Category: General

At the Berkeley Farmers’ Market

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Yesterday I went to the Berkeley Farmers’ Market and had a very interesting conversation with one of the vendors.

1. Whole Foods had called her and asked her if she would like to put her product in their stores. No thanks, she said. “Are you kidding?” they said. No, she said. She didn’t want to put her product in their stores because she didn’t want that sort of volume. She was more interested in supporting smaller stores. She told me that Whole Food’s increased interest in local vendors had come about because of Michael Pollan’s criticism of Whole Foods in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (Pollan had coined the term Big Organic and wondered which side — the more virtuous or the less virtuous — Whole Foods was on.)

2. The vendor next to her, The Fatted Calf, who sell salami, beef jerky, sausage, duck confit, and other meat products, had been forced to stop selling to stores and restaurants when someone called the USDA to complain that they didn’t have an office for the USDA inspector. That’s right: no matter how small your business, you must have an office for the USDA inspector. It’s an absurd burden to put on a small business. As I have heard others say, big businesses welcome government regulation. Because they can afford it and their potential future competitors, now tiny, cannot. Supposedly the regulation protects consumers; it may or may not but it certainly protects big businesses. (Does requiring an office for a USDA inspector protect consumers? I think not.) We need organic consumer protection. The current version is like heavy-duty insecticide. It kills small businesses.

More about Pollan and Processed Food

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A reader named Shawn made an interesting comment on Michael Pollan vs. Processed Food:

I’d like to point out that your example of fortifying flour (white flour, actually) is not really that great, since in this case they are simply adding back some (but not all) of the nutrients that were destroyed in processing. Whole wheat flour does not have to be fortified because it has those nutrients to begin with — which actually supports Pollan’s arguments against food processing.

That’s true, it does support Pollan’s argument against food processing. More detail will help make my underlying logic clearer. Flour is milled for several reasons, the details of which don’t matter; let me just say that white flour is more profitable than whole wheat flour, thus can be sold at a lower price. In terms of price, milling is win-win: the supplier makes more profit and the customer gets cheaper flour. But when you consider nutrition — milled flour less nutritious than unmilled — it is not clear at all that milling is win-win. B vitamin supplementation, by cheaply replacing what the milling took out, moves us back to win-win. Not milling is not win-win: It is nothing-nothing.

When you process food based on a correct theory — an accurate understanding of how our bodies work — the result is often win-win. When you process food based on a wrong theory, it is much harder to reach that result. This is what Pollan didn’t understand. As usual, Jane Jacobs said it best. In response to people who said that Problem X or Problem Y was due to overpopulation — just as Pollan is anti-food-processing — Jacobs said the problem is not too many people, the problem is the undone work. In the case of food, the problem is not too much processing, the problem is the undone work — the undone work of coming up with good theories to guide the processing.

Mr. Dezenhall, Meet Mr. Orwell

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To deal with the threat posed by open-access journals (which I praise and have published in), a group of scientific publishers including Elsevier has hired Washington public relations consultant Eric Dezenhall to help them. According to this article, Mr. Dezenhall has

encouraged his clients to “develop simple messages,” such as “public access equals government censorship”

Orwell’s 1984 includes long excerpts from a fictional book with chapter titles such as “War is Peace.” The book explains the term doublethink like this:

Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.

Secrets of a Successful Blog (part 3)

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Brad DeLong, Berkeley economics professor and very popular blogger, on what makes a blog successful:

1. First-mover advantage. Brad’s was one of the first economics blogs.

2. Regularity of posts. Brad said he writes several posts during one hour in the evening to be posted at intervals the next day. At least that is the ideal, he said.

3. Communicate effectively on things people want to learn about.

Tyler Cowen and Aaron Swartz on this topic.

I learned this last week when Aaron Swartz and I stopped by Brad’s office. I had put the odds of him being there at 50 to 1. Speaking of supposedly-low-probability events, yesterday at the Berkeley Farmer’s Market someone recognized me from the photo on my book. The previous day I had said that would never happen.

Science in Action: Omega-3 (background)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

The omega-3 story began with the circulatory system. In the 1960s, two Danish scientists wondered why Eskimos rarely die of heart disease. Could the answer explain the sharp decrease in heart disease mortality in Norway during World War II? In spite of this promising beginning, the heart and mortality benefits are still not clear. A 2006 meta-analysis of heart disease studies concluded that “omega 3 fats do not have a clear effect on total mortality, combined cardiovascular events, or cancer.”

You can find lots of recommendations to consume omega-3 fats in various forms — fish, supplement, and so on. On the other side, Marion Nestle, the author of What To Eat, seems to believe the advantages claimed for omega-3 are “ hype.” Most researchers are less certain. From a recent New York Times article about Martek, a company that makes an omega-3 food supplement:

“A lot of the claims made for DHA [a form of omega-3] are in the realm of hypotheses,” said David Schardt, senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy organization based in Washington. “They are certainly worth pursuing, but there’s not yet enough proof to warrant telling people to go out of their way to take DHA.”

The exceptions, Mr. Schardt said, are people with a history of heart disease and premature infants, who need an extra boost of DHA for proper brain and eye development to compensate for their early exit from the womb.

Martek’s scientists, when pressed, generally agreed with Mr. Schardt. The data showing any health benefits of DHA beyond those related to the heart or premature infants, while encouraging, is not quite conclusive, they say.

The typical experimental study of omega-3 takes two groups of people with a pre-existing problem, gives one group omega-3 and the other group a placebo, and measures outcomes several months later. A 2005 study in Pediatrics, for example, compared two groups of children (n = about 60/group) with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Most of them had ADHD. One group was given an omega-3 supplement; the other group was given a placebo. The children were tested before treatment and after three months of treatment. (The reading, spelling, and behavior scores of children in the supplement group improved more than the scores of children in the placebo group.) Studies like this are hard.

In summary, there is considerable uncertainty about the effects of omega-3; and the methods used to reduce that uncertainty are slow and difficult. This is why self-experimentation might help.

My recent data. The Queen of Fats (2006) by Susan Allport, a science writer, is an excellent introduction to the subject.

How Good is Food in Berkeley?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

From an interesting NY Times article about difficult people comes this:

“She’s a superior human being, and she comes from a superior area — Berkeley, Calif.,” Ms. Rothman said. “She has told me many times that there are only two places to get good food. One of them is Berkeley, and one of them is France. And France is only second to Berkeley.”

Huh? I love Chez Panisse but otherwise that makes no sense at all. San Francisco has more great food than Berkeley. So does Los Angeles.

A Curious Academic Career

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From Wikipedia:

He had no talent for teaching. He was dismissed by [Johns Hopkins University] after one semester. . . . On leaving JHU, he took a position . . . at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where it became clear that he was no better at teaching advanced students than freshmen. . . . He was let go by Brown, being hired after a trip to Europe by Yale University . . . He quickly showed at Yale the same traits he had at JHU and Brown: he . . . was incapable of giving a lecture at a level that a student (even a graduate student) could comprehend. He was also unable to direct the research of graduate students . . . At age 70, [he] was involuntarily retired.

Which makes me want to learn more about the physical chemist Lars Onsager, who won a Nobel Prize in 1968.

Procrastination (cont.)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

A just-published review article (abstract only) on procrastination, which looks good, and an interesting talk by the author of the review, Piers Steel, a professor of business at the University of Calgary. No mention of an evolutionary explanation.

Update of my earlier post about procrastination: To keep my email In Box un-jammed and my kitchen table unembarrassing, I now realize I must play a few games of Sudoku every day.

Sudoku