{"id":28028,"date":"2014-09-30T08:07:29","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T12:07:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28028"},"modified":"2018-01-11T16:29:27","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T21:29:27","slug":"french-restaurant-food-quality-is-declining-send-in-the-regulators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/09\/30\/french-restaurant-food-quality-is-declining-send-in-the-regulators\/","title":{"rendered":"French restaurant food quality is declining &#8211; send in the regulators!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/timharford.com\/2014\/09\/when-regulators-are-all-out-to-dejeuner\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tim Harford<\/a> on the recent French government attempt to &#8220;fix&#8221; the declining quality of food served in restaurants:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cEach time I visit the city the food gets worse and worse.\u201d Tyler Cowen, economics professor, foodie and author of <em>An Economist Gets Lunch<\/em>, despairs of Paris. Cowen isn\u2019t the only person to lament the state of French cuisine. This may be why &mdash; in a quintessentially French move &mdash; the nation\u2019s government has introduced a new law in an attempt to improve standards.<\/p>\n<p>The quixotic law in question is public decree No. 2014-797, more popularly known as the \u201c<em>fait maison<\/em>\u201d rule, in which restaurants may use a new saucepan-with-a-roof-and-chimney logo on the menu beside any dish that is made on the premises. More accurately, the restaurants <strong>must<\/strong> use the saucepan-with-a-roof symbol to denote house-made dishes, but the definition of house-made is rather whimsical, thanks to French legislators.<\/p>\n<p>The entire affair seems unlikely to improve French cuisine but it does provide a nice lesson in practical economics: regulation is a superficially appealing answer to life\u2019s problems but often fails to provide real solutions.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>A third problem is that the regulation may produce unintended consequences. Consider a chef who offers a fresh fruit crumble alongside a selection of factory-made cakes and puddings. By law, he or she must display the <em>fait maison<\/em> logo beside the crumble, implicitly damning all his or her other dishes. Such chefs might decide to offer no house-made dishes at all, rather than bring unwelcome questions to the forefront of their customers\u2019 minds.<\/p>\n<p>Policymaking is flawed and crude while the world is subtle and unpredictable. That is why regulations are often rigged from the start, are only peripherally related to the real matter of concern and have a tendency to backfire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim Harford on the recent French government attempt to &#8220;fix&#8221; the declining quality of food served in restaurants: \u201cEach time I visit the city the food gets worse and worse.\u201d Tyler Cowen, economics professor, foodie and author of An Economist Gets Lunch, despairs of Paris. Cowen isn\u2019t the only person to lament the state of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,831,62,74,1117],"tags":[786,661],"class_list":["post-28028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-business","category-europe","category-food","category-france","tag-paris","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7i4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28028"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28029,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28028\/revisions\/28029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}