NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, January 28, 2013

This week saw a flurry of headlines suggesting that the quinoa boom, unlike any other commodity boom, must somehow be bad for the people on the producing end. “The more you love quinoa,” The Globe and Mail headline read, “the more you hurt Peruvians and Bolivians.” A report in the Guardian chronicled “the unpalatable truth about quinoa,” which is that “poor Bolivians can no longer afford their staple grain.”

There is nothing quite like food to make us lose all sense of perspective and reason. Behind the killer-quinoa meme you’ll find three modern fallacies of food.

First is the idea that success must be bad for the poor.