Predicting urban food consumption patterns using power law scaling

Abstract

Abstract Power law scaling has been reliably used to project the growth of socio-economic factors in cities as a function of population. We apply a variant of power law scaling to differentiate consumption patterns across major food and fiber categories in growing urban environments relative to rural environments. Using data from China over a 36-year period, we empirically demonstrate that there is a systematic dependence of urban food consumption on city population size. We derive a general function of food consumption based on the rate of urbanization that behaves with quantitative regularity. We further show the contrast between rural and urban food consumption, manifest by urban efficiency gains, which also displays quantifiable scaling relationships. In urban areas, we find that meat consumption increases by 70–80 percent while grain and vegetable consumption declines by 16 percent with each doubling of the population. There is no implicit suggestion of a causal relation between urban scaling and urban consumption; rather, the scaling approach reveals a systematic relationship between urban population size and food consumption patterns. The scaling of wealth creation may dictate affordability and desirability, but without the efficiencies achieved through scale, urban food consumption would remain constrained. JEL codes: Q11, Q18, R10