The size of food portions in depictions of the Last Supper over the centuries

This is pretty rad:

My brother—a religious studies professor at Virginia Wesleyan College—and I indexed the sizes of all of the entrees, loaves of bread, and even plates in the 52 most famous Last Supper paintings from the past millennium featured in Last Supper (2000, Phaiden Press), based on the sizes of people's heads. Through plagues and potato famines, the average size of entrees increased by 69 percent, plates by 65 percent, and bread by 23 percent. (The only thing that didn't continually increase with time was the number of wine bottles on the table—that peaked in the apparently party-happy 16th century.)

The idea is that, since the kind and amount of food during the Last Supper is not specified anywhere, artists would insert whatever seemed natural to them in their culture and time period. So this would reflect humanity's growing bread basket...

Borrowing money from yourself at Carl's Jr.

Ezra Klein says an interesting thing:

This gets to an important point about cheap food: It's not necessarily cheap. It's cheap now. But given the health costs associated with obesity and diabetes -- and given their stunning prevalence in low-income communities -- it's really a way of borrowing money from your future self. No one thinks about it that way, but for this family that bought fast food because it was affordable and now spends thousands of dollars out-of-pocket on diabetes medication, that's been the overall impact.

I think there's something deeply screwed up about a country that not only doesn't make any effort to make healthy food affordable, but actively subsidizes unhealthy food as well. And, as Klein points out, in the long run these twisted incentives end up costing us more.

(Photo by ebruli)

A good point about eating healthy

I never thought about this, but I think it's really true:

Home prepared meals are much less standardized, and not so fined tuned to hit the salty/sweet/fatty buttons over and over. Also, much of the shopping is done for them when you aren't actually hungry, and so you're likely to pick healthier foods with lower caloric density--committing your future self to behave more virtuously than it probaby would decide to on the spur of the moment.

Selecting what food you're going to eat on the fly is dangerous because your hungry tummy can end up persuading you to get the processed, fatty thing. But buying groceries forces you to pre-select your future meals while you are in a reasonably level-headed state (of course, if you shop while hungry you could end up getting all sorts of unhealthy stuff--which is why it's a bad idea to shop while hungry).

Personally, I basically don't eat any meals at home because it takes too much time and effort, and I'm fortunate enough to have enough change rattling around in my pocket to afford that sort of thing. But I think I'm ill served by the options I have--restaurants--because they don't usually emphasize health, and the food is served in a very labor-intensive way (waiters, busboys, etc.), making it more expensive than it needs to be (or, if I'm going to be paying that much, I'd prefer the money go towards higher quality ingredients rather than a waiter's salary). I wish there was a place that was geared for everyday dining, with healthier choices, changing menu items, and less of an emphasis on service--something like a college dorm cafeteria, or the in-house cafeteria here at Adobe.

Additional note, about carbon pricing

Looking at the post below, you get an idea of how difficult it is to a) calculate the ecological impact of spending behavior, and b) actually follow through on adhering to an optimum spending behavior once you figure out what it is. At the end of the day, it's very convoluted and difficult to keep track of, and all sort of hopeless because people, by and large, are not going to exert the effort required to eat sustainably--and if 90% of the people aren't on board, then what's the point of trying?

This is why carbon pricing--i.e., factoring the ecological cost of products into their price via a tax--is such a beautiful idea. What you do is target a few key carbon producers way "upstream" in the chain of production, so that the increased cost of carbon filters down into the price of everything. For example, say you were to slap a carbon tax on barrels of oil sold. This would result in higher prices--and less demand--not just for gasoline, but, say, for a toy manufacturer that transports stuffed dolls halfway around the world in a fuel-ineffecient fleet of boats and trucks. If you slapped a carbon tax on energy, then suddenly everyone's electricity bills would rise and you would see alternative energy sources like solar, wind, gas, and nuclear start to become competitive with coal. Competition in the free market--rather than arbitrary government grants and subsidies--would then determine which alternative energy source becomes dominant. Shopping at the market, you would have to look no further than the price tag to compare the ecological impact of different foods; if a food is very carbon intensive, then this will naturally be reflected in a higher price.

As it is right now, the costs of climate change end up being socialized, because it is tax-payer backed governments that fix (or in the future will fix) the damage. These costs should not remain external to the market, but should instead be internalized into the market, via a carbon tax, so that the costs are distributed proportionately to those who are causing the problem.

More data

Nothing gets by you guys! Patrick--who remains curiously astute after knocking back a few--rightly gets to the heart of the matter, which is the comparative greenhouse gas intensity of different kinds of foods. Luckily, the study (pdf) underlying the Ezra Klein post has a chart that captures precisely this information:
(You may need to click the image to read it without squinting.)

Now, I'm not any kind of trained statistics person but I'm pretty sure that by "normalization by X" they mean the greenhouse gas (GHG) output expressed as a rate of "CO2-equivalent emitted per X". So for example, the second dataset means that red meat results in about twice the amount of GHG per dollar as chicken/fish/eggs--i.e., $5 worth of red meat has the same footprint as $10 worth of chicken/fish/eggs.

I imagine the measure we ought to be most interested in is the GHG per kCal figure (third dataset), since we are trying to figure out how to lessen the GHG impact of our diets regardless of cost and, er, food weight. Viewed this way, cows are definitely the biggest culprit: red meat looks to be about 2.5 times more GHG-intensive per kCal than chicken/fish/eggs, and dairy is slightly worse than chicken/fish/eggs as well. So the biggest gains, it seems, can be had by replacing most of our red meat with white meat or vegetables, and replacing dairy with...not dairy.

(Note: some greenhouse gases affect the climate more than others--hence the generic unit of measurement "CO2e", or CO2-equivalent.)

Anyway, in case all that wasn't very clear, here's the abstract to give you the main idea:

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention
to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the
United States have systematically compared the life-cycle
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production
against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.” We find
that although food is transported long distances in general (1640
km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average)
the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the
production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S.
household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption.
Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle
GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail
contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range
in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-
intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary
shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average
household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”
Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories
from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a
vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying
all locally sourced food.

Where does he get those wonderful charts?

You can always count on Ezra Klein for a good chart. Here is one that breaks down the greenhouse gas impact of different kinds of food as it moves from the production phase to the transit phase:

As you can see, the first three colors--the ones that cover the greenhouse gas impact of the transportation of the food from the farm to the supermarket--are just a small sliver compared to the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during food production. In fact, according to this report, a mere 11% of greenhouse gases emitted because of food consumption are attributable to the transportation of the food. And so this whole "locavore" movement, while tasty, does not have much of a ecological impact.

If you really want to cut back on the ecological impact of your diet, you'd do well to keep cows out of the picture, as they account for about half of all greenhouse gases emitted from food production:


So all you vegetarians out there, this is your free pass to take longer, hotter showers.

Ok that got weird.

EDIT: Eric sensibly asks how much of the total greenhouse gas emissions are caused by food. The report says: "For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home." So food transportation accounts for 11% of 13%, or 1.4% of every U.S. household's emissions.

Rising food prices

Paul Krugman has a post and recent op-ed about an emerging crisis: food inflation. Krugman notes that

[r]ice, the staple food for half the world, gained 2.4 percent to $21.50 per 100 pounds in Chicago, double the price a year ago.

As you'd expect, this is afflicting not just industrialized nations like the United States, but poor countries as well. More important, it is causing big grain exporting countries to hoard their supplies to make sure they cover the needs of their own citizens first, which in turn causes a "run" on grain--the dwindling supply raises prices, which adds to the panic, which causes more hoarding, which raises prices, and so on, in a vicious circle.