Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is April 16, 2012, and my guest is Tyler Cowan of George Mason University. His latest

book is An Economist Gets Lunch, New Rules for Everyday Foodies. Tyler, welcome back to Econ Talk.

Thank you, Russ. I kind of felt like saying when I introduced this podcast and we've had this

past week was on disability insurance before that was on inequality. We've done a lot on the

financial crisis, I felt like saying, and now for something completely different. We're going to

talk about today the economics of food and your love of food. I want to start by asking you to talk

about what a foodie is to you and what role food plays in your life.

Well, let's start with economics. Early economics is the economics of food. If you read Adam Smith,

if you read David Riccardo, so a lot of the early economics I read was classical economics.

So for me, economics has always been economics of food. But as a foodie, I'd say I started in my

early 20s. My food upbringing was quite conservative, decent quality, but nothing unusual, no real

diversity. And I was living in Germany completely far in food environment, and I started trying to

make sense of it using economics. And the rest is history. So what would you say

you have a food blog? That's right. I'm a talent ethnic dining guide.com.

And we'll put a link up to that of course. And you spend a lot of time, it seems to me, which is

maybe not possible given how much time you spend on other things, but you seem to spend a

reason one of time trying to find good food and eat it. Is that accurate? I enjoy traveling around

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