This is a paper I did as a graduate student in economics at M.I.T. The paper was done as a report for a course on the "Economics of World Food". It was a graduate-level course oriented somewhat toward non-economics majors although there were at least a couple other economists besides myself in the class. It was organized and moderated by Lance Taylor who was a professor in both the (now defunct) Food and Nutrition Department and the Economics Department. The class met in the Food and Nutrition Department's buildings, old "temporary" bungalows that housed radar research in World War II.

The most interesting part of the course for me was it gave me a notion of the style of the F&N (Food and Nuts) Department which seemed more down to earth than the economics department where things were quite abstract. My paper here is an example of that abstraction taken to an extreme.

I took another course in Food and Nuts called "Vegetarianism and Nutrition", a freshman seminar run by Noel Solomons which I think had a few other non-freshman vegetarians in it. And I also found myself over in F&N quite a bit because George Ropes, who I worked with on the Egypt Project, kept his office over there although nominally he was a political scientist.

A version in PDF format is available.

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