Food for Thought: What Your Lunch Reveals About the Economy

Imagine this: you are handed a plain lunch. No menu, no story, no price. Just a plate eaten between lectures in an ordinary city. From that plate alone, what could you infer about the economy that produced it?

You would notice globalisation before taste. Supply chains before preferences. Incentives before culture. How far the ingredients travelled, how much processing occurred, and whether the food required skill or labour: all reveal information about wages, regulation, technology, and scale. The lunch is less about personal choice than economic constraints.

Economist Tyler Cowen frames this idea in a deceptively simple question: what does an economist eat for lunch? In this framing, food becomes a compact map of the modern economy. A well-prepared meal signals competitive markets, skilled labour, dense demand, and manageable inequality. A mediocre one often points to the opposite: long supply chains optimised for transport, weak innovation incentives, or the erosion of local knowledge through scale and standardisation.

Food quality, then, is shaped by institutions. Asking why one city eats better than another is not primarily a culinary question: it is an economic one. Take Naples versus London.

Corn illustrates this clearly. In the United States, a $86 billion industry, corn is industrialised. It travels well, stores well, and standardises easily, making it a backbone of global food systems. Corn can be grown at scale, shipped worldwide, frozen, processed, and turned into countless products. It is optimised for price and durability: not flavour or variety. Purple, blue, or region-specific corn varieties exist but rarely survive industrial supply chains. They cannot be mechanically harvested or transported efficiently. The result is standardised, bland corn. By contrast, local or rare corn varieties, like the deep purple corn I ate as a child in my grandmother's garden in rural Ukraine, preserved flavour because they were exempt from large-scale pressures. They were economically irrelevant, not superior in themselves.

So, arguably, food quality emerges where three variables align:

1. Scale versus specificity: High-volume systems prioritise uniformity over distinctiveness. Foods requiring skill, irregular inputs, or local knowledge struggle.

2. Labour and migration: Skilled labour sustains quality. Where labour is scarce or costly, preparation simplifies.

3. Demand density: Dense, discerning demand supports experimentation. Where few care, feedback loops vanish, and quality declines.

These factors explain why food quality clusters geographically and reacts predictably to wages, regulation, and migration policies. Tourist hubs (Venice) often offer worse meals than suburban areas because demand is fleeting. Restrictive immigration policies can reduce culinary variety, even in wealthy economies.

Of course, objections arise: you may say, taste is subjective, culture matters, and wealth matters, but only partially. Freshness, balance, and skill are broadly agreed upon. Traditions survive where institutions allow reproduction. Wealth alone cannot guarantee quality; poor regions can eat well if labour, scale, and demand are aligned.

Food is illustrative. Similar trade-offs appear in books, cities, public services, and politics. Scale improves access but limits variety. Standardisation ensures reliability but suppresses innovation. Quality thrives where incentives reward skill, experimentation and feedback.

Looking at value chains, like the U.S. food dollar from farm to table, makes these trade-offs concrete. Farmers capture only around 10% of the dollar, limiting incentives to preserve flavour-rich crops. Most spending goes to processing, packaging, and transport, prioritising durability over taste. Restaurants and cafes capture much of the rest, driving speed and consistency over skillful preparation. Hidden costs (environmental, social, and health) accompany every meal, from CO₂ emissions to labour conditions and diet-related disease.

Every lunch carries these invisible consequences. Efficiency keeps prices low, but it comes at the cost of flavour, variety, and sustainability. So, the next time you sit down to eat, consider that what is absent from the plate may be as revealing as what is present.