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… Read more…

This review of Tyler Cowen’s new book, “An Economist Gets Lunch” appeared in the New York Post on April 21, 2012. Don’t eat at a restaurant packed with beautiful women. Any Chinese place, even at the most woebegone formica joint in the dullest small-town strip mall, can be a good one if you know what to say. And get to a barbecue place early — before noon. So says Tyler Cowen in his smorgasbord “An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies” (Dutton). The vague title provides cover for the wide range of food issues Cowen considers, all the way from why American food got so bad to why hundreds of millions of Indians are starving to why locavorism usually makes no sense. Just think of it as another contrarian ideas party; “Freakonomics” for food. Cowen’s special sauce is rationality, which is why this may be the first food book I have ever made it through. (I nearly threw Anthony Bourdain’s macho-man pose-a-palooza “Kitchen Confidential” into the fireplace after 20 pages). Eating, especially in restaurants, is a subject that opens into a lot of other fields. There’s location, trendiness, class, alcohol, decor, socializing and even the beauty of your servers and fellow diners to distract you. All of these are factors in why food writing is so bad: There are so many other things to consider that the restaurant critic often doesn’t get around to the food until the second half of the review. When I pointed this out to one such writer, he sighed heavily and said, “Yes, but how many ways are there to say ‘crunchy’?” EATING OUT — FAR OUT Cowen is an economist at George Mason University who is widely admired in the field for his influential Marginal Revolutions blog and also runs a food blog (Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, whose motto is “all food is ethnic food”). He gets around the food-writing problem by taking it for granted that you’ll agree with him on what makes a great-tasting meal. The meal is all that matters to him. He doesn’t care if it’s served in a hut by the side of the road or if you have to sit on a picnic bench to eat it. He’s willing to for a fantastic dish, but he doesn’t pretend food is better just because it cost more. Some of the best meals (not just for the… Read more…