David Just of Cornell University reviews “The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years” by Ulbe Bosma. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the evolution of sugar from luxury to ubiquity, promoting the view that while the contemporary prevalence of sugar is an indication of progress, it also reveals a darker story of human exploitation, racism, obesity, and environmental destruction.”

Are price and consumption independent in flat-rate price service contexts? A field experiment at an all-you-can-eat pizza restaurant shows that a 50% discount on the price of the meal led customers to consume 27.9% less pizza (2.95 versus 4.09 pieces). A second analysis indicated that individual taste ratings of this pizza tended to be inversely related to how much is consumed. One possible interpretation of these two findings is that individuals in a flat-rate (or fixed-price) context may consume the amount that enables them to get their money's worth rather than consuming until their marginal utility of consumption is 0.

Food choice decisions are not the same as intake volume decisions. The former determine what we eat (soup or salad); the latter determine how much we eat (half of the bowl or all of it). Large amounts of money, time, and intelligence have been invested in understanding the physiological mechanisms that influence food choice (James O. Hill, forthcoming). Much less has been invested in understanding how and why our environment influences food consumption volume. Yet environmental factors (such as package size, plate shape, lighting, variety, or the presence of others) affect our food consumption volume far more than we realize (Wansink 2006). Whereas people can acknowledge that environmental factors influence others, they wrongly believe they are unaffected. Perhaps they are influenced at a basic level of which they are not aware. A better understanding of these drivers of consumption volume will have immediate implications for research, policy, and personal interventions. There are three objectives of this paper: (1) explain why environmental factors may unknowingly influence food consumption; (2) identify resulting myths that may lead to is specified models or misguided policy recommendations; and (3) offer clear direction for future research, policy, and personal dietary efforts.