Against Food Fads

Why you're better off ignoring the latest edicts on what you should and shouldn't eat

I have several environmentalist friends who get very cross about the amount of attention spent on supermarket plastic bags. It’s an irrelevance, they say, a distraction from tackling climate change. People only care about them because they’re aware of them; even in terms of plastic pollution they’re only a small proportion of total waste. I’ve not looked into it in detail but assume that they know what they’re talking about, as opposed to the alternative hypothesis that they have a secret vendetta against turtles¹.

This example - where people find it far easier to care about something that’s regularly at the top of their minds is a variant of the availability heuristic. You care about the environment and climate change, but you can’t do much about solar panel development and can’t afford an electric car, so what do you do? Well, you can use fewer plastic bags each time you shop². You’ve made a difference!

In the same way, what we eat is something we’re all concious of - we make decisions about it on a daily or weekly basis³ - and as such is highly vulnerable to the availability heuristic. As a result, food fads appear frequently and rapidly gain in popularity, urging you to change your eating habits for the sake of your health, the climate or world poverty. You can make a difference!

We’ve talked before about ‘Inside View’ and ‘Outside View’. Under the Inside View, one attempts to understand as many details as one can about the situation and so to arrive at the best available estimate - for example by calculating the cost of a new kitchen by itemising each element and adding it up. In contract, using the Outside View, one considers comparable scenarios to arrive at an estimate - for example by asking your friends who’ve had new kitchens what theirs cost, and taking an average. In reality, one frequently uses a mixture of both.

In this post I’ll be arguing that one should take an Outside View approach to food fads and precommit to ignoring them all. You’ll almost certainly be better off for it - not only because you’ll be spared the need to have to think about it, or to make the self-imposed changes it demands, but because you’ll be spared the regret of looking back a few years in the future and wondering what all the fuss was about.

Five historical food fads I’m glad I ignored

There are at least five major food fads that I can remember ignoring. In each case they were widely discussed in the media and got the buy-in of at least a subset of my social circle. There was mild peer pressure that this was ‘a good thing to do’. In each case, the fad passed and now almost no-one I know talks about or worries about this⁴. And in every case, looking back, I’m glad that I totally ignored it and didn’t change my buying or eating habits.

I should say here I’m not even counting the endless crazes about healthy or unhealthy fats or proteins, or ‘superfoods’, or whether one should eat nuts, or drink seven bottles of tomato ketchup every day. These come and go so rapidly it’s hard to keep track - and there’s still nothing better as a guide to life than eating a healthy balanced diet. And for the avoidance of doubt, I’m obviously not talking about individuals with specific allergies or other requirements: if your body literally makes you sick when you eat something, that’s a completely different situation.

But let’s look now at the five fads (there may be some I’ve forgotten) in more detail.

BSE and avoiding beef

Technically speaking it was my parents who made the decision here, as I was too young, but I’m very glad they did. We all remember it, yes? Farmers had been feeding cattle mashed up brains and all the cows were going mad⁵. John Gummer fed his daughter a beef burger live on TV. ‘Beef’ became a playground insult for people you thought were a bit crazy⁶. The US banned British beef exports. And the worst of it was, the human version - vCJD - had an incubation period of around ten years, so we’d all already eaten the beef that was going to kill us.

Despite the absurdity that the incubation period made it, lots of people stopped eating beef. I remember earnest discussions about it, and whether you should feed beef to someone else (‘were they still eating beef?’).

And what happened? Thirty years later, fewer than 200 people in the UK have died of vCJD. Don’t get me wrong - I’m pleased they changed the rules on what cows could eat. But there was no reason to not eat beef.

GM Foods

Next we had the scare over genetically modified foods. The appeal against these was on every possible ground - health grounds, escaping superweeds, evil biotech companies, playing God, you name it, you could put it down as a reason to oppose GM crops in your GCSE Biology exam.

The opposition to this has done real damage. The blocking of Golden Rice has almost certainly prevented the alleviation of Vitamin A deficiency in the developing world - not to mention the impact on food yields and famine. In Britain, it’s probably not been a game-changer (other than all those little ‘GM-free’ labels they went about printing for a few years), though it’s nice to think that if the ‘Frankenfood’ research had developed unfettered for a couple of decades we might have actually been able to have a lettuce as Prime Minister.

Regardless, the United States has been growing and eating vast quantities of GM food for years now. Soybean, corn, beets and more; 95% of animals reared in the US eat GM food. Thanks to them carrying out what is effectively a massive, multi-year population scale field trial we can be pretty confident they’re not doing any harm⁷. In all, GM crops are also grown in 29 countries around the world⁸ and it’s fair to say the scare stories were over-rated.

Organic

The organic movement began from legitimate concerns about the impact of fertilisers and pesticides on the environment. But we’ve got a letter better at regulating these since the ‘70s - and meanwhile, ‘organic’ can incorporate some pretty nasty stuff, as long as it’s natural (arsenic and nicotine can be classed as ‘organic’, for example, as they are natural, so just as with normal farming it’s all about how they are used).

For anyone concerned about climate change, organic food has some pretty major downsides, requiring significantly more land, with landuse being a major driver of carbon emissions. Similarly, if you’re worried about food security, or world hunger, organic food is seriously bad news. The ultimate - and tragic - case study here is Sri Lanka, which a couple of years ago managed to cause widespread food shortages and simultaneously crash its economy due to a reckless decision to ban fertilisers and pesticides, effectively forcing all of its farmers to go organic.

Of course, there are some people who like to buy organic food as a mark of quality. That’s fair enough as far as it goes - because organic food is more expensive anyway, a lot of retailers will also ensure it’s a premium product in other respects. But while I’ve no problem with eating organic food, I’ve never regretted not jumping on the band wagon.

Fairtrade

A little bit later ‘Fairtrade’ became all the rage. Fairtrade - principally bananas, sugar, coffee and cocoa - was meant to solve developing world⁹ poverty by giving farmers a fair price for their crops, allowing them to trade their way to prosperity without having to rely on charitable aid. For several years it seemed to go from strength to strength. What wasn’t to like?

Nearly two decades on, you can still find Fairtrade products in the supermarket but it’s fair to say it’s well past it’s heyday, the ranks of fair trade products replaced with ‘free from’, vegan and other products competing for the busy consumer’s attention. Between 2000 and 2020 the Fairtrade Premium on bananas totalled £114m - or just over £5m annually - compared to a total global banana market of $13.5bn (£10.7bn). It’s fair to say this isn’t transforming the global economy. Meanwhile, the countries that have between them lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty have done so through the unsexy but tried and tested means of adopting freer markets, improving institutions and governance, industrial strategy and attractring foreign investment.

The steelman position of Fairtrade would be that even if it’s not done as well as it’s supporters hoped, the additional money for the products sold has actually helped thousands of individual banana, cocoa, and other farmers. This is true - and anyone who bought Fairtrade can legitimately feel they did some good, which is more than can be said of many of the other fads.

But if you would to spend money on relieving international poverty there are better ways to do it. Malaria nets, deworming, education charities, direct cash transfers, micro-finance initiatives: you can take your pick. If you’re struggling to figure out what’s most effective, Givewell is a good guide¹⁰. The promise of Fairtrade was that it was a new economic model of development, one that would stand out over and beyond aid in alleviating poverty. It’s fair to say it hasn’t done that.

Food miles

At about the same time, people started worrying about ‘food miles’, the idea that if one were concerned about the climate, one should buy food from nearby, rather than shipping it halfway round the world. This conveniently tied into more traditionalist and localist concerns about buying local and supporting British farmers¹¹, as well as vaguely unspecified concerns about ‘foreign’ food safety and practices.

It was the perfect food fad, able to tilt to either the left or the right whenever it became convenient, rather like the Liberal Democrats.

I haven’t actually heard anyone mention food miles for at least a decade, so I had to go and look this one up to see what had happened to it. It turns out that due to differences in farming practices, food miles aren’t all that useful for trying to cut back on climate emissions: for example growing UK tomatoes in heated greenhouses generates more carbon than importing them from abroad. Some people are still studying their impact¹², but overall it appears a lot less important than people said: only 4% of food transport emissions are from international transport - and transport itself is only 4.8% of total food system emissions, making this less than 0.2% of what one should worry about.

The current food fad: Reducing meat

The new food fad is reducing your meat intake in order to help combat climate change. For some people this means becoming vegan or vegetarian; for others it’s about reducing the amount of meat they eat, either by eating less of it in some meals or by not eating it on every day of the week.

Now, it is certainly true that the food system does generate a fair chunk of carbon emissions. And it is also true that - in general - eating meat generates more carbon emissions than eating vegetables, both because it uses more land (it takes multiple kilos of vegetable to generate one kilo of meat) and because cows, when they’re not busy going mad¹³, belch out a lot of methane, which is a powerful greenhouse gas¹⁴. Like every major food fad, it’s based on some degree of plausibility.

Now at this point I could point out that in every area we’ve made major steps at cutting carbon emissions - electricity generation, electic vehicles, heat efficient buildings - it’s been by developing and deploying at scale low- or no- carbon ways of doing the thing we were always doing, not by voluntary reductions or abstaining from things. I could observe that new technologies are developing - and becoming cheaper - so rapidly that even some of the best books on climate change, such as David Mackay’s Without the Hot Air - are out-dated within a decade, because they failed to foresee the pace of change. I could point out that by 2050 we could have fully tasty vat grown meat, or massively deployed solar + direct air capture facilities to soak up our residual emissions¹⁵. And then we could have a big debate.

But I’m not going to do that, because this is a food fad! Just ignore it. The only reason you’re even considering it is because of the availability heuristic and the fact that it’s something you can do personally, relatively easily.

But if you are someone who cares deeply whether we hit Net Zero in 2045 as opposed to 2050 or 2055 there are almost certainly more useful things you could do. Get involved in local groups championing wind farms. Write to your MP. Join a (sensible) campaign group pushing policies you agree with. If you can afford it, buy a heat pump or an electric car. Get your home insulated. Basically, do something that will help to get the cost curves of the technologies we need down¹⁶, as that’s almost certainly the only thing that matters: China, India and Africa will only decarbonise when it’s cost effective¹⁷. Or follow the food fad if it makes you happy - but only if you want to, not because it will make a difference¹⁸.

But surely occasionally a food fad is right?

Perhaps. It’s certainly true that the outside view can’t guarantee - for any new circumstance - that a food fad won’t pan out. The question is whether ignoring food fads is a useful heuristic, or a ‘heuristic that almost always works’.

A useful heuristic is one which works most of the time, and when it doesn’t work the consequences aren’t too bad. ‘Heuristics that almost always work’ - as conceptualised by Scott Alexander - are also ones that work most of the time, but when it doesn’t work the consequences are disastrous. A security guard who assumes the strange noise is just the wind, a volcanologist who always assumes the volcano won’t erupt or the corporate futurist who always thinks the exciting new technology is overhyped are good examples.

So which is ignoring food fads? If you ignore and you’re right, you’ll have saved yourself a lot of hassle, self-denial of foods you like, and/or greater expense. You’ll also have saved yourself the trouble of thinking about it.

On the other hand, what if you’re wrong? It’s a small chance, but what if this is the one? Might you die? Might you cause catastrophic climate change?

Fear not: we live in a society where every major political party and the permanent bureaucracy is obsessed with banning and regulating things, and in which safetyism is our national religion¹⁹. If there’s even a hint that a new food product or technique might be bad for you, it’ll be banned before you can say Jack Robinson²⁰. As to the environment, again, in the rare occasions the food fad is actually something that would make a difference it will be taxed or regulated before long.

In general, then, there’s a strong case for ignoring food fads. The only caveat to this is that if it makes you happy to follow them, knock yourself out. If all your friends are taking up a food fad and you want to fit in, by all means do so. If you’re the sort of person who gets torn up by guilt because of poverty in Africa, but buying Fairtrade lets you sleep at night because you’ve ‘done your bit’, by all means go ahead. If you’re getting more pleasure from the food fad than the inconvenience it causes then that - for you - is a good trade-off.

But don’t feel guilty about not following a food fad - or do something which makes you miserable, or costs you money you can’t afford because you feel you should. The high likelihood is that it really doesn’t matter - and that if you don’t jump on the bandwagon, you’ll look back in a few years and be glad you didn’t.

So ignore the food fads. And if you change your mind, don’t worry: there’ll be another one along in a minute.

1. Of course, the even bigger reason to be sceptical about the plastic bag charge is that it’s not worked. Although the Government - and various retailers - claim plastic bag use has fallen by over 90%, this only includes ‘single-use plastic bags’. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, most supermarkets don’t even offer these any more, instead selling (at a higher price) the rather thicker ‘bags for life’. These are not included in the statistics and a Full Fact investigation found that these bags are still being given out plentifully - and, as they are thicker, it may be the case that even moe plastic is being used than before. Which is a pity, as I like turtles.

2. It probably helps that this is a relatively easy lifestyle change, which doesn’t bring about any real hardship - though as we’ll discuss below, a decent minority people are willing to make much bigger sacrifices for things they believe in.

3. As in, we shop once a week. I don’t think any of my readers are boa constrictors.

4. Though possibly a few people I know still do - particularly regarding organic - and just don’t talk about it much.

5. I may be simplifying this slightly.

6. Possibly this was only at our school.

7. Though with Americans, would we actually be able to tell?

8. Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Honduras, India (Bt cotton only), Malawi, Mexico, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Slovakia, Spain, Sudan, eSwatini (Swaziland), United States, Uruguay, Vietnam, and Zambia, if you want the full list.

9. I can’t remember if we still called it the ‘third world’ back then.

10. While I have some disagreements with the broader tenets of Effective Altruism, they’re very good at evaluating impact in narrow domains such as ‘which developing world health intervention saves lives most cost-effectively.

11. Ideas I do actually have more time for.

12. One study found that they account for 1/5 of the carbon emissions of the food system, but that study included costs of shipping in fertilisers or other inputs to produce food in the country it was eaten in, which seems a dubious way of measuring it - and certainly not much help to retail consumers.

13. And when they are, for that matter.

14. Despite it being wrong about the science in almost every conceivable way, at this point I have an irresistable compulsion to link to The Cow Song.

15. This is my own personal bet. That we’ll decarbonise electricity generation, ground transport and most of heat, but that solar + direct air capture will compensate for air travel and food. Solar is really becoming incredibly cheap and direct air capture - which we can already do, expensively - doesn’t seem harder to crack than, for example, electric cars.

16. Which will happen if it is deployed more rapidly.

17. Yes, China is installing vast amounts of solar energy, but it is also installing vast amounts of coal generation. Last year over 100% of the increase in carbon emissions was caused by India and China.

18. As with Fairtrade, the steelman of this position would acknowledge that eating less meat reduces the amount of carbon being produced right now. But it is almost certainly the case that the total warming depends far more heavily on how fast we get global emissions to Net Zero (or nearly there), which, globally is utterly dominated by how fast we can get the major cost curves down.

19. You might think it’s diversity, or multiculturalism, or even (if you’ve just woken up from an unexpectedly long nap in the Catskill Mountains) Christianity, but you’d be wrong. COVID-19 showed just how rapidly previously sacred values - from open borders to caring about inequality - got thrown overboard when safety was threatened. And more broadly we see that safety tends to determine the outcome in almost every public policy debate.

20. There is a slight nuance here regarding things that are fine in moderation but bad if you eat lots of them - thinking here of fizzy drinks, fatty products and the general obesity problem, where the Government isn’t entirely sure what to do. But, at an individual level, this can be solved by the ‘eat a healthy balanced diet’ approach.