I enjoy following the food demand survey put out by Oklahoma State. Here are two items of interest from the latest:
- Willingness to pay for all meats, and dollars spent on food at home and away from home fell substantially last month – more than seems to be due to just sampling error
- Most people really do not understand what organic food means. In the following, we see what types of fertilizers people think are permitted:
Since the survey allowed people to select as many as they could, what it means is that half of all people think no fertilizer at all is used on organic crops. What is also curious is that if you look elsewhere in the survey, the most popular and accepted type of fertilizer, securing nitrogen from the atmosphere via Haber-Bosch, is thought to be third most important source for organic, but of course it is not permitted on organics.
This is very interesting data – I find number 1 to be very interesting. So either people are less well off or losing an appetite for meat, or perhaps some combination of both…I was going to suggest it might be something seasonal, because the numbers don’t look too far off from last November. But looking at the last two categories, (rice & beans, pasta) the y-o-y drop is somewhat alarming, especially considering that these are generally the least expensive foods to buy. But maybe, what’s it called, when the demand for ramen noodles increases when times are tough because they are substituting more expensive goods with less expensive goods – maybe the decreased demand for the less expensive items isn’t a bad thing. Or maybe we are curing the obesity epedemic and people aren’t eating as much! Sure provides a lot of food for thought (pun intended).
…or maybe i missed the point of the post entirely, which is that people are realizing that “organic” isn’t that meanginful, and they are shifting toward more efficiently produced forms of substanance.