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Agric Hum Values (2013) 30:661662 DOI 10.1007/s10460-013-9470-6
Jayson Lusk: The food police: a well-fed manifesto about the politics of your plate
Crown Forum, New York, New York, 2013, 230 pp, ISBN 978-0-307-98703-7
Harvey S. James Jr.
Accepted: 25 September 2013 / Published online: 20 October 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
In The Food Police, Lusk argues that there is an increasing trend by a chorus of authors, talk show hosts, politician, and celebrity chefs (p. 2) to regulate, restrict and otherwise control the foods that we produce and consume. He calls these people the food police and the high priests of politically correct food. They are a self-appointed elite who think they know what foods people should and should not eat. Some of their targets, according to Lusk: banning trans fats and foie gras, outlawing Happy Meals, taxing Twinkies and subsidizing fruit and vegetables, mandating that schools purchase a certain percentage of local food.
The book consists of 10 chapters. In the rst chapter, A Skeptical Foodie, Lusk states that he does not have an agenda to change what food people eat. He also does not want to promote the status quo. As an economist, he is generally agnostic about peoples preferences (p. 15). Rather, his aim is to tell the truth about food, and economics, which he argues is badly distorted in the popular, public, and academic spheres. Lusks contribution to the debate is his unabashed advocacy of economics and freedom of choice. He uses economic logic and empirical studies to debunk myths and misconceptions about the production and consumption of food and to argue that efforts to interfere with food and agricultural markets by directly controlling or regulating how they operate will produce unintended, harmful consequences. Simply put, as problematic as the current food system is, it works in producing...