A weekly(ish) notebook on the economics of food, drink, and place
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What I found in Belgium: abbey walls, wild yeast, and an economics lesson I couldn't have learned from a textbook.
Next PostMay 7, 2026 · Post #4
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Next week I'm heading to Belgium to visit Trappist breweries and a lambic festival. Here's what I'm looking for and why it matters to an economist.
Read this post →May 4, 2026 · Post #3
In parts of rural America, a dollar store isn't competition for the grocery store. It's the replacement. I've watched it happen in my own town.
Read this post →April 28, 2026 · Post #2
Two bottles of Chianti. Same grape. Same region. One costs $11 and the other costs $18. What you're paying for is more interesting than you think.
Read this post →April 25, 2026 · Post #1
European wine exports to the United States fell 11% in January 2026. Italian wine got hit even harder. The numbers tell a story anyone paying attention already suspected — but there's more underneath the headline than meets the eye.
Read this post →May 21, 2026 · Post #5
Two weeks ago I wrote about what I expected to find in Belgium. Now I'm back, and I want to tell you what I actually found — which was both what I anticipated and something I couldn't have predicted from a textbook.
This post is more travelogue than analysis. I'll return to the economics in future posts, but some experiences need to be described before they're theorized, and Belgium was one of them.
The first thing you notice at a Trappist abbey is the quiet. Not silence, exactly — there are birds, and wind, and the distant hum of whatever mechanical process keeps a monastery running in the twenty-first century. But a particular kind of quiet that comes from a place organized around contemplation rather than production. The brewery is there, but it's not the point. It's a means.
I wrote in my preview post that the Trappist model looks bizarre from an economist's perspective — enormous demand, deliberately constrained supply, prices held below market-clearing levels. Standing in the abbey courtyard, the model makes more sense than it does on paper. These are not people who made a strategic decision to restrict output. They're people who decided what kind of life they wanted to live, and the production constraint follows from that decision. The economics is downstream of the theology.
That distinction matters more than I expected. In my discipline, we tend to treat firms as entities that choose objectives and then optimize. The Trappists don't optimize. They satisfice — they produce enough, and then they stop. The word "enough" does a lot of work in that sentence, and it's a word that appears almost nowhere in microeconomic theory.
The highlight of the trip — and I don't say this lightly — was seeing a coolship in person.
A coolship is a broad, shallow copper vessel, usually housed in the attic of a lambic brewery. After the wort is boiled, it's pumped into the coolship and left to cool overnight with the windows and louvers open. Wild yeast and bacteria from the surrounding air settle into the liquid. By morning, fermentation has begun — not because anyone added anything, but because the landscape did.
I knew all of this before I arrived. I've read the papers. I've taught the concept. But standing in that attic, looking at the open louvers and the fields beyond them, the reality of spontaneous fermentation hit differently than the theory. There is no quality control step. There is no inoculation. The brewer's job, at this stage, is to get out of the way. The Pajottenland does the rest.
One of the brewers I spoke with described his relationship with the local microbiome the way a farmer might describe soil. You don't create it. You inherit it. You maintain conditions that allow it to thrive. And if you move, you lose it — not metaphorically, but literally. The organisms in the rafters of his brewery have been developing over generations. They are site-specific in a way that no wine appellation can fully match, because in wine, you can at least bring the yeast with you.
The lambic festival was everything I hoped it would be and also completely overwhelming. Dozens of producers. Hundreds of bottles. Gueuze, kriek, framboise, faro, and variants I'd never encountered. The range of flavors within what is nominally a single product category was staggering — from bone-dry and bracingly acidic to round and fruity, with every shade in between.
What struck me most, though, wasn't the beer. It was the conversation. Producer after producer described the same tension: they want to protect the integrity of lambic as a geographically specific product, but they can't agree on where to draw the boundary. The TSG designation protects the name, but the geographic question — what counts as "Pajottenland" for microbiological purposes — remains unsettled. One producer argued that the relevant boundary is the Senne river valley. Another said it's wherever the specific microbial community exists, which may extend farther. A third was blunt: "If you can't see my brewery from yours, your beer is not the same as mine."
This is the GI boundary problem in its purest form, and I've encountered it in wine, in cheese, in cured meats. The product is defined by place, but place doesn't come with clean edges. Drawing the line is always partly science, partly politics, and partly tradition. Belgium just makes the stakes unusually visible, because the defining ingredient is literally airborne.
I came to Belgium with a set of economic questions about production constraints, geographic designations, and the limits of scale. I'm leaving with the same questions, but also with something less academic: a deeper appreciation for the relationship between patience and quality.
Lambic takes one to three years to mature. Gueuze is a blend of one-, two-, and three-year-old lambics. The blender's art is in combining barrels that have developed differently over time into something balanced. There is no way to rush this. There is no technological shortcut. The product is, in a very real sense, made of time.
That's not a concept that fits neatly into a production function. But it's one I'll be thinking about for a long time — and writing about here.
Next week: I brought a clipboard to gelaterias across Tuscany. Here's what the prices told me about the economics of place.
May 7, 2026 · Post #4
Tomorrow I'm flying to Belgium. The itinerary includes Trappist monasteries, a biannual lambic festival, and as many brewery visits as I can fit into ten days. My friends think this is a vacation, but perhaps my colleagues know me better. It's qualitative fieldwork. Though I admit the fieldwork may involve a fair amount of drinking.
I've been thinking about this trip for months, and I want to use this post to lay out what I'm going to look for, because the questions are the same ones that run through everything I write here. They're questions about growth, geography, and the economics of restraint.
There are fewer than a dozen Trappist breweries in the world that carry the Authentic Trappist Product label: six in Belgium, two in the Netherlands, and the rest scattered across Western Europe (stay tuned in September for a planned visit with one of the youngest in Italy). The designation requires that beer be brewed within the walls of a Trappist monastery, under the supervision of the monastic community, and that profits go to the monastery's charitable works rather than to shareholders.
From a traditional economic perspective, this is bizarre. These breweries make some of the most sought-after beer on the planet. Westvleteren XII routinely appears on "best beer in the world" lists. The demand is enormous. The supply is, by design, tiny. At Westvleteren, you have to phone the abbey and arrange a pickup time. There is zero distribution. There are no exports. The monks brew exactly as much as they need to fund their monastery, and not a liter more.
In any economics textbook, a firm facing excess demand at its current price should expand output, raise prices, or both. The Trappists do neither. They hold production flat, keep prices modest, and let the secondary market absorb the surplus demand. (Westvleteren has appeared on eBay for up to ten times the price on site at the abbey.) This isn't a market failure. It's a deliberate rejection of the market logic that my discipline treats as axiomatic. And it fits the broader context of my work, where winery owner-operators are not necessarily pure profit maximizers as mainstream theory would predict. It's hard to put small-scale beer and wine producers in a one-size-fits-all box.
I want to see the Trappist tradition up close. I want to understand the decision architecture — not just the theological rationale, but the operational one. How do you manage a production facility when the objective function isn't revenue maximization? What does the cost structure look like when labor is monastic? How do the monks think about quality control when they have no competitive pressure to maintain it?
The standard economic interpretation would frame the Trappist model as irrational, or at best as a nonprofit maximizing a different objective function — spiritual fulfillment, community stability, whatever goes in the utility function when profit doesn't. And that's partly right. But I think it misses something deeper.
The Trappists have figured out something that most firms learn too late: scale is a quality risk. The moment you expand production to meet demand, you start making decisions that optimize for volume. You need more raw materials, which means less selectivity. You need more labor, which means hiring outside the community that developed the product's identity. You need distribution, which means ceding control to intermediaries. Each of those steps is individually rational and collectively corrosive. We see exactly this in the craft beer industry. As costs increase and demand starts to dwindle, we're seeing many small breweries consolidating or closing up shop. Those who ramp up production to take advantage of those scale economies or sell out to larger companies, like AB InBev and Tilray Brands, often sacrifice quality for survival, alienating their initial base of purists in favor of more casual drinkers.
Regarding the Trappists, this is the logic of geographical indications turned inside out. In wine, GI systems try to protect quality by regulating how and where a product is made. The Trappists protect quality by regulating how much. The constraint isn't geographic; it's volumetric. And it works precisely because the monks are willing to leave money on the table.
The first half of the trip centers on lambic, and honestly, this may be the part that has me most excited as a researcher.
Lambic beer is spontaneously fermented. Instead of adding cultivated yeast, brewers expose hot wort to the open air and let the wild microorganisms of the Senne valley do the work. The specific blend of wild yeasts and bacteria that colonize the beer exist in a particular landscape: the Pajottenland, the stretch of farmland southwest of Brussels. They live in the rafters of old breweries, in the orchard air, in the microbiology of a specific terroir. You cannot replicate them in a laboratory. You cannot move them to another region. The geography isn't a label or a marketing story. It is literally an ingredient.
This makes lambic one of the purest cases of terroir in the fermentation world — arguably purer than wine, where the winemaker exercises considerable control over the process. A lambic brewer sets the conditions and then waits. The land, the air, and the microbes do the rest. The result takes one to three years to mature, and the blender's art lies in combining barrels of different ages into a balanced gueuze. But branding around this yeast terroir has consistently lagged behind that of wine and even spirits, where the geography-quality connection is far more tenuous.
The EU has granted lambic a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG) designation, and there have been ongoing debates about tightening the geographic boundaries. The question is familiar from wine: how do you draw the line? If the microorganisms are the defining ingredient, the "region" is wherever those organisms live — which may not correspond neatly to any political or historical boundary. I'll be attending a festival where producers from across the Pajottenland gather, and I want to hear how they think about this. Where does lambic end and "lambic-style" begin?
I realize Belgian monks and wild yeast might seem far from my day job in Martin, Tennessee. But the questions are the same ones I work on at home. What makes a product belong to a place? When does scaling up destroy the thing that made a product valuable? How do you build economic value in a region without extracting the character out of it?
These are live questions in West Tennessee, where small producers (from craft breweries to specialty meat operations) are trying to figure out how to grow sustainably without losing what makes them distinctive. The Trappists offer one model: don't grow. Lambic offers another: let the place itself be so embedded in the product that growth beyond the region is literally impossible.
Neither model translates directly. But both illuminate something that gets lost in the standard economic prescription to scale: sometimes the constraint is the value.
I'll report back from the field in two weeks, likely with tasting notes in hand.
May 1, 2026 · Post #3
I've spent the first two posts of this blog talking about wine — geographic designations, trade policy, the informational architecture of a $18 bottle of Chianti. I promise I'll return to all of that, and next week I'll be writing from Belgium, beer in hand. But this week I want to talk about the other end of the food economy. Not the indulgence but the infrastructure.
When I moved to Martin, Tennessee to begin my academic career, there were four traditional grocery stores: Priceless Foods, E.W. James & Sons, Ruler Foods, and a large Wal-Mart. Fast forward eight years and only Wal-Mart and Ruler remain. Drive through West Tennessee — Weakley County, where I work, or nearby Obion, Lake, or Crockett, to name a few — and you'll see a pattern. The small-town grocery store is gone or going. In its place, often literally in its place, is a Dollar General. Sometimes two. In some towns, the dollar store is now the primary place to buy food.
This is not a story about corporate villainy, not exactly. Dollar General isn't doing anything illegal or even unusual. It's following a perfectly rational business model: small footprint, low overhead, shelf-stable inventory, locations in underserved markets that larger retailers won't touch. From a pure market-entry standpoint, it's textbook. And for many rural consumers, a dollar store is genuinely better than nothing; it sells milk, eggs, canned goods, and basic staples at prices that undercut what a small independent grocer can offer.
But "better than nothing" is a low bar. And new research, including work by my UTM colleague Chuck Grigsby-Calage and his co-authors at the University of Florida, is beginning to quantify what happens on the other side of that trade-off.
Grigsby-Calage, along with Conner Mullally and their colleagues, published a study in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics asking a deceptively simple question: when a dollar store opens in a neighborhood, does food access get better or worse?
The answer, as is usually the case in economics, is "it depends." In most places, the arrival of a dollar store had no measurable effect on grocery access. But in urban neighborhoods that had only a single grocery store to begin with, the opening of a dollar store was associated with a measurable decline in food access. The effect grew with each additional dollar store that opened in the same area. And the impact was concentrated in neighborhoods with larger Black populations, limited vehicle access, high reliance on public transportation, and high poverty rates.
The mechanism is straightforward: dollar stores don't replace grocery stores, but they can undercut them just enough to push a marginal grocer out of business. A full-service grocery store operates on razor-thin margins (typically 1 to 3 percent net profit). It carries perishable inventory, employs more staff, and needs a larger customer base to break even. A dollar store needs none of that. When the dollar store siphons off enough of the shelf-stable and household goods revenue that the grocer depends on to subsidize its produce section, the math stops working. The grocery store closes. And now the dollar store, which was never designed to be a primary food source, is the only store left. Healthy options disappear, often for the most vulnerable populations.
I run the Economics and Business Innovation Lab at UTM, and a significant part of our work involves regional economic analysis in the counties surrounding Martin. The USDA defines a food desert as a low-income area where residents live more than 10 miles from a supermarket. By that measure, parts of West Tennessee qualify. But the federal definition, useful as it is, misses something important: it treats food access as a binary. You're either in a food desert or you're not.
A town with one grocery store and two dollar stores is in a fundamentally different position than a town with one grocery store and no dollar stores, even if neither technically qualifies as a food desert. The question isn't just whether people can get to food. It's what kind of food, at what cost, and what the downstream effects are on health, on household budgets, on the economic viability of the town itself.
This is where the grocery store problem becomes a regional development problem. A grocery store is more than a place to buy food. It's an employer. It's a reason to drive into town, where you might also stop at the hardware store or the pharmacy. It's an anchor tenant in the most literal sense. And when it closes, the other businesses on that block become more vulnerable. The loss can cascade.
Small organizations promoting local farmers markets and access to fresh produce can help. The Northwest Tennessee Local Food Network, headed by Sam Goyret and Caroline Ideus, organizes our local farmers market in Martin, connects small farmers with schools and other outlets for their produce, and conducts educational outreach. That work matters. But it is a minor salve for a larger wound in the food supply chain.
I called this blog Marginal Indulgence because I'm interested in the economics of the things we consume for pleasure: wine, cheese, craft beer, a good meal. But indulgence is a privilege that depends on infrastructure. You can't choose between a $11 Chianti and a $18 Chianti Classico if your town doesn't have a wine shelf. You won't think about terroir if you're driving 20–30 miles for fresh produce.
The gap between a community that has food choices and one that doesn't isn't just about income. It's about market structure, about the conditions that allow a grocery store to survive, a farmers' market to take root, a local food economy to function. And those conditions are shaped by the same economic forces I study in wine markets: information, regulation, competition, and the geography of where things are produced and sold.
This is the "place" part of food, drink, and place. It's less glamorous than a Tuscan vineyard, but it's the same discipline. And for the communities I work with in West Tennessee, it may be the part that matters most.
Next week: dispatches from Belgium; Trappist breweries, lambic festivals, and what happens when geography and fermentation collide.
April 28, 2026 · Post #2
Geographical indications are one of my key areas of interest, and they'll come up often in this blog. Consider this a primer (and maybe a bookmark) if you plan to follow along.
There's a wine shop near my house (or rather just over the state line) where you can buy two bottles of Chianti. One costs $11 and the other costs $18. Same grape: Sangiovese. Same region: Tuscany. Same basic winemaking tradition stretching back centuries. So what's the $7 difference?
Last week I wrote about the decline in European wine exports to the U.S. That shift was driven by tariff uncertainty, front-loaded imports, and what looks like a genuine erosion of market share. But trade statistics are aggregates. They tell you that less wine is crossing the Atlantic Ocean at lower prices. They don't tell you why a particular consumer reaches for one bottle instead of another, or what's actually encoded in the price she pays.
That's a different question, and it starts at the shelf.
The $18 bottle carries a Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita. That DOCG designation means that (1) the grapes were grown in a legally defined zone, (2) the wine was made according to specific production rules, and (3) an independent body verified compliance. The $11 bottle is a broader appellation with fewer restrictions, a larger production area, and less specificity about where and how. The U.S. has a similar system using American Viticulture Areas (AVAs; think Napa, Sonoma, and Columbia Valley), which involve similar regional requirements but less rigid oversight (more on that in future posts).
What you're paying for, in economic terms, is information. The designation reduces your uncertainty about quality. It signals something credible because a regulatory framework backs it up. It's not just a winemaker's marketing copy, but a system of geographic delimitation, production standards, and third-party certification that has legal teeth.
This is what economists call a credence attribute. Unlike the color of the wine (which you can see) or the taste (which you can evaluate after buying), the provenance and production method are things you mostly have to take on faith. Geographical indications exist to convert that faith into something verifiable. One of the most daunting aspects of wine for new consumers is precisely this uncertainty: you don't know the quality of what you're about to buy, you may not be able to judge it while you're drinking it, and by the time you've finished, the bottle is empty and you don't know what you should think. Geographical indications establish a trust infrastructure that eliminates some of those concerns, or at least tempers them.
Here's where it gets interesting. Whether the wine tastes $7 better is an entirely separate question, and the research on this is humbling. In blind tastings, the correlation between price and perceived quality is shockingly weak. Trained panels do somewhat better, but ordinary consumers? They're essentially guessing. Some studies have found a slightly negative correlation between price and enjoyment when the label is hidden.
But put the labels back on and everything changes. The correlation between price and reported satisfaction becomes strong and positive. Brain imaging studies show that identical wine activates more pleasure-associated neural activity when subjects are told it's expensive. The label doesn't just describe the experience. It changes the experience. The information is part of the product. It is wrapped up not only in the sensory world, but also those of culture and identity.
This is not an argument that geographic designations are a scam. In fact, it is the opposite. It's an argument that they are doing exactly what economic theory predicts: providing a credible quality signal in a market plagued by asymmetric information. The fact that the signal also shapes subjective experience makes it more powerful, not less. You enjoy the wine more because you trust where it came from. That trust has a price, and the market has figured out what it is.
I keep coming back to geographical indications because they sit at the center of almost everything I study. They're about information economics, consumer behavior, trade policy, rural development, and cultural preservation all at once. The same logic that explains the $7 gap between two Chiantis also explains why Parmigiano-Reggiano commands a premium over generic Parmesan, why Cinta Senese pork costs three times as much as commodity pork in Siena, and why the EU fights so aggressively to protect GI designations in trade agreements.
It also connects directly to the export story from last week. When European wine loses ground in the American market, the pain isn't distributed evenly. Conventional, commodity-tier wines (the ones competing on price with California, Chile, and Australia) take the biggest hit. But wines with strong geographic branding, the ones whose labels do the most informational work, tend to be stickier. The designation provides a moat, if you will. Not an impenetrable one, but enough to matter.
That's the margin again. The $7 difference isn't just a price gap. It's a measure of how much credible geographic information is worth in a market full of noise. And right now, in a trade environment defined by uncertainty, that kind of clarity has never been more valuable.
Beer follows a very different model, where styles and sensory elements often take precedence over geographical indications. When I travel to Belgium in the coming weeks, we'll visit some Trappist breweries and a biannual lambic festival where geography still holds sway.
April 25, 2026 · Post #1
Image: Freerangestock.com
European wine exports to the United States fell 11% in January 2026 — down to about €1 billion, a loss of roughly €127 million compared to January a year earlier. Italian wine got hit even harder: exports dropped nearly 19% in value, with shipments to the U.S. cratering by more than a third. The European Commission's latest Agri-Food Trade Monitor tells a story that anyone paying attention to the transatlantic wine trade already suspected was coming, but the numbers still sting.
I read reports like this differently than most people do. I don't just see a headline about trade decline. I see a natural experiment — messy, uncontrolled, playing out across thousands of decisions made by importers, distributors, restaurateurs, and consumers in real time. I see price signals and substitution effects and information asymmetries tangled up with politics and tariff threats and the peculiarities of how wine moves across borders. I see, in other words, economics.
That's what this blog is about.
I'm an economist at the University of Tennessee at Martin, where I hold an endowed chair in free enterprise and entrepreneurship and direct something called the Economics and Business Innovation Lab. My research sits at the intersection of applied microeconomics, food and agriculture, and consumer behavior — which is a formal way of saying I study why people pay what they pay for the things they eat and drink, and what happens to markets when the rules change.
I also happen to care a great deal about wine. And beer. And cheese, and cured meats, and the way food systems are embedded in the places that produce them. This isn't a hobby that runs parallel to my academic work — it is my academic work. I've published on how regional wine designations affect prices. I'm currently studying geographic indication price transmission for heritage meat products in Tuscany. In a few weeks I'm heading to Belgium to visit lambic breweries and Trappist abbeys, and this fall I'm taking my family to Siena for a semester where I'll be teaching wine economics and food marketing while living inside one of the world's most storied food cultures.
So when I read that European wine exports to the U.S. dropped by €127 million in a single month, I don't experience it as an abstraction. I think about the Chianti producer I met outside Siena whose entire export strategy depends on the American market. I think about the importer in New York trying to decide whether to absorb a tariff or pass it through. I think about the consumer in Nashville staring at a shelf where the $14 Sangiovese she used to buy now costs $18, and whether she'll switch to something from Paso Robles instead.
Here's what makes the January 2026 numbers particularly interesting — and particularly tricky to interpret. A big part of the year-over-year decline isn't really a decline at all. It's a hangover.
In early 2025, importers rushed to bring European wine into the U.S. ahead of anticipated tariffs. Euronews reported that U.S. imports of Italian sparkling wine surged 41% in November 2024 alone, far outpacing consumer demand, as importers stockpiled inventory against an uncertain policy environment. Industry data showed U.S. wine imports up 8.6% in Q1 2025 — a bump widely characterized as strategic front-loading rather than genuine demand growth. That front-loading inflated the January 2025 baseline. So when you compare January 2026 to that artificially high number, the drop looks more dramatic than the underlying demand shift probably warrants.
This is a classic problem in economic measurement: the comparison period matters enormously, and policy uncertainty doesn't just change behavior in the future — it changes behavior now, which distorts the data you'll use later to figure out what happened.
But strip away the base effect and there's still a real story here. Volumes to the U.S. fell 16%. Prices fell 19%. That combination — less wine moving at lower prices — suggests something beyond a timing adjustment. It suggests that European wine is genuinely losing ground in the American market, at least at the margin. The question is whether that's a temporary response to trade policy noise or the beginning of a structural shift.
I have my suspicions, but I'll save those for future posts. What I will say is this: wine is one of the most interesting products in all of economics. It's an experience good — you can't fully evaluate it until you consume it. It's a credence good — much of what you're paying for (terroir, tradition, regulatory compliance) you have to take on faith. It's wrapped in layers of geographic branding, cultural signaling, and regulatory architecture that vary enormously across countries. And it's subject to trade policy decisions made by people who, in many cases, don't drink it.
I'm calling this blog Marginal Indulgence because it captures exactly where I live, professionally and otherwise. In economics, "marginal" means the next unit — the next dollar, the next bottle, the next decision at the edge. That's where the interesting action happens, not in grand theory but in the small choices that aggregate into markets. And "indulgence" is the subject matter: wine, food, beer, cheese, the things we consume not just for sustenance but for pleasure, for culture, for identity. The margin is where a Chianti becomes a Chianti Classico, where a farmstead cheese becomes an artisan product, where a small-town brewery decides whether to distribute beyond the county line. Every one of those transitions is a marginal indulgence — one more degree of care, specificity, or cost that someone decided was worth it.
Expect short posts — maybe 800 words, maybe fewer — about the economics of food, drink, and place. I'll write about wine, obviously, but also beer, regional food systems, geographic indications, entrepreneurship, and whatever catches my attention at the grocery store, in a trattoria, or in a dataset. Some posts will connect to my published research. Some will be dispatches from the field — Belgium this spring, Siena this fall. Some will just be me thinking out loud about why a gelato costs what it costs in Florence versus Siena, or what happens to a rural Tennessee county when its only grocery store closes.
I'll try to write the way I wish more economists would: clearly, without jargon, and about things that actually matter to people who eat. Which is everyone.
Welcome to the indulgence.