Economics, food choices, and nutrition

Abstract

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.

A theoretical and empirical investigation of nutritional label use

“…However, we recognize that increased use of labels can and will affect the specific nutrition knowledge, which in our study is identical to the nutrition information stock. Note that this distinction of nutrition knowledge has also been made by Blaylock et al [33].…”

“…Similarly, the S 3 variable includes demographic variables plus the information sources that have been found to affect nutrition knowledge [3] (or stock of nutrition information in our case). As in Blaylock et al [33], we distinguish between two types of knowledge on nutrition. The first type is knowledge of general nutritional concepts, which we call nutrition knowledge, and the second type is specific knowledge of the nutrient content of foods, which, for this article, is identical with the concept of nutrition information stock.…”

“…We used seven questions of pairwise comparison of foods regarding the nutrient content of foods [3,33,42]. Consumers were asked to compare certain foods (e.g., butter vs. margarine, whole milk vs. skim milk, white bread vs. whole wheat bread) and were asked to indicate which has more cholesterol, fat, fiber, calories, etc.…”

Can Health and Environmental Concerns Meet in Food Choices?

“…At the same time, other authors focus on the effectiveness of eco-labelling in shaping consumer environmental food choices, pointing out the importance of variables, such as: information asymmetry and eco-labelling credibility; time constraints and difficulty in understanding correctly environmental certifications; and differences in price and taste [37][38][39]. Instead, the literature studying the economic variables that influence healthy food choices focuses on variables, such as: the relative cheapness of energy-dense food with respect to healthy products; time preference; time constraints; nutritional knowledge; and the effectiveness of health-related labelling, such as nutrition and health claims [22,[40][41][42][43][44][45][46].…”

Adverse Selection Revisited in the Context of Food Safety

“…Rising income levels made it easier to acquire the necessary calories (Pritchett & Summers, 1996). Later, humans purchased additional values such as taste and other qualities (Drewnowski, 1997;Blaylock, Smallwood, Kassel, Variyam & Aldrich, 1999). For example, individuals spent their extra money on higher-quality foods (e.g., by shifting from pork to beef).…”