Food and Nutrition

A new Kellogg Foundation survey shows that Americans support farmers markets and extra SNAP benefits.

If you’re sick of the sad, hopeless stories coming out of Africa, here’s one that made my year.

"New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years. From the middle to the end of the last decade, rates of child mortality across the continent plummeted much faster than they ever had before."

I wonder whether the causes of death have changed.

"An interesting new paper (here is the working paper version) from the Review of Economics and Statistics (one of the harder to get into journals) by Luis Braido, Pedro Olinto and Helena Perrone, who explore (random enough) accidental exclusions of families from the Bolsa Alimentacao (or BA, one of the CCT programmes in Brazil). BA is targeted to women, so the random enough accidental exclusion generates a natural experiment: households in BA for whom resources are transferred to the senior woman in the household versus BA eligible households who (unfortunately) receive no transfer. The authors ideally need an experiment that randomly allocates who receive the cash transfer, men or women. But they do not have this, they have female income transfers versus no income transfer.

So they look at different household sub groups to see if the differences in impact on food expenditure between female income and no income vary for different household groups: (1) households with no adult males, (2) households with male and female adults but where the eligible female has an additional source of income she can lay claim to and (3) households with male and female adults but where the transfer is the only source of income to the eligible woman.

They find the (female income--no income) impact differential on food expenditures does not vary by household group and conclude that BA does not give an extra boost to food security and diet quality via the female income effect. An interesting paper and somewhat against the orthodoxy. A good reminder, as Micheal Lipton often says, that we researchers should always be testing our priors rather than peddling them."

Glorious excess is what most people remember about schmaltz: the love that went into it, the smells that surrounded it and, especially, the innocence that allowed everyone to revel in it.

President Obama and four African leaders will introduce the group of companies, the Alliance for Food and Nutrition Security, on Friday at a forum on food security and agriculture.

You'll forgive me for not jumping up and down with joy at this anouncement.

"Most Americans consume diets that do not meet Federal dietary recommendations. A common explanation is that healthier foods are more expensive than less healthy foods. To investigate this assumption, the authors compare prices of healthy and less healthy foods using three different price metrics: the price of food energy ($/calorie), the price of edible weight ($/100 edible grams), and the price of an average portion ($/average portion). They also calculate the cost of meeting the recommendations for each food group. For all metrics except the price of food energy, the authors find that healthy foods cost less than less healthy foods (defined for this study as foods that are high in saturated fat, added sugar, and/or sodium, or that contribute little to meeting dietary recommendations)."

When I eat bananas, I don't think about potassium. When I eat radishes, I don't think about lycopene. When I eat green vegetables, I don't think about isothiocyanate. When I eat oranges, I don't think about cryptoxanthin.