Jayson Lusk

author of "Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology are Serving up Superfoods to Save the World"

December 7, 2016

Jayson Lusk currently serves as Regents Professor and Willard Sparks Endowed Chair in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Oklahoma State University and also serves as the Samuel Roberts Noble Distinguished Fellow at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs. After earning a B.S. in food technology from Texas Tech University in 1997, he received a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Kansas State University in 2000. His first job out of graduate school was as an assistant professor at Mississippi State University, where he stayed for three years before moving to Purdue University as an associate professor. In 2005, he accepted my current position at Oklahoma State. In 2011, he and his family lived in Paris while he served as a visiting researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research and worked on a research fellowship awarded by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.

He is a food and agricultural economist who studies what we eat and why we eat it. Since 2000, he's published more than 175 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on a wide assortment of topics ranging from the economics of animal welfare to consumer preferences for genetically modified food to the impacts of new technologies and policies on livestock and meat markets to analyzing the merits of new survey and experimental approaches eliciting consumer preferences. He's been listed as one of the most prolific and cited food and agricultural economists of the past decade in a variety of outlets including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Science Direct, IDEAS, and Oxford Journals Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, won numerous research awards, given hundreds of lectures for businesses, nonprofits, trade industry organizations, and universities in the US and abroad, has been interviewed or published editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Forbes.com, Foxnews.com, TIME.com, Townhall.com and the Huffington Post, and has made TV appearances on Fox and Friends, the John Stossel Show, Varney & Co., and Wall Street Journal Live, among others. He's served on the editorial councils of eight academic journals including the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, and Food Policy and consulted for various nonprofits, government agencies, and agribusinesses. He's also been elected to and served on the executive committees of the three largest U.S. agricultural economics associations, including most recently the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association for which he currently serves as president. In 2015, he was named a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.

In 2007, he co-authored a book on experimental auctions (a consumer research method) with Jason Shogren published by Cambridge University Press and co-authored an undergraduate textbook on agricultural marketing and price analysis with Bailey Norwood published by Prentice-Hall. In 2011, he released a book co-authored with Norwood on the economics of farm animal welfare published by Oxford University Press and also co-edited (with Jutta Roosen and Jason Shogren) the Oxford Handbook on the Economics of Food Consumption and Policy. His first trade book, The Food Police: A Well-Fed Manifesto about the Politics of Your Plate, was published by Crown Forum in 2013. His most recent book Unnaturally Delicious: How Science and Technology are Serving Up Super Foods to Save the World was published by St. Martin's Press in 2016.

He currently lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma with his wife and two sons.

The food discussion in America can be quite pessimistic. With high obesity rates, diabetes, climate change, chemical use, water contamination, and farm animal abuse, it would seem that there wasn't very much room for a positive perspective. The fear that there just isn't enough food has expanded to new areas of concern about water availability, rising health care costs, and dying bees.

In "Unnaturally Delicious," Lusk makes room for optimism by writing the story of the changing food system, suggesting that technology and agriculture can work together in a healthy and innovative way to help solve the world's largest food issues and improve the farming system as we know it.

This is the story of the innovators and innovations shaping the future of food. You'll meet an ex-farmer entrepreneur whose software is now being used all over the world to help farmers increase yields and reduce nutrient runoff and egg producers who've created new hen housing systems that improve animal welfare at an affordable price. There are scientists growing meat in the lab. Without the cow. College students are coaxing bacteria to signal food quality and fight obesity. Nutrient enhanced rice and sweet potatoes are aiming to solve malnutrition in the developing world. Geneticists are creating new wheat varieties that allow farmers sustainably grow more with less. And, we'll learn how to get fresh, tasty, 3D printed food at the touch of a button, perhaps even delivered to us by a robotic chef.

Innovation is the American way. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, and John Harvey Kellogg were food and agricultural entrepreneurs. Their delicious innovations led to new healthy, tasty, convenient, and environmentally friendly food. The creations were unnaturally delicious. Unnatural because the foods and practices they fashioned were man-made solutions to natural and man-made problems.

Now the world is filled with new challenges changing the way we think about food. Who are the scientists, entrepreneurs, and progressive farmers who meet these challenges and search for solutions? "Unnaturally Delicious" has the answers.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2017-honorees-b/jayson-lusk

Last Updated: 12 January 2022