Photo: Darwin BellBeets are the new broccoli. Or at least they will be after Obama takes office on January 20, as the president-elect recently revealed his distaste for this vitamin-laden root vegetable. And Obama is not alone: Even as beet salads have become popular in trendy eateries, most American kids I know also reject the mighty beet.
It’s a curious thing. You see, I grew up in Australia, where just about everyone seems to love eating beets, especially kids. In fact, even those kids who wrinkle their noses at other vegetables still love beets (or “beetroot” to an Aussie). When I arrived in the U.S., I was stunned to find Americans don’t add beetroot to their burgers. In Australia, beetroot on a burger is a given. In fact, during my undergraduate days the student cafeteria stopped serving beetroot on their burgers; I ran for election to the Sydney Uni student union partly on the platform of restoring beetroot on the burgers. (Obama should be careful, beetroot-lovers are a powerful constituency: I was elected in a landslide.)
Even McDonald’s understands the beet imperative, adding a healthy slice to their McOz burgers. And these aren’t fancy beets; the simple canned beets you get from the supermarket will improve any burger. Try it — you will thank me. With more adult tastes, I now prefer my beets roasted, perhaps with goat’s cheese.
But my point isn’t about how best to enjoy your beet, my point is the Beet Paradox: Why is it that American and Australian children have such different reactions to such a simple vegetable? The rest of our diets are pretty similar; our upbringing is similar, and so are the broader social and economic milieus which shape us. Yet the same food elicits starkly different reactions. Why?
And the Beet Paradox forces all of us economists to ask: Can we really treat preferences as exogenous and stable?
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When I emigrated to the US, also from Australia, I experienced a similar phenomenon. Of course, here in the US the burgers are simply exemplary. Even when taking the beetroot-laden Aussie-style burger into account, is there perhaps a correlation between the lack of beetroot on burgers and the quality of the burgers themselves? Perhaps adding beetroot simply disguises an otherwise bland burger.
I’m not sure there’s much of a “paradox” at work here; rather we may merely be seeing human nature for what it is.
Food preferences tend to be very localized. Even inside the US, as homogeneous as it is, there are strong regional preferences. I grew up, and currently live, in New England where ketchup (catsup?) is an oft-used condiment, on everything from burgers to hot dogs to scrambled eggs. But elsewhere in the US it’s not as common … and I’ve never seen it used on eggs anywhere else.
The incredible variety of regional cuisines within Italy are legendary, providing another example of the same phenomenon. While I haven’t been to Australia, I must assume there are regional cuisine preferences there too, as there are in any sizeable country. I know Oz has some foods which are rare or unavailable in other English-speaking or Commonwealth countries, such as vegemite.
I can offer no explanation for the regional-specialization of foods, other than to suppose it might be related to the phenomenon of dialect variation in languages. When people cluster, they tend to adopt similarities of behavior (linguistic, gastronomic, or otherwise) which aren’t found outside the group. That our world of media saturation and instant contact outside of regional groups hasn’t abated these differences, suggests this tendency is somehow innate.
Stigler and Becker faced the question of whether preferences are exogenous and stable. Most of us economists just duck it.
Apart from the transcendent question you raise (which may threaten the Economist’s Big Mac Index?), any one who has absorbed a history book, travelled with their eyes and/or noses open, or told the grandchildren what things were like when they were young, will have realised that tastes are caught from the people round one, and change with time.
The issue on which economists will no longer be able to duck including this reality in our calculus is global warming. We need to include as an important variable for policy decisions our best estimate of how people a hundred or more years hence will value different policy outcomes. There is no reason to expect their valuations to be identical with ours.
I’ve been putting beets on my burgers often since our honeymoon in Sydney. Loved them since I was a kid. Can’t figure out why my kids don’t. Roasted beets, hmm… Time to try something new!
Similar tastes?
One word.
Vegemite.
When he says no thanks to Putin’s offer of Borscht Soup will that re-incite the cold war?
The beetroot is just evil. I feel inspired by the prospect of a fellow beetroot hater in the Whitehouse.
The only people I know who like beets are over 60. They have cafeteria food written all over them. They bleed pink. What more do you need?