November 25, 2024

Eat This Podcast: Bennett’s Law

Hello

What foods do poor people buy when they have a bit more money?

First, they change from coarse grains — things like sorghum or millet — to fine grains, wheat and rice, maybe corn. Then they switch up to protein from animal-sourced foods. This logic was even considered something of a law, Bennett’s Law, after Merrill Bennett, the agricultural economist who formulated the idea in the early 1940s. But it wasn’t really a law, because no-one had actually studied income and food purchases under controlled conditions.

Now someone has. For Marc Bellemare, the lead author on a recent paper, the research, “changes your view of how the world works”.

Listen here.

Take care,

Jeremy