Frittering away
Q: Did you see that “some generation Y foodies are spending up to $600 a week on gourmet produce such as seafood, cheeses, olives and cured hams.”
A: In the Herald? Yes.
Q: Is it true?
A: Slightly.
Q: Who are these people?
A: Well, for a start, they’re Australians
Q: Oh. How many is “some”
A: At least one.
Q: No, seriously, how many?
A: 1% of a the 18-34 subset of a sample of ‘over’ 1000. Here’s the full report
Q: How many is that?
A: Maybe three in the sample?
Q: Three people or three households?
A: A good question. They don’t say, though the average weekly food expenditure in their sample looks reasonably close to the national household average that they cite.
Q: How were the people sampled?
A: They don’t say.
Q: How many were Generation Y?
A: They don’t say
Q: How did they even define ‘gourmet food’? Or don’t they say that either?
A: Sadly, no.
Q: This report doesn’t seem to follow the code of practice you blogged about recently, does it?
A: That was just for political polls, and anyway this report is Australian.
Q: Is there anything else you want to complain about in the report?
A: If you call it an “Inaugural” report you really can’t use it to conclude “Australians are becoming a more food savvy nation”.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »