Food and Nutrition Economics

At the heart of most food, nutrition, and health decisions and concerns is an economic issue. Consequently, understanding some basic economics is imperative to evaluate the likely effectiveness of food and nutrition policies or interventions, especially those designed to operate through economic channels. Section I of the book provides the fundamentals of nutrition. Section II provides the fundamentals of consumer economics, from both the neo-classical and behavioral economics perspectives. Section III gives an overview of the US food system and the fundamentals of food production economics. Section IV gives the fundamentals of market analysis, including horizontally and vertically related markets. Section V gives an overview of cost effectiveness and cost benefit analysis of nutrition interventions. The general structure for most chapters is to first motivate the importance of the topic, present the economic approach to analysing the topic, intersperse the text with some examples and questions applying the concepts, and conclude with what has been found in the empirical literature related to the topic. A hypothetical conversation between a nutritionist and an economist runs throughout the book to help give the book a conversational feel and motivate and summarize each chapter.