Category: Food and Drink
Our non-eggcellent regulations
Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden are among the nations the U.S. Department of Agriculture approached to address the shortage brought on by a bird flu outbreak, according to European industry groups.
But supplying Americans with eggs would be complicated for foreign producers — but not because of political tensions over the myriad import tariffs President Donald Trump has imposed or threatened to impose on his nation’s top trading partners.
Even if they were eager to share, European countries don’t have many surplus eggs because of their own avian flu outbreaks and the growing domestic demand ahead of Easter.
One of the biggest obstacles, however, is the approach the United States takes to preventing salmonella contamination. U.S. food safety regulations require fresh eggs to be sanitized and refrigerated before they reach shoppers; in the European Union, safety standards call for Grade A eggs to be sold unwashed and without extended chilling.
Here is the full story, via Rich Dewey. So no, American scientists will not be moving to Europe — their eggs are too dangerous. And yes it is Germany too:
It is common in parts of Europe, for example, for consumers to buy eggs that still have feathers and chicken poop stuck to them.
Here is Patrick Collison, comparing the virtues of America to the virtues of Europe. I do not mind that he left out the chicken poop, for me it is a sign of authenticity. As for eggs, the best ones I ever had were in Chile.
America’s Tourism Deficit: How the French Are Winning the Currency War One Croissant at a Time
Every year, American tourists pour billions of dollars into France, wandering the Louvre, sipping overpriced espresso in Montmartre, and snapping selfies along the Seine—while far fewer French tourists bother making the reverse pilgrimage to admire, say, Disney World. The result? A massive tourism deficit.
On paper, this reflects wealth differentials and revealed preferences – Americans, being richer and more numerous than the French, express a high demand for old world Parisian experiences. But behind this innocent wanderlust is something more sinister. When Americans vacation in France, that’s counted as a US import of tourism. When French people vacation here—fewer, more begrudgingly—that’s a US export. So voilà, the tourism deficit creates a trade deficit, an excess of imports over exports!
The tourism deficit means there is a steady leak of the world’s reserve currency into the hands of a nation famous for its cheese, wine, and suspicion of American capitalism. France, using little more than museums and moodiness, is accumulating dollars from innocent American travelers. And they’re not just hoarding them for kicks. Those dollars are claims on real assets. First it’s a Napa vineyard. Then a Brooklyn fintech startup. Eventually, who knows? The Port of Long Beach? The Federal Reserve’s snack bar?
Make no mistake: France’s true comparative advantage isn’t wine or luxury goods—it’s the ruthless extraction of tourism dollars, performed with flawless precision, a disdainful shrug, and a little help from Emily in Paris. We’re being out-traded, one overpriced pastry at a time, by a nation whose strategic horizon spans centuries—and whose Netflix marketing is impeccable.
The political implications are, shall we say, obvious.
From now on, we demand a tourism balance. No more visa waivers, no more jet-setting to Provence until they send an equal number of French tourists to Branson, Missouri. It’s high time the French get over their Napoleon complex and start to appreciate American corn dogs and Dolly Parton. France needs to treat us with the same respect as the friendly countries that enthusiastically dispatch high-spending tourists to our shores.
It’s one-for-one, or the deal is off. Tourism parity or rien! Point final.
Thwarted arbitrage?
US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has intercepted an increasing number of eggs from Mexico, where a carton of a dozen costs about $2. For comparison, the cost in many parts of California is just under $10 per dozen, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
Nationally, there has been a 48% increase in eggs being detained at ports of entry this fiscal year compared with the same time last fiscal year, according to CBP. In San Diego, these “egg interception” cases have increased by a whopping 158%.
Every day, more than 200,000 cars cross the border from Mexico to the United States.
…Once confiscated, the eggs are destroyed by officials in oven-sized incinerators.
Here is the full Guardian story.
My first trip to Haiti
This was in 1994, right after the Aristide regime was restored by Clinton. I had traveled a good deal by that time, mostly in North America, Europe, and southeast Asia. But I had never been anywhere truly dangerous. It seemed impossible to visit such places. It is not that I did any serious risk calculation, rather the option simply was not part of my mental toolkit.
But somehow I started thinking about visiting Haiti. It seemed like it would be the most dangerous place I could possibly choose. I had this recurring mental image that I could not even set out on the street without someone coming along and cutting off one of my arms with a machete.
And so I bought my ticket. I suppose I viewed this as a kind of challenge. I also knew that if it went OK, I would end up going to a lot of other places as well.
Not long before the trip, I was on the phone with my friend Christopher Weber, the renowned investor, writer, and Offenbach scholar. I mentioned I was going and next thing you know Chris, being a “bounder of adventure,” was coming along with me.
I arrived in Haiti first. As I walked into the baggage and pick-up area of the airport (lovely live compa music), some men immediately grabbed my bags and took them from me. “Uh-oh.” In fact they brought them to the cab and wanted a tip, and they didn’t want anyone else carrying my bags first. High-trust oases in low-trust countries remains a very interesting topic to me, to this day.
I stayed in Pétion-Ville, the wealthier “suburb” of Port-au-Prince, known for its restaurants and nightlife, and I loved the place. The food, music, and art were all amazing, and they were everywhere. You could find interesting artwork on many of the street corners and for very low prices. A known artist might be selling a work for $200. I bought a political satire piece by Maxan Jean-Louis entitled “Aristide’s Wedding,” showing his semi-forced alliance with the United States military. I also bought “Soccer Angels” by the great Jean-Baptiste Jean, and a Claude d’Ambreville painting of women with basket on their heads, now a Haitian standard. That set me off buying art.
The architecture was amazing — think a more elaborate New Orleans style — but very badly ailing, you could even say collapsing.
My favorite dishes were the “combie hash,” the Dinde (a small turkey, best I have had), and the seafood mixing French and Caribbean influences. The tender conch (lambi) is arguably the Haitian national dish. The rice and beans cooked in mushroom juice was another delight, totally new to me. At the time it was obviously the best food in the Caribbean.
My arms remained intact, and walking around Petitionville required some basic caution but did not feel dangerous. Furthermore, the population at that time was hopeful for the future, so it felt very good to be there. The storytellers communicated an appropriate sense of drama.
After a day of walking around, Chris and I rented a car, which was in retrospect an unsound thing to do. We drove to Moulin Sur Mer, a “resort” on the ocean, originally an 18th century sugar plantation. Only a few other people were staying there and one of them appeared to be a Dominican drug lord family. Inside one of the buildings was a list of all the Haitian presidents, and at times the rate is about one leader per year — “model this.” I recalled Hegel’s adage that governments based on voodoo religion were bound to be unstable.
The water was lovely, but the drive to and from Moulin Sur Mer was not uneventful. On the way back, at a service station, a man pulled a submachine gun on Chris and asked for a rather favorable exchange rate on our gasoline purchase. Another man ran at the car and tried to jump on the roof as we drove past. I still am not sure whether he wanted to commandeer the vehicle or simply was looking for a free bus ride (Haitians frequently ride on the tops of their buses).
In any case we pressed on, and it didn’t all seem that dangerous after all. I went away vowing to return, and indeed over the years I was to make four more trips to Haiti, as it became one of my favorite countries. The next time I went I met Selden and Carole Rodman in the line boarding the flight from Miami, and that was to change my life yet again…
The Curious Surge of Productivity in U.S. Restaurants
We document that, after remaining almost constant for almost 30 years, real labor productivity at U.S. restaurants surged over 15% during the COVID pandemic. This surge has persisted even as many conditions have returned to pre-pandemic levels. Using mobile phone data tracking visits and spending at more than 100,000 individual limited service restaurants across the country, we explore the potential sources of the surge. It cannot be explained by economies of scale, expanding market power, or a direct result of COVID-sourced demand fluctuations. The restaurants’ productivity growth rates are strongly correlated, however, with reductions in the amount of time their customers spend in the establishments, particularly with a rising share of customers spending 10 minutes or less. The frequency of such ‘take-out’ customers rose considerably during COVID, even at fast food restaurants, and never went back down. The magnitude of the restaurant-level relationship between productivity and customer dwell time, if applied to the aggregate decrease in dwell time, can explain almost all of the aggregate productivity increase in our sample.
That is from a new paper by
Hire Don’t Fire at the FDA
As a longtime critic of the FDA, you might expect me to support firing FDA employees—not so! My focus has always been on reducing approval time and costs to speed drugs to patients and increase the number of new drugs. Cutting staff is more likely to slow approvals and raise costs.
To be fair, we’re talking about the firing of some 200 probationary employees from a total of some 20,000. Unusual but not earth shaking. But the firings are indiscriminate, and as I explain below, the FDA is a peculiar target for cost-cutting because user fees under PDUFA cover a significant share of the FDA’s budget so its workers are among the cheapest federal employees. So what is the point? Shock and awe in advance of bigger reforms for the FDA? Perhaps. Regardless, I think we should keep in mind the big picture on staff and speed.
The Prescription Drug User Fee Act of 1992 (PDUFA) provides strong evidence that with more staff the FDA works faster to get new and better drugs to patients. Before PDUFA, drug approvals languished at the FDA simply due to a lack of staff—harming both drug companies and patients. Congress should have increased FDA funding, as the benefits would have far outweighed the costs, but Congress failed. Instead, PDUFA created a workaround: drug firms agreed to pay user fees, with the condition that the funds be used for drug reviewers and that the FDA be held to strict review standards.
PDUFA was a tremendous success. Carpenter et al., Olson, Berndt et al. and others all find that PDUFA shortened review times and it did so primarily through the mechanism of hiring more staff. Thus, Carpenter et al. report “NDA review times shortened by 3.3 months for every 100 additional FDA staff.” Moreover, the faster approval times came at little to no expense of reduced safety. Thus, Berndt et al. report:
implementation of the PDUFAs led to substantial incremental reductions in approval times beyond what would have been observed in the absence of these legislative acts. In addition, our preliminary examination of the trends in the number of new molecular entity withdrawals, frequently used as a proxy to assess the FDA’s safety record, suggests that the proportion of approvals ultimately leading to safety withdrawals prior to PDUFA and during PDUFA I and II were not statistically different.
And in a later analysis Philipson et al. find that:
more rapid access of drugs on the market enabled by PDUFA saved the equivalent of 140,000 to 310,000 life years. Additionally, we estimate an upper bound on the adverse effects of PDUFA based on drugs submitted during PDUFA I/II and subsequently withdrawn for safety reasons, and find that an extreme upper bound of about 56,000 life years were lost. This estimate is an extreme upper bound as it assumes all withdrawals since the inception of PDUFA were due to PDUFA and that there were no patients who benefitted from the withdrawn drugs.
If we’re going to have FDA review, it should be fast and efficient. We need to shift the focus from the FDA’s balance sheet in the Federal budget to the patients it serves—more staff means faster reviews, better access to treatments, and a healthier society.
More generally, government regulation, not staffing, is the real problem. Cut regulation, and staff cuts can follow. Cut staff without cutting regulation, and the morass only gets worse.
Kevin Kelly’s fifty travel tips
Here is one of them, in part:
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip.
Here are the rest, mostly I agree.
How the System Works
Charles Mann is worried that so few of us have any notion of the giant, interconnected systems that keep us alive and thriving. His new series, How the System Works at the The New Atlantis, is a primer to civilization. As you might expect from Mann, it’s beautifully written with arresting facts and images:
The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.
…Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.
Every American stands at the end of a continuing, decades-long effort to build and maintain the systems that support our lives. Schools should be, but are not, teaching students why it is imperative to join this effort. Imagine a course devoted to how our country functions at its most basic level. I am a journalist who has been lucky enough to have learned something about the extraordinary mechanisms we have built since Jefferson’s day. In this series of four articles, I want to share some of the highlights of that imaginary course, which I have taken to calling “How the System Works.”
We begin with our species’ greatest need and biggest system — food.
and here’s one telling fact from the first essay:
Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”
Addendum: Tom Meadowcroft from the comments: I teach chemical engineers, who are expert at understanding, designing and managing processes, and will be running many of these civilizational processes after they graduate. Even amongst that group of very bright thinkers, there is remarkably little knowledge as to how we achieve clean water, reliable electricity, fuel for transport and industry, dispose of sewage, and grow and distribute food. These same young adults can all tell you about colonial mindsets, how the world is going to burn, and how various groups are victimized. Our K-12 education system has very warped priorities and remarkably ignorant people at the front of the classroom.
The New Consensus on the Minimum Wage
My take is that there is an evolving new consensus on the minimum wage. Namely, the effects of the minimum wage are heterogeneous and take place on more margins than employment. Read Jeffrey Clemens’s brilliant and accessible paper in the JEP for the theory. A good example of the heterogeneous impact is this new paper by Clemens, Gentry and Meer on how the minimum wage makes it more difficult for the disabled to get jobs:
…We find that large minimum wage increases significantly reduce employment and labor force participation for individuals of all working ages with severe disabilities. These declines are accompanied by a downward shift in the wage distribution and an increase in public assistance receipt. By contrast, we find no employment effects for all but young individuals with either non-severe disabilities or no disabilities. Our findings highlight important heterogeneities in minimum wage impacts, raising concerns about labor market policies’ unintended consequences for populations on the margins of the labor force.
Or Neumark and Kayla on the minimum wage and blacks:
We provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of minimum wages on blacks, and on the relative impacts on blacks vs. whites. We study not only teenagers – the focus of much of the minimum wage-employment literature – but also other low-skill groups. We focus primarily on employment, which has been the prime concern with the minimum wage research literature. We find evidence that job loss effects from higher minimum wages are much more evident for blacks, and in contrast not very detectable for whites, and are often large enough to generate adverse effects on earnings.
Remember also that a “job” is not a simple contract of hours of work for dollars but contains many explicit and implicit margins on work conditions, fringe benefits, possibilities for promotion, training and so forth. For example, in Unintended workplace safety consequences of minimum wages, Liu, Lu, Sun and Zhang finds that the minimum wage increases accidents, probably because at a higher minimum wage the pace of work increases:
we find that large increases in minimum wages have significant adverse effects on workplace safety. Our findings indicate that, on average, a large minimum wage increase results in a 4.6 percent increase in the total case rate.
Note that these effects don’t always happen, in large part because, depending on the scope of the minimum wage increase and the industry, large effects of the minimum wage may be passed on to prices. For example here is Renkin and Siegenthaler finding that higher minimum wage increase grocery prices:
We use high-frequency scanner data and leverage a large number of state-level increases in minimum wages between 2001 and 2012. We find that a 10% minimum wage hike translates into a 0.36% increase in the prices of grocery products. This magnitude is consistent with a full pass-through of cost increases into consumer prices.
Similarly, Ashenfelter and Jurajda find there is no free lunch from minimum wage increases, indeed there is approximately full pass through at McDonalds:
Higher labor costs induced by minimum wage hikes are likely to increase product prices.4 If both labor and product markets are competitive, firms can pass through up to the full increase in costs (Fullerton and Metcalf 2002). With constant returns to scale, firms adjust prices in response to minimum wage hikes in proportion to the cost share of minimum wage labor. Under full price pass-through, the real income increases of low-wage workers brought about by minimum wage hikes may be lower than expected (MaCurdy 2015). There is growing evidence of near full price pass-through of minimum wages in the United States….Based on data spanning 2016–20, we find a 0.2 price elasticity with respect to wage increases driven (instrumented) by minimum wage hikes. Together with the 0.7 (first-stage) elasticity of wage rates with respect to minimum wages, this implies a (reduced-form) price elasticity with respect to minimum wages of about 0.14. This corresponds to near-full price pass-through of minimum-wage-induced higher costs of labor.
You can draw your own conclusions about the desirability of the minimum wage, but the fleeting hope that it raises wages without trade-offs is gone. The effects of the minimum wage are nuanced, heterogeneous, and by no means entirely positive.
Milei Implements Peer Approval for Food
Reason: In a sweeping move to overhaul Argentina’s food trade policies, Javier Milei’s administration officially deregulated food imports and exports on Monday. The reform, outlined in Decree 35/2025, seeks to boost foreign trade, cut bureaucratic red tape, and lower consumer prices.
Federico Sturzenegger, head of the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, explained in a post on X that the measure “seeks cheaper food for Argentines and more Argentine food for the world.”
Under the new policy, food products and packaging certified by countries with “high sanitary surveillance” can now enter Argentina without any additional registration or approval processes. These items will be automatically recognized under the Argentine Food Code, cutting down on administrative delays and costs for importers.
The legislation identifies countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Union, as having similar or higher sanitary standards than Argentina.
As Sturzenegger explains in his post, this measure “eliminates requirements to register and authorize: samples, products, establishments, warehouses, utensils, and containers (32 pages of paperwork).”
An excellent “peer approval” policy and one that I have long supported when it comes to the FDA and drug approvals. In fact, since 2010 the US FDA has begun to recognize other countries as having comparable food safety systems. To date, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have been recognized with a Systems Recognition partnership.
Systems Recognition (SR) is a partnership between the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a foreign regulatory counterpart, in which the agencies have concluded that they operate comparable regulatory programs that yield similar food safety outcomes.
Argentina’s policy is unilateral and assumes equivalence if a country uses recognized standards (e.g., Codex Alimentarius) or has high sanitary vigilance while the FDA’s SR policy is bilateral and involves more regulatory harmonization and investigation. I prefer the Argentinian approach. Nevertheless, both programs have the goals of simplifying trade, avoiding duplicate inspections, and helping to prioritize scarce inspection resources.
I encourage the FDA to build on SR for food and extend it to drugs. This could be done in a minor and major way, both of which would useful. The minor reform would be peer approval for already-approved US drugs. In this way, importation could ease drug shortages. The FDA has done this in the past on an ad-hoc basis but it should be made permanent. The second, more major reform, would to extend peer-approval to any drug or device approved by a stringent authority.
France fact of the day
Consumption of red wine in France has fallen by about 90 per cent since the 1970s, according to Conseil Interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux (CIVB), an industry association. Total wine consumption, spanning reds, whites and rosés, is down more than 80 per cent in France since 1945, according to survey data from Nielsen, and the decline is accelerating, with Generation Z purchasing half the volume bought by older millennials.
Here is more from Adrienne Klasa at the FT. You will note these are declines from large numbers:
“With every generation in France we see the change. If the grandfather drank 300 litres of red wine per year, the father drinks 180 litres and the son, 30 litres,” said CIVB board member Jean-Pierre Durand.
In the USA, the Surgeon General is calling for cancer warnings on alcohol (NYT).
Merry Christmas!
Wishing all our readers a wonderful day and New Year!
Is Indian food the world’s best?
From my latest Bloomberg column:
Why is the food so good? I have several overlapping hypotheses, most of them coming from my background as an economist. Interestingly, India’s culinary advantages can be traced to some good and some not-so-good aspects of Indian society.
First, food supply chains here are typically very short. Trucking, refrigeration and other aspects of modernity are widespread, but a lot of supply chains are left over from a time when those were luxuries. So if you are eating a vegetable, there is a good chance it came from nearby. That usually means it is more fresh and tastes better.
The sad truth is that India still has very high rates of food spoilage, especially when food is transported longer distances. The country is making significant progress building out its transportation networks, but in the meantime the American culinary tourist enjoys the best of all worlds: Our purchasing power is high, and we can spend our money eating super-local.
And:
India also has high income inequality. That means there is plenty of cheap labor competing to cook for diners with higher incomes. The “thickness” of the competition leads to innovation and experimentation — there are a lot of restaurants, food stalls, truck stops and the like. It is a buyer’s market. Furthermore, some of India’s best dishes, such as Bengali sweets, are very labor-intensive. Indian desserts that are mediocre in US restaurants receive the proper care and attention in Kolkata.
And:
Then there is the cultural side. India is a “food nation.” When I ask locals which are the best places to eat, which I regularly do, I am repeatedly struck by how many have strong opinions. When everyone is a food critic, standards rise accordingly. It also makes it easy for the visitor to get quality recommendations.
There are further good arguments at the link. In Bangalore I had a superb meal, Kayasth food, by Manu Chandra in Lupa, this was a special menu:
Cochin (Kochi) bleg
What to see, what to do, and where to eat? I thank you all in advance for your suggestions…
Regulating Sausages
In the comments on Sunstein on DOGE many people argued that regulations were mostly about safety. Well, maybe. It’s best to think about this in the context of a real example. Here is a tiny bit of the Federal Meat Inspection Act regulating sausage production:
In the preparation of sausage, one of the following methods may be used:
Method No. 1. The meat shall be ground or chopped into pieces not exceeding three fourths of an inch in diameter. A dry-curing mixture containing not less than 3 1⁄3 pounds of salt to each hundredweight of the unstuffed sausage shall be thoroughly mixed with the ground or chopped meat. After being stuffed, sausage having a diameter not exceeding 3 1⁄2 inches, measured at the time of stuffing, shall be held in a drying room not less than 20 days at a temperature not lower than 45 °F., except that in sausage of the variety known as pepperoni, if in casings not exceeding 1 3⁄8 inches in diameter measured at the time of stuffing, the period of drying may be reduced to 15 days. In no case, however, shall the sausage be released from the drying room in less than 25 days from the time the curing materials are added, except that sausage of the variety known as pepperoni, if in casings not exceeding the size specified, may be released at the expiration of 20 days from the time the curing materials are added. Sausage in casings exceeding 3 1⁄2 inches, but not exceeding 4 inches, in diameter at the time of stuffing, shall be held in a drying room not less than 35 days at a temperature not lower than 45 °F., and in no case shall the sausage be released from the drying room in less than 40 days from the time the curing materials are added to the meat.
The act goes on like this for many, many pages. All to regulate sausages. Sausage making, once an artisan’s craft, has become a compliance exercise that perhaps only corporations can realistically manage. One can certainly see that regulations of this extensiveness lock-in production methods. Woe be to the person who wants to produce a thinner, fatter or less salty sausage let alone who tries to pioneer a new method of sausage making even if it tastes better or is safer. Is such prescriptive regulation the only way to maintain the safety of our sausages? Could not tort law, insurance, and a few simple rules substitute at lower cost and without stifling innovation?