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It's not my fault and it's not my problem
And also it's not my responsibility
I'm Angela Duckworth
I'm Steven Dubner
And you're listening to No Stupid Questions
Today on the show, is everything we thought we knew about food deserts wrong?
You mean for that $2 burger I can get 600 calories? Give me two
Yeah, more bang for your buck
Steven, I read this paper from QJE
Economists call it the Cuge
Wait, do they really call it Cuge?
They do
Alright, now I'm feeling slightly embarrassed, I didn't know that
Can I just say, not knowing that economists call the quarterly journal of economics
The Cuge should not be a source of embarrassment for anyone
It might be a badge of pride
Correct
Well, I was reading the Cuge and I was reading in particular this article about food deserts
And I know we've talked a little bit about our affection mutual for Trader Joe's
And I'm so interested in this question of whether when you live in a food desert, so no Trader Joe's
No supermarkets that even sell decent fresh fruit and vegetables
Does that make you into an unhealthy eater?
And I think that's been the received wisdom for a long time
And this recent article done by one of my favorite economists, Hunt Alcott, is making the claim
That food deserts do not cause people in low-income neighborhoods to eat worse
That in fact, it is not a supply problem that people are eating
Junk food, fast food, but a demand problem
So, Steven, what do you think about this argument and do you think it's important?
So, I did read this paper
There were, I believe, six authors, three of them economists
And then others are professors in marketing and data science and real estate
And, yeah, after examining a lot of data, they found
I'm looking here, quote, that exposing low-income households to the same products and prices available
To high-income households, in other words, ameliorating the food desert
Reduces nutritional inequality by only about 10%
While the remaining 90% is driven by differences in demand, as you said
These findings counter the arguments that policies to increase the supply of healthy groceries
Could play an important role in reducing nutritional inequality
So, look, whenever someone can bring data to the issue, I think that's a step in the right direction
On the other hand, you can imagine a lot of people looking at these conclusions and saying
Whoa, blaming the victims
You're basically saying that people around this country who are living in low-income communities
Because they are low-income families, they also eat worse
Right, let's first talk about the paper itself because this paper was amazing
And I know I'm a nerd, but I was reading this paper and I was like, holy smokes
How would you ever be able to make a causal conclusion about something which seems hopelessly correlational
And the correlation that had been well-established long before these six scientists got together
Was that there is a strong relationship between low-income neighborhoods
And the absence of food that's healthy in particular supermarkets
So you find a lot of convenience stores, you find a lot of fast food joints
But if you go into a convenience store or a fast food joint, it's just like
Where are you going to get a salad? Where are you going to get a fresh apple?
So the correlation had been well-established, so they replicate that
They combined the Nielsen Homescan
It's like a nationally representative panel survey of grocery purchases
Of 61,000 households across the United States
And then they combined that with another national data set
Which is sales data from 35,000 grocery stores
Covering like 40% of all U.S. grocery purchases
Then they matched that to a third data set
Which is surveys of nutrition knowledge and preferences
In addition to that, they actually get hold of data
For the entry dates and the exact geolocations
Of all 6,721 new supermarkets in the United States
From 2004 to 2016 with the data on the other retail establishments in each zip code
I mean, just think about getting the data together
To paint a national portrait of the availability of food across the entire country
But also paired with how people are purchasing food
Also paired with preferences and knowledge about food
When you look at this study, you have to say
Look, everything that came before it is tiny
In comparison to the monumental data set that they aggregated
I mean, when people talk about the big data revolution
This is the big data revolution
What big data means to a lot of people is that
I as an individual am having my data fed into a big pool
Where some other people serve me ads based on my preferences
Which is not the most delicious use of big data for most people
But it takes a real blend of art and science to do it the way that these scholars did
These are people who are really well equipped to manage huge sets of data
And they know how to ask really good questions of those data
And here, they're using the introduction of a new local supermarket after it opens
To look at how the existing population changes their dietary habits
Is that about right?
That's exactly right
So the assumption, I think it's a very reasonable one
Is that when a supermarket opens in your neighborhood
We can look to see how that influences your purchases
Do you start buying fruits and vegetables and other healthy foods
Because now there's a more convenient place
The food desert is no longer such a food desert
And the prediction would be, if it's a supply problem
Then when one of these supermarkets opens
And finally you have somewhere other than CVS or Popeyes
To get food, you flock there and you start eating differently
And in fact, they found that that did not happen much
And here's the big thing
What people are doing is they're shifting from one supermarket
To a different supermarket
And they will go to the closer supermarket
But what they found in this study was that people are already driving
Something like five miles on average to go to the supermarket in the first place
In other words, to some extent the food desert problem isn't as grave as it might seem
Only because people are in the habit of commuting relatively long distances
Certainly not walking distance to where they were going to buy their groceries in the first place
So you might switch from grocery A to grocery B
But it's not exactly changing your personal landscape all that much
I was talking about this topic with my daughter Anya who is in college
You know her a little bit
She's interested in food
She's interested in psychology and so on
And she made what I felt was a really good point that I felt ridiculous for not having thought of
She said the fundamental question really here is
How and where and when do people or better a given person learn to eat nutritiously?
And when I think back to my life but also a lot of the research I've read
The obvious answer is the family into which you were born and the community into which you were born
Your habits
Right, so I happen to have been raised in an aggressively free-range organic type family
Farm literally, right?
Not that I would have chosen it, I'll be honest with you
Like all the other kids would come to school with Wonder Bread and bologna sandwiches
And I've got homemade whole wheat bread with bean sprouts and some funky protein-ish spread
Created from some indeterminate animal who may have died in the last month
Or maybe a little bit longer ago than that
I can't say it was necessarily into my liking
But we were essentially organic before that was a big trend
So homemade everything bread yogurt grew most of our own veg our own eggs from chickens some of the meat local fruit milk
No refined sugar at all except what you could sneak somehow
In retrospect, I feel I was very lucky having been conditioned with a palate for generally nutritious food
So imagine that you've been raised in a family or a community or a culture even
Where you're not eating nutritious food and that's your habit and habits as we know are so deep
They're sticky
And then you get a really nice fresh supermarket next door
You have to think how much should we expect that to actually change your buying and eating habits
Especially when fresh fruit and veg particularly but also healthier food overall is more expensive than the other processed stuff
It's more expensive. It's a pain in the ass to prepare relatively speaking
You know, I think the fact that healthy food which of course can be delicious
Of course we can learn to prepare it is at a disadvantage to junk food in that it is relatively less convenient
It is relatively less caloric, which by the way is one of the reasons why we crave unhealthy food, right?
Yeah, our evolutionary past has said salt fat sugar carbs go for it
So I think there's a lot stacked against healthy food. So when you open a supermarket
It's not just that you're not changing culture and you're not automatically changing habits. I mean, it's not exactly a fair fight
I think for me what this study reveals though is that there is a geographic physical food desert
But there's also cultural circumstances. I'm sure our childhood eating habits do influence our adult eating habits
But honestly Steven when I grew up trying to assimilate as a Chinese girl in a nearly all-white suburban neighborhood
I absolutely made my mom get Wonder Bread, Oscar Mayer, bologna, bright yellow mustard and it's like French's
French's, yeah
Fritos, Twinkies or tasty cakes because you know, I'm from Philadelphia. I drank tons of soda
I ate tons of candy probably why I have so many cavities so I don't eat like that today
And it's partly I think maybe largely because my current cultural context all the people I hang out with
Nobody's eating that way. So I don't know that we have to be completely bound to program from birth you're saying
Yeah, there's obviously some flexibility
Sure
I think that does suggest that all of us can evolve as we go and break habits that are less good and embrace habits that are somewhat better
But it's really interesting to me. I come back to this notion that the paper really points to of thinking that something is a supply problem
When in fact, it's a demand problem and why that is a big problem because if you try to solve policy
Assuming that the problem is on one side of the equation, but it's on the other you're probably not going to address that
You know in the food realm
I think back to this line of research about calorie count posting which began maybe 10 years ago or so now
And the research shows that it really doesn't work in the way that it was intended for instance
If a chain fast food store in a place like New York City is required to post the calories on every let's say hamburger
It found that people didn't consume less often
And in fact, sometimes they would consume more for the very simple reason that oh calories. Yeah more bang for your buck
Yeah, those are valuable. You mean for that $2 burger. I can get 600 calories. Give me two. That's a lot of calories for the penny
600 calories is really kind of an amazingly good deal in some ways
There was a paper recently looking at voluntary disclosure information from firms
And they found that calorie posting at Starbucks would sometimes drive people away from Starbucks over time
Especially men and that a place where they were often likely to go instead was Dunkin Donuts
Out of the frying pan into the fire
So I think it's instructive jumping off from this paper to look at other examples of where we think it's a supply problem
But in reality, it's a demand problem
I asked our Freakonomics Twitter feed for examples along these lines. Can I read you a few? Yeah
I said does anyone have a good example of a problem that we typically talk about as a low supply problem
But in fact is often a low demand problem. We got many many many replies here a few fact-based news
That's so interesting because people are always blaming the lack of supply and maybe as a populace
We're not asking for it as much as we should
Yeah, and truth be told there's a lot of fact-based news out there
There's a lot of writing by academics and analysts of different sorts who are really really evidence-based
But those don't get five million views. Here's another one bipartisan politicians
This person wrote everyone complains there are none, but no one wants their politicians to compromise
Oh, that's a good one. Here's another trade schools
I don't know how true this is but I like the idea of this example
This person wrote people have been told that working in trades doesn't pay well and is unstable
So it isn't in high demand from consumers despite crazy high supply shortages in just about every skilled trade
Right electricians plumbers and people who are not a do stuff
And here's another example on Twitter from a fellow named David Johnson. He wrote sleep
It's common to complain about not getting enough sleep
However, most people simply are choosing other activities instead of sleeping sometimes out of necessity
Yeah, so I wonder what you and your field and your psychology
Cohort say about this notion about the way that we might find it more comforting to think of a problem as a problem caused by
The supply people out there as opposed to being the internal demand from ourselves
I mean this gets back to Anya's question. Where do our preferences come from?
And I do think that all of us human beings may have some bias to things that are not our preferences and habits and choices
But are external to us as we've talked about before Stephen this is sometimes considered external locus of control
That all of us human beings you and me included would have some motivation to think well
It's not my fault and it's not my problem and also it's not my responsibility
Therefore to do something about it at the same time because it's very complicated
All human beings are somewhat rational in the sense that they're reacting to their incentives
Their perceived costs and benefits
For example, if you look at the soda tax, right?
The soda tax has been suggested by the authors of the paper that we're talking about
As well as many many other economists as a very helpful assistance to all of us human beings because we all love sugar
And when you say you can have 64 ounces of sugar with a straw and a cup with a nice lid for a dollar
It's really hard to resist that because we are reacting to our benefits and costs
And they say here's a solution for everyone not just for you know people who are in food desert
But for everyone there's gonna be a tax and I actually experienced this the other day
I went into a corner bakery
I was trying to buy a diet coke and I don't do this very often because I don't even drink diet soda much anymore
But they were like, yeah, it's four dollars and twenty nine cents
And I was like what and I'll tell you I'm not gonna go buy another one because that soda tax works
It worked on me and we should say that was one of the most successful components of driving down
Cigarette demand in this country and other countries to arguably the single biggest difference
Was made by taxes. I mean not to say that we shouldn't have warnings not to say that those commercials with a Marlboro man
Smoking a cigarette out of his trachea
I mean not to say that those didn't have any effect
But many people would argue that taxes had the single biggest effect
And it is not a gigantic leap both psychologically and physiologically to suggest
That there is a parallel between the addiction to nicotine and the addiction to sugar
The appetite for sugar can be based on an addictive taste the way that the appetite for nicotine can be
Oh, yeah, I completely agree
I mean if you could remove one thing from the American diet and just solve 80% of the problem overnight
It would be sugar sugar. I don't think that's really any more in question
Although it was questioned by research some of which was funded by sugar producers
There's a rather grotesque history in this and many countries of academic research
It looks to be objective and it turns out to be industry funded and that's been the case with nicotine and with sugar
We should also say nicotine itself is not a bad drug
And in fact, it's being used in many different ways many different applications
But smoking cigarettes is a terrible delivery system for nicotine because smoking is so bad
Well, look when we understand that by human nature all of us human beings like sugar we crave it
All of us are vulnerable to really cheap easy ways to get things that by evolution we of course want
But I do think that policies that encourage us to do what's good for us in the long run
By levying short-term costs on the things that we're all easily addicted to or attracted to
I think that's great. I mean tax the hell out of soda in my view charge me over $4
Even if I'm trying to get a diet coke fine good
And then also maybe if you can make fruits vegetables somewhat more likely to get eaten because they're subsidized in some way
And that has happened right snap programs and I think with good effect
And there has been good research done on that which showed that if you decrease the price of the goods
I mean look this is basic economics 101 with a little bit of psych 101
But if you increase the availability and decrease the price of the things that are better
Then people are going to consume some more of it
Still to come on no stupid questions
Stephen and Angela discuss initiatives that effectively encourage healthier habits
I have to say that habits are hard to break but not impossible
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The Glad Girl group coming at you with their throwback jam
That was Glad Force Flex drawstring trash bags featuring Pine Salt original synth
And that's better than all good
It's all glad
Rest day is the best day
Busting onto the scene in adulthood, I didn't know what chard was, let alone how to cook it
One of my many jobs in college was as a cashier
And a customer told me how to steam green beans
So I went home and I tried it
And when they came out bright green, I thought I'd done something wrong
Because I was used to them being brown from a can
The second sort of odd obstacle is that a lot of vegetables go bad pretty quickly, right?
So if I go to the farmer's market to pick out veggies for the week
Anything with leaves is wilted after a couple days in the fridge
This is Eric from Stillwater, Oklahoma
And I gotta say one of the biggest difficulties in eating healthy has to be social influences
A lot of my friends and family don't always eat the most healthy
And I'm usually just gonna have what they're eating
And when we're gonna go someplace to have fun
Or if we're gonna go out, no one's gonna pick a healthy option
Because no one ever said,
Hey man, come on, let's go out and have some glasses of water and salads
Hi, Steven and Angela, this is Lauren Grandsfeld from Brooklyn
For me, there are two obstacles to eating healthy
One is accessibility and readiness
When I'm hungry and I'm busy
It's so much easier just to grab a piece of bread
And smear some peanut butter on it
Or have cereal and milk
Rather than start to wash the lettuce and cut vegetables
And find a protein to add to it
Or have all of that prepared in advance
And the other obstacle is really believing that there's a long-term benefit
To rather eating the salad than the peanut butter sandwich
Sometimes it just feels like the work is not worth it
That was, respectively, Sarah Johnson, Eric Natvold, and Lauren Grandsfeld
Thanks to them and to everyone who sent us their thoughts
Now, back to Steven and Angela's conversation about the behavioral economics of food deserts
I think the tricky part, or maybe the difficult part, is that if the problem of generally poor nutrition
Were caused by low supply, that would be amazing
Because supply is pretty fixable
But what they find instead is that most people who eat generally well, nutritionally
There are a couple big commonalities in that population
And those are higher income and higher education
Which, by the way, are correlates, not necessarily causes
Exactly
But here's the thing, especially because those are correlated
It makes me think of how hard this problem is
I remember a paper from 2015 by Jesse Hanbury, Ilya Rakovsky, and Molly Schnell
It was very similar, it was called Is the Focus on Food Deserts Fruitless?
Retail access and food purchases across the socio-economic spectrum
And they argued, similarly, that access to food is a relatively minor driver to nutritious eating
And a much more powerful driver is education
How educated you are about nutrition
So if it's education, which correlates with income, which lead to better nutrition
It also suggests that the arrow may be going in the other direction and maybe even more aggressively
Which is to say that low nutrition can lead to lower education and correspondingly lower income
And that's a vicious cycle
Well, first of all, these are all correlations
But you're right, that there could be causality going in both directions
And whenever there's causality in both directions, x driving y and y driving x
That is the very definition of a vicious or, by the way, a virtuous cycle
Depending how things go
I think we have some other avenues, though
Other than making people wealthier and getting people all the way through college
Both of which are noble and urgent policy imperatives
There is cultural change
Like, we can say that cigarette taxes are maybe the primary driver for why people don't smoke today
But I do think that in many, many communities, smoking is looked at with some amount of shame
Some amount of embarrassment, some amount of like, yeah, I probably shouldn't be doing this
I mean, just from watching Mad Men, I don't think that was always true for the United States
So cultural change is possible
And I have to say this, if you look at the cultural icons really across the board
You know, people that you might admire from movies, from music
Oh, when you said cultural icons, I was thinking McDonald's and Popeyes
That's not the cultural icons you meant
No, no, I was thinking about human cultural icons
And guess what? I think that people who are famous and very successful in all these different walks of life
Ten, by the way, to eat very well
I mean, healthy eating and exercise and self-care are kind of a thing
Among the elite of every cultural category that I can think of
For the most part, you can point to exceptions
That suggests to me that maybe with some creativity
We can think about how to make these role models a little more salient
Without being judgy, I think one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that
Another thing that is universal to human nature is to not want to feel bad about yourself
And so if there is a way to increase demand for healthy food without making people feel bad
That's going to be the trick
The one last thing I want to ask you about is
We know that culture and cultural influence is strong
And we know that habit formation is really strong
Is there anything you can pull from your bag of tricks as to how to form a better habit in this realm?
Anything maybe you've learned from the Behavior Change for Good project?
Well, habit was exactly where my mind was going
As I concluded my reading of this extremely long but excellent article
So in that analysis they said, hey, supermarket opens up
We're going to look and see what happens
What happens to people's buying patterns and so forth
Oh, it turns out they don't change all that much
But I did wonder what happens in the long term
What happens when you live in a neighborhood where not just one supermarket pops up
And we look at your behavior in the short term
But what if you live in a neighborhood where there are more and more of these grocery stores
Where we now start to look at shifts in behavior that happen over much longer time scales
Where there's a number of things hopefully happening
Maybe there's some pressure on fast food outlets to make a dollar menu that doesn't have quite as fatal food on it
I have to say that habits are hard to break but not impossible
And if a kid like me who grew up with RC Cola, Doritos, baloney sandwiches on Wonder Bread
And tasty cakes as like 80% of her calories can eat a pretty healthy diet these days
It just suggested to me that hope is not lost
Right, that demand really is dynamic
Demand can change and it's not easy but it's possible
And look I think if you look around a place like New York City at least
It's been a dramatic change over the past 20 or 30 years
I mean we're not a typical place to eat because we've never had as many chains and franchises as other cities
Or other places especially more suburban or exurban areas
Although that has also changed too
There are a lot more chains even in Manhattan than there used to be
But among those chains and franchises there are so many more healthier places now
All these places that have a generally nutritious option at least
And so I would say that is very much a reflection of what you are saying you would hope for
Which is a real holistic overall change in demand at least to some degree
It may not be a 60% shift in demand but a 12% shift in demand is still really large and I think encouraging
I would also suggest if it's so hard to wean oneself from eating a lot of food that one feels they'll suffer from later
That rather than listening to podcasts people should just start making them
Maybe several because it's just hard to eat when you're constantly talking is what I've found
Maybe people should start hosting their own podcasts that's what you're saying
Exactly everyone should probably have eat or ten podcasts
Such a great idea Steven that's a really actionable policy idea
You're welcome
I have a related suggestion you could also take a walk while you're listening to this podcast
Yeah but it's really easy walking and eating it's one of my favorite combinations
And also don't walk to get a dollar cheeseburger so you know there's nuance here but yes I think there's hope
No Stupid Questions is produced by me, Rebecca Lee Douglas
And now here's a fact check of today's conversation
Angela and Steven discuss why New York City's 2008 calorie posting requirement backfired
They say that paying $2 for a 600 calorie burger might be perceived as a great deal
They're presumably thinking of McDonald's
According to the McDonald's website a Big Mac is about 550 calories
But it will likely cost you more than $2
As of January 2022 the sandwich cost an average of $5.81 in the United States
However, according to the Economist's Big Mac Index
If you were in Turkey you could nab one for just under $2 US
Later, Steven was unsure about a claim in a listener's tweet about trade schools
According to a report from the National Center for Education Statistics
Trade school enrollment has actually been on the rise since 1999
However, this is after a decline in the 80s and 90s that created a shortage of tradespeople
Also, demand for specific trades is certainly on the rise
A 2020 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics lists
Win turbine service technicians, physical therapist assistants, and home and health personal care aides among the fastest growing occupations
That's next to white collar jobs like statisticians and data scientists
Also, Steven cites a 2015 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research titled
Is the Focus on Food Deserts Fruitless?
And notes that it's similar to the article that is the focus of today's question
That makes sense because the co-authors of the 2015 paper are actually three of the authors of the Quarterly Journal of Economics article
Finally, Angela references quote
Those commercials with the Marlboro man smoking a cigarette out of his trachea
In this case, I'm pretty sure she's misremembering a 1996 California public service advertisement featuring a woman named Debbie Austin
In the piece, Austin explains to viewers that she began smoking at age 13 and could never quit
She tells the camera they say nicotine is an addictive before inhaling a cigarette from a stoma in her throat
A hole that allowed her to breathe after her larynx was removed at age 42
Austin died in 2013 of cancer at the age of 62
That's it for the fact check
Coming up next week on No Stupid Questions
Does the early bird really get the worm?
I usually do wake up quite early, between 5 and 5.30
But to me that's just normal
This is the thing, you think it's normal, it is not normal
That's next week on No Stupid Questions
For that episode, we want to know
Which is better, being an early riser or a night owl, and why?
To share your thoughts, send a voice memo to NSQ at Freakonomics.com
With the subject line, early bird
Make sure to record someplace quiet and please keep your thoughts to under a minute
Maybe we'll include them on the show
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Thanks for listening
If you look on a list of states with the best and worst diets, California is number one
They have a big standard deviation as I say
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