An Economist Gets Lunch:
New Rules for Everyday Foodies
By Tyler Cowen
Dutton, 304 pages

Anyone writing engagingly on a nonacademic subject who cites the political scientist Thomas Schelling and the Chicago School of Economics as important influences on his own thinking is up to something unusual. And if the book in question is designed to help you find a better lunch, you have good reason to read it immediately—and lament he didn’t write it sooner.

Tyler Cowen’s witty and delightful book, An Economist Gets Lunch, is about food, not economics. Cowen promises “new rules for everyday foodies,” by which he means rules to guide you to the best food around, whether you’re in Paris, France, León, Nicaragua, or suburban Washington, D.C., and whether you’re in front of a white-linen table or in an aisle in a Korean supermarket.

The rules are different depending on the factors economists are keen to measure: the cost of land, labor and capital employed in the agriculture that produces ingredients, the supply chain that gets them onto the plate in front of you, the skill with which the chef has transformed them. In Cowen’s world, “every meal counts.” He promises that if you follow the rules, you will do better than the “median” meal, no matter where you are or the cost of the menu. And his clever, amusing, and rigorous analysis is very convincing.

Cowen doesn’t tell you where to go for your meal. He tells you how to think your way to the best outcome (meal) possible given the situation. For example: “Eat at a Thai restaurant that is attached to a motel.” Cowen admits “that sounds odd.” But he explains: “If the restaurant is attached to the motel, they are not paying extra rent for the space. A Thai family already owns the motel and they are opening this business on the side. They don’t have to cover high rents…the odds are you’ll get fairly authentic Thai food and at low prices.” 

Eating in Italy? Cowen has some advice. Rome, Florence, and Venice have, he says, the worst food in Italy. It’s the fault of high rents and tourists. There is superb food to be found in the country; just go elsewhere. “If you can’t name a famous landmark in an Italian city,” he writes, “it is likely to have superb food at affordable prices.”

There are dozens of observations like this, all of them useful and all intended to impart a dollop of economic reasoning alongside whatever else is on the plate. I suspect Cowen uses the rules in his economics classes at George Mason University to make the dismal science more digestible for his students. 

Cowen applies the methods of his profession to vividly explain how federal regulation once promoted decent food on airplanes (fares were fixed and high, and airlines competed for customers with better service) and how deregulation has made airline meals inedible (fares are low because that’s where the competition is focused). The Prohibition era was responsible for years of bad food; among other reasons, restaurants could not cook with wine. Additionally, speakeasies operated furtively and were not eager to gain reputations for their cuisine. 

Prohibition may be the one government regulation that the liberal-left understands to have been a mistake. But Cowen is skeptical of all government regulation and throughout the book shows how it often does damage, sometimes unintended and sometimes in service of the interests or values of the regulators and the politicians who empower them. There are myriad ways regulations and legislative overreach can deprive one of a good dinner: Regulation forbids us to bring back foodstuffs in our luggage from Italy and France, and politicians wishing to curry favor with the animal-rights lobby are making the production of foie gras illegal in many municipalities and states.

More serious—because it is a matter of life and death—is the damage inflicted by regulations that effectively prevent poor third-world farmers from growing more productive crops because they have been genetically engineered and the European Union won’t allow them in. Troublesome too is the promotion and subsidy of biofuels. “Ethanol subsidies are a lose-lose policy on almost every front,” Cowen explains, because they push up corn prices and take food off the table of hungry people while actually failing to diminish greenhouse gases.

Cowen spares none of the liberal conceits about helping the environment by, for example, turning to locally produced ingredients that need not be transported long distances. When you account for all the environmental consequences of efficient food-distribution networks, it is rarely the case that using only local ingredients is of any environmental benefit. He has it just right, in tone and substance, as he discusses “feel good” behavior that actually does nothing to benefit the environment and sometimes makes it worse. He doesn’t share the popular liberal aversion to agribusiness and argues that it could do much to alleviate hunger, especially in India.

The only problem with this splendid book is where to put it in one’s library, with the food books or the economic books? It’s really two books with a common quality: Thinking can make things better.