Consumers make dietary decisions based on economic, physiologic, psychologic, sociologic and even spiritual considerations, with hardly a nod to societal implications (see, for example, Nestle, et. al, 1998). Eating in a developed country such as the United States becomes a social and family event, an act of pleasure, that goes far beyond the ingestion of the necessary nutrients to sustain life. People eat for both pleasure and as a biological necessity. This must be remembered if we are to understand the complex world of food choices, dietary quality, and change.Complexity necessitates simplification and abstraction. Human behavior is complex, economic relationships are complex, nutrition is complex; put them together and the entanglements are limitless. We must have a framework to help us sort though the possibilities; abstracting from the realities of life is a requirement, not a choice. Human behavior is so complex that to understand anything a great deal must be assumed. Differences of opinion are a natural outcome of intellectual inquiry. Joan Robinson probably said it best: "The analysis can be extended to any degree of refinement but the more complicated the question the more cumbersome the analysis. In order to know anything, it is necessary to know everything, but to talk about anything, it is necessary to neglect a great deal" (Robinson, 1941).Many forces, most outside the consumer's direct control, shape food demand and food consumption behavior. In Senate testimony more than 20 years ago, Dr. Winikoff of the Rockefeller Foundation said of nutrition, "it is affected by governmental decisions in the area of agricultural policy, economic and tax policy, export and import policy, and involves questions of food production, transportation, processing, marketing, consumer choice, income and education, as well as food palatability and availability. Nutrition is the end result of pushes and pulls in many directions, a response to the multiple forces creating the 'national nutrition environment" (Senate Report, 1977). We focus our attention on factors influencing consumer food choices.Our objective is to examine empirical evidence on the role and influence of economic factors, defined rather broadly, on food choices and subsequent hence, nutritional outcomes. It is not an exhaustive review, but rather we focus on selected studies whose conclusions appear to be supported by a preponderance of the literature. Our goal is to do this in a non-technical fashion. We examine factors such as food prices, household income, nutrition knowledge and awareness, time constraints and time preferences. We do break with the central design of the paper in the last section where we discuss some new, as yet unpublished, findings.

This paper examines the payments made to minority producers, focused on African American producers, from the COVID‐19 program, Coronavirus Food Assistance Program (CFAP), of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and compares it with one of the other more recent ad hoc program payments, the Market Facilitation Program (MFP). There were two rounds of the CFAP, and combinedly (as of March 2022), the program made direct payments of $31.0 billion ($11.8 billion from CFAP 1 and $19.2 billion from CFAP 2) starting in 2020. The MFP made a total payment of $23.5 billion (in two rounds, MFP 2018 and MFP 2019) to producers affected by the retaliatory tariffs placed on US producers by trade partners across multiple years. CFAP made almost $600 million in direct payments to minority producers, including Black or African American producers. Black or African American only producers received more than $52 million in CFAP payments. CFAP payments were proportional to the value of agricultural commodity sold for most minority producers. The 2017 Census of Agriculture showed that the majority of minority producers, including African American producers but excluding Asian producers, raised livestock. CFAP made the highest payments to livestock minority producers. The CFAP payment distribution pattern shows that payments reached minority producers who often did not receive Government payments. CFAP made more payments and as a share of total program outlays to minority producers compared to MFP. However, for Black or African American only producers, even though the magnitude increased (because CFAP disbursed more funds compared to MFP), the share of payment received did not increase.

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