Casual Conversation: Professor Will Masters on September 30, 2024

On Monday, September 30 at 5 pm ET, Professor William (“Will”) Masters will be our guest for a Casual Conversation about food or, more precisely, food economics.  This discussion you should not miss.  Really.  If you want to explore the reasons why you eat what you eat, how much you eat, and what obstacles stand in your way to change your food consumption, this is the time you should join us.

Even more to the point, many of us are grandparents, and the knowledge we bring to the (breakfast, lunch and dinner) table(s) (and to our local supermarkets, bodegas, and restaurants) can create a better and healthier future for those whom we love. 

Also, understand this session as one of a series of Casual Conversations that began with the discussion by the future Dartmouth Professor of his book Drunk which describes the history of alcohol and how it is made, how and why it is consumed, and what changes have occurred that may challenge its continued overall utility.

As Will co-writes:  If you are interested in food and curious about economics, this book is for you.  Our approach starts by recognizing your expertise: every reader comes to this book with a lifetime of eating, making choices and thinking about food.  Your intimate familiarity with food gives you a head start on our topic, ready to use the language and toolkit of economics for dialogue with others about the causes and consequences of everyone’s daily meals and snacks.  

And now to provide some particulars:

Will is Professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science band Policy with a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics.  He is Fellow of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA), International Fellow of the African Association of Agricultural Economics, and a former editor of Agricultural Economics.  Will is the stepson of Dartmouth ’69 classmate Phil Bush, and the co-author with Amelia B. Finaret of the Open Access textbook, Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health (Palgrave Macmillan 2024 ISBN 978-3-031-53839).  

And now to some recommendations.  The book is free and can be downloaded.  While it is a textbook and quite long and detailed, I suggest that you read two short chapters: 8, titkled Food and Health; and 12, titled The Future of Food.  We can concventrate on those in our discussion.  In 8, Will discusses our cognitive limitations including the biases we should be familiar with through many discussions had on the listserv, and your own knowledge.  As Will writes:

Even those of us who know about the latest scientific consensus on food and health may find it difficult to act on that knowledge, due to a variety of behavioral biases.

What can we do about them, either privately or collectively.  How many of us can turn on a dime and adapt to the changes, as they inevitably come, to health guidelines involving what we take into our bodies: the thoroughly discredited food pyramid; the wacko ingestion of mega doses of vitamins we don’t need supplemented at all; the allergy-inducing withholding peanut butter from children until age 3 (the subject of an essay in a new book by a Hopkins prof).  To say nothing of GMOs, a fast way to do what farmers have done for thousands of years with selective breeding.  Don’t like change?  Then don’t eat.  Or live.

For the future of food, expect change, lots of it.  As Will writes: “The future of food will not be like the past.”  You like your fish caught wild?  But aquaculture may be better for everyone.  Will discusses the past, present and possible future of anti-spoilage technology and food safety, including the use of edible films to wrap produce.  In the constant effort to decrease the relative use of inputs to outputs, we may see greater application of precision agriculture, and integrated pest management may well reduce environmental harm.  What role do your home gardens play in the agriculture ecosphere?  Find out.  And take heed from Will:

Different kinds of innovation often complement each other, as alleviating one constraint on plant growth and farm operations makes alleviating the next constraint more valuable.

Plan to cozy up to your favorite healthy (or not) nosh (which you have fully analyzed for credence attributes) and join Will to find out more about it, and about you.  No prior training required in economics and no knowledge at all of agriculture.  And the book, with its very short chapters 8 and 12, is FREE!

Usual rules apply.  Let me know <Arthur.Fergenson@ansalaw.com> by this Saturday whether you want to attend (and what delicious food and drink you will bring to share virtually with the others on the Zoom call).

See you soon!