the decline in child mortality rates are both quite real, but the advances have not been balanced — and agriculture lags behind.

In a recent address, Michael Lipton, an economist and research professor at Sussex University in Britain, offered a sobering look at Africa’s agricultural productivity. He suggests that Rwanda and Ghana are gaining, but that most of the continent is not. Production and calorie intake per capita don’t seem to be higher today than they were in the early 1960s. It remains an issue how Africa’s growing population will be fed.

One huge problem is that the price of fertilizer in Africa is often two to four times the world price. Yet African soil and rainfall make much of the continent subpar for growing food. In other words, the region that probably needs fertilizer the most also has to pay the most for it, and much of Africa doesn’t have the prosperity to make this an easy stretch. The high prices result in large part from infrastructure and trade networks that aren’t developed enough to create a low-cost and competitive market. And the problem could worsen if economic troubles in China distract it from its beneficial investments in African roads and harbors.

On top of all that, many African nations have unhelpful policies toward agriculture. Malawi, for instance, subjects corn to periodic export and import restrictions as well as to price controls, all of which thwart development of a well-functioning market. When market speculators save corn in anticipation of greater scarcity, they may be punished by law. These restrictions of market incentives exacerbate the basic supply problems.

Such bottlenecks are a challenge for the future of the African economies. For comparison, the rapid expansions of economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were all preceded by significant progress in agricultural productivity. In these countries, higher yields created a domestic surplus for savings and investment, encouraged small-scale entrepreneurship, fostered a sense of economic security and helped the middle class expand.

In contrast, much of Africa’s growth has come from resource wealth — such as oil, diamonds, gold and strategic minerals — and, unfortunately, resource prices are notoriously volatile. Resource wealth is less well-suited to supporting sustainable democracies, because it tends to be connected with state-backed privileges and other legally entrenched entities. The Norwegian government manages its oil wealth just fine, for example, but autocracies and fledgling democracies are more likely to be corrupted.

There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent studyin the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.

WHAT to do? First, put food problems higher on the agenda. In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture. Even in the economics profession, the field of agricultural economics is often viewed as secondary in status.

Second, the United States government should stop subsidizing its own corn-based biofuels, mainly ethanol. Today, about 40 percent of America’s field corn goes into biofuels, thanks to a subsidy and regulatory policy dating from 2005. With virtual unanimity, experts condemn these subsidies as driving up food prices, damaging land use and costing the taxpayers money. Once the energy costs of producing the biofuels are taken into account, it doesn’t even appear that this policy helps slow climate change. It has become a form of crony capitalism, at great global expense.

Today, we have two presidential candidates who both look a bit short on grand vision and transformational change. Perhaps they could look to helping solve the food problem — and making a big dent in global hunger — as America’s next beneficial legacy.

The world is not yet in that happy situation where “what’s for dinner?” is a boring question.

Inland Empire Weekly: An Economist Gets Lunch Spells Out the Manifesto for A New Food Revolution

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This article originally appeared in Inland Empire Weekly


The fridge was empty the other day.

No milk, no OJ, no breakfast fixin‘s. You were out of bread, cereal, snacky stuff and lunchmeat. There was barely a crumb for supper, either, so it was off to the grocery store for you.

Yes, the fridge was empty the other day. And now your wallet is.

You have to eat, and you’d rather eat well. So how do you do it with economy in mind when the economy stinks? Grab An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen and get some lessons.

Every now and then, says author Cowen, the world needs a “special kind of revolution” in food. It happened with Upton Sinclair, it occurred with the perfection of frozen food and the invention of the microwave. Today’s changes will “happen only gradually,” but it’s possible to eat better now “for your own good and for everyone else’s.”

First of all, throw out all the fads: delete “locavore” from your vocabulary and forget about “slow food.” Eating locally is not always, economically speaking, a good idea and it’s not always the best choice, environmentally. You can, furthermore, eat fast food cheaply and nutritiously, as long as you’re willing to expand your definition of “fast food.”

What’s important to remember, he says, is that we’re eating better than ever before. Yes, obesity is a problem here, but we aren’t starving. Many world-citizens can’t make that claim.

To find “better eating,” Cowen says to remember this principle: “Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative and the demanders are informed.” This, he says, will help you make every meal count and it will help you understand that the best food doesn’t have to empty your wallet.

Remember that ambiance and presentation often have nothing to do with the taste of the food. Shop at ethnic markets and don’t be intimidated. Keep in mind that politics has a lot to do with the price of what you eat. Become educated about “cross-subsidy” food and learn to spot a trendy restaurant before it becomes trendy. And remember that much of what we produce and you eat has economic and environmental-domino effects on every other country in the world.

No doubt about it, An Economist Gets Lunch is a joyful book. Author Tyler Cowen is funny and flippant, and his wry observations are a delight for foodies and everyday consumers alike.

The problem comes if you’re expecting a lot about economy here, because there isn’t much. Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University, but his food critic side-interest consumes the majority of this book. That doesn’t make it bad in any way, but it might disappoint readers who expect something more serious and less edible.

Still, I definitely think this is a book that might change the way both kinds of readers perceive that which is on their plates. What’s in An Economist Gets Lunch will, in fact, give you lots to chew on.


Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: An Arab Spring Economics Recipe: Add High Food Prices to Trade Barriers, Get Revolutions

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This article originally appeared in Arabic Knowledge@Wharton

Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, has recently published a book called An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies about how you can apply basic theories of economics to get the best meal for your money.

On a serious note, he tells Arabic Knowledge@Wharton, most people don’t realize there is not a shortage of food, but rather too many poor people unable to pay for it. Cowen also discusses how food prices and trade barriers in the Middle East helped drive the Arab revolutions.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows:

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: You state that food is a result of capitalist supply and demand. It seems logical and simple, but people don’t think about food in those terms. How did you come up with that?

Cowen: I grew up as a kid reading classical economic works by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and James Mill. Those are the origins of economics, as we all know. For obvious reasons, they’re obsessed with food. That’s almost all they write about because that’s what the economy was about back then. If you have a background in classical economics, the notion that economics is about food comes very naturally. Maybe the world has forgotten that somewhat.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: In the Middle East, eating a more Westernized diet is a sign of worldliness but it may not be as healthy as eating traditional meals. How did the idea of local eating transform into a lower-status symbol?

Cowen: There’s a class division in a lot of those societies. You either do things that are Western to show you have money, but it’s not necessarily healthy. I think if they became a little more obsessed with, say Indian or Chinese food, they’ll do better. There are issues with diabetes and obesity in many of these wealthier Gulf nations. They also tend not to be physically active because that also has a stigma. So it’s one thing to eat if you’re physically active, you can get away with doing so much more.

Also, they have servants, and they import labor. A lot of people are just not working; they don’t have to work. That’s a lethal combination. And the idea of, “Oh, I’m going to go to the gym,” like they say in America, it’s not the same there. It’s too much like work.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: You point out that there is no shortage of food in the world. But there is a shortage of money for poor people to buy the food. It seems almost ironic. What are the factors that affect this polar phenomenon?

Cowen: If you look at wheat and rice, there have been price spikes over the last five years and they’ve made food a lot harder for poor people to afford. The so-called “Green Revolution” has somewhat slowed down. This is an unreported story. Crop yields are stagnant. It isn’t a problem we can solve overnight but it’s really one of the biggest problems in the world. It hardly gets any publicity. But for poor people in India, the Middle East and parts of Africa, it really matters.

Some of the problems are we don’t have enough trade. It could be either legal barriers or just costly to transport or trade things. If there could be a shortage of rice in one place, it actually not that easy to ship a lot of rice in there because of bad roads and so on.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: So if countries worked on improving the transportation infrastructure, that would lower food prices in some parts of the world?

Cowen: Exactly, that would do a lot to feed people. Again, it sounds much more mundane but it’s more important than what people in the food world usually talk about.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: So when companies like Wal-Mart bring their logistics ability to Africa, it actually could be a good thing for the poor people of Africa?

Cowen: It’s exactly what we need more of. Yes.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Yet there’s a fear Wal-Mart will put the smaller stores out of business.

Cowen: Yes, they do so sometimes, but they do so by charging lower prices. It makes it more accessible and more reliable. It’s not just the pricing at any one point and time. It’s what happens in the very worst periods. Companies like Wal-Mart are very, very good at keeping up supply and being regular.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Are there other things that people can do to feed the poor people in the Middle East, especially in the Arab nations that have undergone revolutions?

Cowen: Well, they have very bad economic policies; it’s hard to know where to start. They tend to have bad energy and bad water policies. They overuse energy and they overuse water and protect their domestic farmers. It creates an unholy triad of subsidies with water, food and energy in a way that’s environmentally unsustainable. They should rely more on free trade. They tend not to trust it and I understand why, given their histories. But what they’re doing now isn’t really working.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Do you think people recognize that when they’re forming the new governments?

Cowen: I think very often they do. There are a lot of sophisticated people in the governments. But that doesn’t mean they have the power to set things straight.

Plus, it depends on which country in the Middle East you’re talking about. So Tunisia is better run than most places. Lebanon has a saner agricultural policy than most places. Yemen is a total disaster. Algeria and Egypt have not gone so well. So there’s a lot of variety within the Middle East. If you think of a model like Turkey, which isn’t technically in the Middle East, they’ve liberalized and encouraged agribusiness. Turks are much better fed than 20 years ago. When you ask a country like Iran, what should we do? It’s hard to know even where to start.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: As you said, Egypt hasn’t gone well. And Egypt is in the beginnings of forming a new government, it sounds like they have a very big uphill battle.

Cowen: Yes, I think it’ll get worse before it gets better. They’re prevailing on economic policy based on mercantilism — powerful, bad, old-fashioned mercantilism in the greediest way. It doesn’t work. Mercantilism backed by military rule not a good idea.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: You point out that the Middle East imports about half of the wheat they use, which is needed for bread and other staples. This system of importing a food staple contributes to high food prices, which is one of the reasons for the political unrest and an impetus for the Arab revolutions. What can the Middle East do to reverse this trend?

Cowen: Well, it’s not just up to the Middle East. One reason that wheat prices and other prices have gone up is because the world as a whole has slacked off in research and development in agricultural productivity. I don’t think the Middle East can solve that problem on its own.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Why has the world slacked off in such research and development?

Cowen: I don’t know. It’s a bigger public policy question. In a lot of areas, we’re spending more on short-term consumption and less on long-term investment. And I think that’s our fault. It’s a general trend and you see it in a lot of different countries.

Somehow, our time horizons are shortening. But most Middle Eastern countries do not have free trade in food. And if they did have free trade in food and didn’t protect their domestic farmers with subsidies, they would have cheaper food. So they treat their domestic farmers as a lobby that should be catered to when they should not. I wouldn’t suggest that would solve all their food problems. It wouldn’t.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: The domestic farmers would argue they would be put out of business.

Cowen: Sure, but should Saudi Arabia be growing bananas and paying for all that water in the desert? It’s crazy. There’s a long history in many of these countries, trying to be self-sufficient with fairly outrageous water and farm subsidies, which raises prices. It costs a lot of money in the budget. It’s not really a successful path forward but it does buy the support of some interest groups of course. That’s why they do it.

But the notion of saying something simple like “Well, Lebanon has more water than we do so we should just stop subsidizing water and buy it from them.” Those countries would be much better off.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: So if some of these countries just traded across borders?

Cowen: Yes. I don’t mean to get into politics but Israel has the highest agricultural productivity in the Middle East. And they use technology much better. But a lot of countries are very reluctant to trade with Israel. Even share information and have any dealings at all. That’s another mistake they make and that’s part of the problem.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: While water is scarce in some regional countries, like Yemen, it’s actually abundant in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. Can you explain more about the water inequality problem in the Middle East?

Cowen: Typically, the Gulf has the worst problem with water. I’m not even sure Yemen is even a viable country because there’s some chance, they will literally run out of water in the next 20 years in a lot of parts of the country. At this point, I don’t know what they can do. Saudi Arabia is a lot wealthier and they’ve returned to some sanity. Every now and then, the price of oil dips and they decide they can’t afford to be as they used to be, so they cut back on their subsidies for the better. They ought to just say their domestic farmers have to pay the market price for their water. And if they can’t produce food at that price, we’ll buy from Lebanon, Turkey, Israel or wherever else.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: So to buy water and food products from other nations?

Cowen: Often how you buy water is to buy it in the product. If you buy a tomato, one way to think of that transaction is you are buying water. It’s called virtual water, so yes.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: In India, the economy is growing at 8 to 9% but agriculture is growing at 3% because agribusiness is not allowed. Can you explain the problem and discuss some of the solutions required?

Cowen: India has slowed down since the book came out. India is now at the 6% range. They have a climate that’s very hostile to agribusiness. They don’t want to let in Wal-Mart. They don’t let in generally consolidated land holdings. Agriculturally, they’re one of the least efficient countries. Half of the children under five are malnourished. And half of the workforce is in agriculture.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Why doesn’t India let agribusiness grow?

Cowen: They protect their own small farmers. The result of that is massive malnutrition, which have terrible consequences, not just for the kids, but for the whole country. People grow up and have inferior opportunities. One thing the world does know how to do, even in non-ideal countries, is to raise agricultural productivity. Turkey has done it. Most of South America has done it. But India has not been willing to take that step. It’s a huge, huge problem for them. Millions of people suffer in a very serious way.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: Can you explain how the European fear for GMO’s (genetically modified organisms) is affecting Africa’s agricultural economy?

Cowen: There are a few reasons African countries are reluctant to use GMOs. Some of them do, mostly South Africa. But partly they don’t have the infrastructure to do it at all. And some are afraid that if they do, they can’t export to the European Union, which is their main market and more important than the United States. So they’ve held back on investing.

African agriculture has a lot of problems. But the biggest problem is simpler than GMOs. Africa has terrible roads. In Africa, it takes four to six time times to transport a product, which is crazy. It’s such a poor place. It’s relatively dry so they really need fertilizer. And to think an African farmer has to pay four to six times more than what an African farmer has to pay for fertilizer? A lot of that is because they have bad roads.

But not doing GMOs is part of a bigger, broader set of problems and it could make their agriculture more productive. I’m not sure injecting GMOs and doing nothing else will make a huge difference. If there’s no road to bring your crop to market, it doesn’t matter what you do to your crop. But it’s part of a series of big, interrelated problems.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: This fear of GMOs is more of a European fear than an American fear?

Cowen: Yes, that’s right. There’s a very small minority of Americans who worry about this kind of thing. In terms of law and public policy debate, it’s pretty much taken for granted. People have been eating GMO products for 20 years and there’s really no evidence of ill effects. Why is it this way in Europe? I don’t know. To me, it’s a bit like the right wing, climate change, etc. People start obsessing over it in a bad way and they’re not willing to face up to the evidence.

Arabic Knowledge@Wharton: In your book you point out New Zealand lamb. Its two biggest consumers are the U.S. and the Arab World. If segments of the U.S. population decided to boycott New Zealand lamb due to transportation not being environmentally friendly, how would that effect prices in the Arab World?

Cowen: In that example, I just tried to point out that boycotts are often not very effective. They make people feel good. If you get a lot of people to boycott, people somewhere else will just buy more of it. There’s a system-wide effect. In general, I tend to be skeptical of boycotts as a way to change the world. Sometimes they work but more often than not, they don’t.


The Washington Monthly: Highlights from Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Gets Lunch

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This article originally appeared in The Washington Monthly.

I just finished, and enjoyed, Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Gets Lunch. It’s chock full of fun guidance for anyone with an adventurous spirit seeking better food. Below are my highlights, which I made on my Kindle version as I read it. All are direct quotes, and they’re representative of the book’s style, though certainly not an exhaustive reflection of its scope and content. That it’s a fun read should be clear from the quotes, though the wisdom of some may not be. That’s what the rest of the book is for, and I don’t want to spoil it.

  • American has been about perfecting diversity and choice, rather than about perfecting any single style.
  • Avoid dishes that are ingredients-intensive. [America]
  • Go for dishes that are composition-intensive. [America]
  • Order the ugly and order the unknown.
  • If you are stuck in midtown, and you want good, cheap ethnic food, try the streets before the avenues. [Manhattan]
  • The best strip malls, for food, are usually those without Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or other big-box stores. [America]
  • The next food revolution in the United States is likely to be a mobile one and it will be advertised on Google and Twitter, not through fancy commercials during Super Bowl Sunday.
  • Google “Washington best cauliflower dish” even if you don’t want cauliflower. Get away from Google for the masses.
  • It is often best when the people in a restaurant look a little serious or even downright grim.
  • Eat barbecue in towns of less than 50,000 people.
  • The key point of Vietnamese dining is to use the sauces and condiments.
  • Hip people do not always have superb taste in food.
  • The two worst signs for Thai restaurants are Thai restaurants with large bars and lots of drinks and also Thai restaurants that serve sushi.
  • Eat at a Thai restaurant that is attached to a motel.
  • Eat some sardines at home and save up your cash for an occasional splurge on better Japanese food.
  • Pakistani food in the United States is better than Indian food in the United States.
  • Sometimes the easiest way to trade water is inside a tomato.
  • The environmental impact of food comes from its production, not its transportation.
  • Every time you substitute some canned sardines for junk food, just about everyone is better off.
  • Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.
  • The best French food in the world today is served in Japan.
  • Unless you are spending a log of money, Paris is the worst place to eat in all of France.
  • Everything in Switzerland is good. Everything in Switzerland is expensive.
  • If you can’t name a famous landmark in an Italian city, it is likely to have superb food at an affordable price.
  • Go to Sicily and stay as long as you can. And eat.

Time Moneyland: Cheap Eats: Surprising Advice on Dining Out — From An Economist

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in Time Moneyland on May 1, 2012.

Tyler Cowen is an economist who teaches at George Mason University. He has written economics columns for the New York Times, published what the Economist called “the most talked-about economics book of the year” in 2011, and was praised recently by Foreign Policy as one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” The man is obviously quite knowledgeable—when it comes to economics. So what’s he doing giving recommendations for what to eat in the local strip mall?

Food, Cowen would argue, is, in fact, always a matter of economics. We all need food. We make food decisions every day, and every one of these decisions has a monetary connotation, so there’s an economic angle to everything and everywhere we eat.

Cowen’s new book, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies, is filled with advice on food, and if there’s one overarching theme, it’s that “foodie” should not equate to “snobby.”

Part of the book is excerpted in the May issue of Atlantic Monthly, in a story called “Six Rules for Dining Out.” One of the most curious rules is that when it comes to getting the best value for the dining dollar, foodies should pass on nearly every restaurant located in hip urban neighborhoods. Instead, Cowen recommends heading to restaurants that share parking lots with dollar stores, supermarkets, and liquor stores. What we’re talking about is the scintillating dining destination known as the suburban strip mall.

Cue: record scratch sound.

Cowen’s reasoning is that, compared to restaurants in high-rent districts, strip mall eateries have low overhead, so they can keep menu prices down and experiment with foods and ingredients without constantly having to worry it won’t be able to pay the bills:

A strip-mall restaurant is more likely to try daring ideas than is a restaurant in, say, a large shopping mall. The people with the best, most creative, most innovative cooking ideas are not always the people with the most money. Many of them end up in dumpier locales, where they gradually improve real-estate values.

Hip, high-rent urban neighborhoods tend to attract well-established, upscale restaurants, because only these restaurants can afford the rent. The suburbs and peripheries of cities are where immigrants tend to live—and, not so coincidentally, also where they work and eat. Cowen looks especially for areas where a particular ethnic cuisine dominates the scene. When an area is loaded with a huge selection of, say, Indian or Korean restaurants, the odds are pretty good that any individual restaurant’s food is above average, if not excellent. After all, there is plenty of local competition, and their immigrant clientele is informed and unlikely to be swayed by gimmicks or silly trends. If a restaurant was poor or mediocre, it’d quickly be run out of business.

When hunting for restaurants, Cowen targets ethnic areas with just the right “atmosphere.” When the goal is a magic combination of terrific food at the right price, the signs he looks for are abandoned cars, cheap plastic signs, and five-and-dime stores in the neighborhood. Hey, he’s not saying this is the right atmosphere for a first date, just for good food.

On the other hand, Cowen tends to stay away from restaurants that boast of what most diners would categorize as a good, friendly and fun atmosphere. Specifically, he advises foodies to avoid spots filled with “beautiful, laughing women.” Why? He’s playing the odds that because the place is popular and trendy, the focus is on “the scene” rather than the food, which is all but guaranteed to be overpriced:

The point is not that beautiful women have bad taste in food. Instead, the problem is that they will attract a lot of men to the restaurant, whether or not the place serves excellent food. And that allows the restaurant to cut back on the quality of the food.

Another of Cowen’s unexpected, contrarian insights is highlighted in a USA Today review of his book:

Agribusiness, Cowen says, has made good food ingredients available, along with the drawbacks it has spawned. He uses this analogy: “The printing press brought us both good and bad novels, but was a cultural boon nonetheless.”

Contrary to what some foodies assume, Cowen’s take is that businesses that mass-produce food are not necessarily evil, nor is the food they produce necessarily unhealthy. “There’s nothing especially virtuous about the local farmer,” writes Cowen, and by contrast, “technology and business are a big part of what makes the world gentle and fun.” Overall, he explains, advances in agribusiness have been good for everyone, bringing food prices down and feeding more people than ever in human history.

Columbia Business: Economist Joins ‘Foodies’

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in Columbia Business on April 30, 2012.

Imagine dining at a Columbia restaurant or shopping at a Columbia grocery store with someone who has a doctorate in ecomonics and is offering a stream of advice.

That sort of approximates the experience of reading “An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.”

Tyler Cowen is a university-based economist obsessed with eating and drinking (obsessed in a good way, once the idea of thinking about food consumption in a new way takes hold). “An Economist Gets Lunch” is a mind-bending book for non-economists. Cowen offers lots of mantras for foodies, and the dominant mantra reads like this: “Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative and the demanders are informed.”

In his own life, Cowen uses the mantra to experience excellent food wherever he goes — in the Washington, D.C., area where he resides (he is on the faculty at George Mason University); in his home kitchen; in other locales across the United States; and in nations around the globe.

Challenging tenets

Cowen opens the book with “a journey into the unknown,” the unknown being the nation of Nicaragua and the journey being about finding delicious, affordable meals.

As he travels through Nicaragua, Cowen is consciously upending three tenets of “food snobbery” that have become conventional wisdom:

• The best food is the most expensive.

• The primary source of cheap food, agribusiness, is evil.

• Chefs, food writers, cultural leaders and political officeholders know best; everyday foodies are not a trusted source of innovation.

Good food is often reasonably priced, Cowen says, and the most expensive restaurants are often serving trendy atmosphere for the upper crust of society rather than focusing on the tastiest meals. In his own neighborhood, Cowen has located outstanding restaurants where the meals are priced under $15. “These favorite restaurants serve diverse items, ranging from Sichuan dan dan noodles to French Epoisses cheeseburgers to red salmon curry to Ethiopian raw beef with chilies and dry cottage cheese.” Further from home, “the best barbecue cooks of Texas are highly skilled applied scientists; you can find chili ecstasy in Albuquerque diners and sometimes even in pharmacies; and the region in Italy with the fewest Michelin-starred restaurants — Sicily — has some of the best, most surprising and also cheapest food in Europe.”

A common denominator, Cowen asserts, is “their on-site owners and chefs are devoted to food they love to prepare.”

USA Today: Review: ‘An Economist Gets Lunch’ Offers New Perspectives

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in USA Today on April 29, 2012.

Every person who wants to stay alive must consume food and drink.

In a sense, that makes everybody an expert on food and drink. But it is the rare consumer of food and drink who swallows with an economist looking on.

Tyler Cowen is an economist obsessed with eating and drinking. Obsessed in a good way, once the idea of thinking about food consumption in a new way takes hold.

An Economist Gets Lunch is a mind-bending book for non-economists. Cowen offers lots of mantras for foodies, the dominant mantra reading like this: “Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.”

In his own life, Cowen uses the mantra to experience excellent food wherever he goes—in the Washington, D.C., area where he is on the faculty at George Mason University; in locales across the United States; and around the globe.

If that sounds somewhat selfish, please know that Cowen is fully aware of the big issues: starvation, daily hunger for many of those not literally starving, obesity, food-related cancers, a lack of food safety, environmental degradation related to food production, corporate farming, greedy agribusiness conglomerates, and more.

He deals with all those issues, especially in the chapters titled “Another Agricultural Revolution, Now” and “Eating Your Way to a Greener Planet.”

Other books may deal more fully and interestingly with the big issues. But Cowen’s book is a thoughtful, offbeat guide to better individual eating for readers with money to prepare food in well-appointed home kitchens, to dine at restaurants near home, and to travel widely away from home while eating experimentally.

Cowen opens with “a journey into the unknown;” the unknown being the nation of Nicaragua and the journey being about finding delicious, affordable meals.

As he travels through Nicaragua, Cowen is consciously upending three tenets of “food snobbery” that have become conventional wisdom:

•The best food is the most expensive.

•Agribusiness, a primary source of cheap food, is evil.

•Chefs, food writers, cultural leaders and political officeholders know best; everyday foodies are not a trusted source of innovation.

Agribusiness, Cowen says, has made good food ingredients available, along with the drawbacks it has spawned. He uses this analogy: “The printing press brought us both good and bad novels, but was a cultural boon nonetheless.”

Good food is often reasonably priced, Cowen says, and the most expensive restaurants are often serving trendy atmosphere rather than focusing on the tastiest meals.

In his own neighborhood, Cowen has found outstanding restaurants where meals are priced under $15.

“These favorite restaurants serve diverse items, ranging from Sichuan dan dan noodles to French Epoisses cheeseburgers to red salmon curry to Ethiopian raw beef with chilies and dry cottage cheese.”

Farther from home, “the best barbecue cooks of Texas are highly skilled applied scientists; you can find chili ecstasy in Albuquerque diners and sometimes even in pharmacies; and the region in Italy with the fewest Michelin-starred restaurants—Sicily—has some of the best, most surprising, and also cheapest food in Europe.”

A common denominator, Cowen asserts: “their on-site owners and chefs are devoted to food they love to prepare.”

For home cooks, Cowen includes well-researched chapters about shopping in ethnic supermarkets and using cookbooks wisely.

Canadian Business Times: An Economist Gets Lunch

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This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in Canadian Business Times on April 27, 2012.

Cowen’s latest work of pop economics is a bracing riposte to the locavore likes of Michael Pollan and others who blame commercialization and agribusiness for the miserable state of North American cuisine. While he doesn’t deny that American food has journeyed a “long arch through some big black spots,” Cowen argues it is too simplistic to vilify the industrialization of agriculture. Instead, he blames factors ranging from Prohibition, which forced the closure of some of the best restaurants, to the rise of the two-income household, which popularized the frozen dinner. These forces created “a century-long perfect storm of bad news for good food,” but blaming the agricultural infrastructure is misguided. “The printing press brought us both good and bad novels,” he writes. “but it was a cultural boon nonetheless.” His thesis is well taken, but some of his best insights come when he applies an economist’s methodology to everyday quandaries like choosing a restaurant. He argues that low-rent venues allow restaurateurs to innovate, making them better bets than hot restaurants in pricey locales. Thinking of dining at an ethnic restaurant near a dollar store with an abandoned car out front? “If so, crack a smile, walk through the door, and order,” he says. “Welcome to the glorious world of good food.”

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