New USDA estimates show household food insecurity held constant in 2020 during the pandemic

 USDA yesterday released its annual food security report, showing that 10.5% of U.S. households were food insecure in 2020. Surprisingly, the 2020 estimate was unchanged from 2019 despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Observers expected the 2020 statistics to show a jump in household food insecurity.

The annual food security report uses data from a December food security supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), the same data source used for federal statistics on unemployment and poverty. The report asks 18 survey items about hardships experienced in the past year.

The USDA report this year includes an interesting and thoughtful discussion of differences in methodology between the CPS supplement and the Household Pulse Survey (HPS), a special federal survey designed to measure household conditions during the pandemic year. The Pulse survey used a simple food insufficiency question about hardships experienced in the past 7 days. As the pandemic worsened in 2020, this higher-frequency food insufficiency measure in Pulse showed sharp increases in hardship, followed by a return to the milder starting levels.

It will take researchers a while to sort through the distinct results in the new USDA annual report. The CPS survey has some advantages, including a higher survey response rate. It has a broader time reference period covering the entire year. The Pulse survey also has some advantages, including more frequent survey administration and a shorter reference period, which could be useful for understanding short-term changes in hardship.

Currently, along with Irma Arteaga at the University of Missouri, I am helping to oversee a small grants program for USDA, looking at innovations in household food security measurement on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of USDA's official measure. You can imagine that the new 2020 annual food security report will be a big topic of discussion as this Food Sec 25 project proceeds.

25 years of food security measurement

To mark the 25th anniversary of U.S. household food security measurement, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA ERS) will fund a suite of competitive grants on food security measurement methods, data, and future research needs. 

The selection and coordination of the projects will be managed by an external cooperator, a collaboration between Tufts University (Dr. Parke Wilde) and the University of Missouri (Dr. Irma Arteaga). This Request for Proposals (RFP) invites proposals for research projects funded up to $50,000 (primarily small projects using secondary data or reviews of the existing research literature) and up to $100,000 (larger projects including primary data collection and new analysis). 

We are open to new ideas, innovative approaches, and critical feedback to aid ERS in advancing food security measurement. The selected proposals may cover a variety of topics, but all selected proposals will demonstrate actionable items that ERS can pursue to improve or extend the food security measurement program. Each grantee will produce a written conference paper, present the paper at the conference in April 2022, and produce a manuscript for inclusion in a journal special issue with a draft manuscript due in August and final manuscript due in November 2022.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Request for proposals release (Nov 16, 2020)
• Informational webinar for applicants (Dec 17, 2020)
• Proposals due (Feb 19, 2021)
• Award notification (Apr 7, 2021)
• Funding period 19 months begins (May 1, 2021)
• Conference manuscript due (Mar 28, 2022)
• Food security measurement conference (Apr 4, 2022)
• Manuscripts for journal special issue (Aug 22, 2022)
• Final manuscripts for journal special issue (Nov 11, 2022)

WEBINAR: DECEMBER 17, 2020, 1PM EASTERN

Join us for an informational webinar and Q&A about this project and the application process (details).

LINKS

• Project website (link)
• Request for proposals (link) (.pdf); and
• Budget template (link) (.xls).

RIDGE conference on nutrition assistance research October 14

The 2020 Tufts/UConn Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics (RIDGE) Conference, held virtually on October 14, will feature new economic research aimed at enhancing food security and dietary quality for low-income Americans.

New and established investigators who were 2019 RIDGE grantees will present on topics ranging from evaluating the impact of nutrition-driven changes in school meals to influences of labor policy on SNAP to nutrition assistance participation amongst populations of interests, including college students and multigenerational households.

The conference is free but requires advanced registration.

RIDGE is a USDA-supported collaboration between the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut and my research team at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. Completed studies from an earlier round of grants have addressed many important research questions in nutrition assistance research, including these:

• Dr. Erica Kenney (.pdf) on changes to nutrition standards in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP),
• Drs. Rebecca Franckle and Eric Rimm (.pdf) on the frequency of benefit delivery in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and
• Drs. Michah W. Rothbart and Amy Ellen Schwartz (.pdf) on universal eligibility for federal school meals programs.

A consumer food data system for 2030 and beyond

Government policy influences all parts of the food marketing chain, including farms, food manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, and diverse nutrition assistance programs. At every stage, sound policy-making depends on high-quality data.

The National Academies Press this month published a new consensus report from the Center for National Statistics (CNSTAT), entitled A Consumer Food Data System for 2030 and Beyond, with recommendations to help guide the federal government in consumer food data collection and dissemination. The report panel was chaired by UC Davis professor Marianne Bitler (I was a panel member).

As the report summary explains, trade-offs are essential, because it is challenging for any consumer food data system (CFDS) to achieve all of the characteristics that we would wish:

• Comprehensiveness. To monitor levels and trends in food behaviors and related outcomes, and to identify the effects of public programs and policies on those behaviors, a comprehensive data system requires a variety of sources spanning multiple topics.
• Representativeness. Data on food behaviors and outcomes is most useful if it is representative of the U.S. population, both nationally and sub-nationally.
• Timeliness. To have maximum program and policy impact, the system collects data at regular intervals, repeats over time at an appropriate frequency, and releases data without undue delay.
• Openness. Because data programs are maintained with taxpayer funds, data should be accessible to the public and to the research community. Security and privacy concerns must be addressed before making de-identified data available.
• Flexibility. A flexible data system recognizes that food and consumer data will be used for some research applications that were planned in advance, as well as for applications generated by a broad, entrepreneurial, and inventive community of research users studying unanticipated changes in policy, food retail markets, or consumer preferences.
• Accuracy. Accurate measurement and reporting are the foundation of effective evidence-based policy making, so a desirable data system is one that seeks continuous quality improvement. Given increased reliance on data produced by state and local governments and commercial entities for purposes other than scientific study, continual assessment and improvement of the quality of these sources will be a central part of the CFDS.
• Suitability for causal analysis. While some policy questions can be answered with descriptive information, others require cause-and-effect inference. With this in mind, data design efforts should include (i) the collection and sharing of policy variables for use in implementing quasi-experimental designs, (ii) the use of administrative data for potential program evaluations with random-assignment research designs, and (iii) the creation of longitudinal survey and administrative data (either repeated cross-sections or panel data) for use in statistical analyses that offer causal insight.
• Fiscal responsibility. The CFDS should maximize the research value of federal dollars invested in the data system (including staff time) through its combined impact in descriptive information, monitoring functions, and estimation of causal effects.

Looming behind the report is the panel's awareness of the increasing difficulties of collecting traditional survey data, due to rising costs and greater difficulty maintaining a high response rate. The data systems of the future will combine survey data with administrative data and proprietary data (such as retailer scanner data) in new ways.

For the food industry, it is essential to have coherent federal leadership on dietary and environmental issues together

For the food industry -- and also for meeting important public interest goals -- it would be beneficial for the U.S. federal government to consider environmental sustainability along with nutrition science in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).

In 2013, the Food Forum of the National Academies organized a workshop on sustainable dietary guidelines (covered previously). At the time, we had little hope the topic would be included in the actual guidelines. Then, in 2015, hopes were raised when the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) included scientific literature on sustainability in its report, which serves as an important input to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), which then jointly produce the official dietary guidelines once every five years. That year, former Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan, several other colleagues, and I argued in an opinion column for Science that the federal agencies should use this material on sustainability in the official report. However, the agencies excluded all mention of sustainability in the end. Since then, the National Academies has continued to organize fascinating workshops on this topic (see video presentations and proceedings), but we have little indication of progress in the federal guidelines.

The Menus of Change initiative, a collaboration between the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and the Culinary Institute of America encourages the restaurant industry in particular to explore new ways of providing healthy and sustainable food in a profitable way. I have served on the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee for several years. The experience clearly shows that major food industry sectors see the need to address complex consumer expectations for environmental and nutrition issues together. From a practical standpoint, it would be impossible for business executives to separate the issues.

For the new 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, an advisory committee report is expected later this spring, and then the official report will come out a few months later. This week, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a policy brief (.pdf) encouraging the federal government once again to favorably consider including sustainability in the official report.

A growing body of research shows that shifting what we eat could improve the health of the population and the planet. However, the US government has declined to incorporate this evidence into federal food policies. As government agencies develop the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a review of recent studies on dietary patterns and sustainability by the Union of Concerned Scientists and colleagues shows that current US dietary advice may not support the long-term environmental sustainability of the food system. This policy brief outlines key actions and recommendations for federal agencies and policymakers to help protect public health and food security for generations to come.

The policy brief draws on a literature review published this week [updated March 16] in Advances in Nutrition, by UCS researchers and several Friedman School community members, including Rebecca Boehm (alum), Nicole Tichenor Blackstone (faculty), and Naglaa El-Abbadi and Salima Taylor (students).

I hope the government does include sustainability. Just as the dietary guidelines help consumers and government agencies understand the connections between diet and health, by providing a steady and sober summary of the balance of evidence in a complex literature, it would be valuable to do likewise for environmental sustainability. This is not a mere digression into a side topic. In the 2020-2030 decade, the climate emergency will be central to almost all policy debate on major social and economic decisions, including decisions about the food system. If political pressure from selected agricultural industries causes these issues to be excluded from the dietary guidelines, federal food and nutrition policy will be hampered for years to come.

The Labor of Lunch, by Jennifer Gaddis

In her new book, "The Labor of Lunch" (University of California Press, 2019), Jennifer Gaddis of University of Wisconsin-Madison covers the history and politics of federal school meals programs from every angle.

The book contrasts with contemporary behavioral economics research, which treats lunchrooms as a "laboratory" for small random-assignment trials of minor changes in product presentation. Gaddis instead pays attention to the big social issues that always have complicated school meals programs: women's work, the labor movement, racism, federal budgets, and class differences in food tastes for nutrition experts and broader populations.

To illustrate the scope, ambition, and topic coverage of the book, here are some homework questions one could ask students after they read this book:

1. What makes the lives of lunch-workers precarious?
2. What organizational sponsor of a free school meals program was labeled the "greatest threat to the internal security of the country” by Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover?
3. In training programs focused on sanitation and cost reduction, what important topic was left out?

(Answers: 1. Neoliberal capitalism. 2. The Black Panther Party. 3. Scratch cooking.)

The concluding chapter aims for expansive changes rather than short-term victories:

There are high-road alternatives to both the cheap food economy and to real food lite that offer a pathway toward a new economy of care in American public schools. Accessing this high road depends foremost on revaluing the labor of lunch. We must invest in professionalizing school cafeteria workers and recognize them for the multiple forms of care they already provide to the nation’s children. I want to move beyond this foundational argument, however, to propose a more expansive vision of what food systems could look like if we focus our collective efforts on transforming the NSLP into a hub for food justice—real food and real jobs—in every community across the rural-urban divide.

In a related New York Times column last week, Gaddis asks why parents still are sending kids to school with bag lunches rather than supporting the school meals programs. It reminds me of a conversation with my children a couple years ago. The kids knew their parents had always placed them in the school meals program as a matter of principle, rather than complete confidence in the product. When they mentioned having brand-name restaurant chain pizza in high school for lunch, they could tell from my face I was disdainful. They reassured me it was just twice weekly. Twice a week for pizza is not so awful, I conceded. But they meant only twice weekly was there brand-name restaurant chain pizza; on the rest of the days, there was reheated frozen generic pizza.

In some respects, the radical critical tradition of Gaddis' narrative may differ from that of most of my colleagues in agricultural economics, or myself. But any reader of this book will see these important nutrition programs should be dramatically better on grounds of taste, nutrition, and fairness to workers.

Funding announcement from Tufts and USDA for WIC telehealth innovations

My colleagues at Tufts University and I are happy to announce that we are now requesting proposals from WIC State Agencies or a consortium of WIC State Agencies (SAs), through April 10th for the USDA/Tufts Telehealth Intervention Strategies for WIC (THIS-WIC) grant opportunity.

The opportunity is made possible through funding from the USDA, Food and Nutrition Service and will help WIC State Agencies (SAs) develop and implement telehealth innovations to enhance nutrition education and breastfeeding support for WIC participants, particularly those who have a hard time getting to WIC clinics (e.g., rural areas).

In addition to supporting participants, telehealth innovations offer many potential benefits to SAs, like improving retention.

THIS-WIC will assist and support SAs throughout the application process and during project implementation. The THIS-WIC team will:

• provide technical support to WIC SAs throughout the application process and project implementation period;
• lead evaluations in collaboration with WIC SAs to assess the impact of the innovations; and,
• share promising initiatives as well as potential solutions to commonly encountered challenges.

The application process has two phases:

• Phase I – interested applicants should submit a Brief Proposal (no more than 3 pages) by April 10th, 2020 (11:59p ET)
• Phase II – selected applicants from Phase I will be invited to submit a Full Proposal by August 7th, 2020 (11:59p ET)

THIS-WIC anticipates supporting 5-8 WIC SAs for 30 months, with funding up to $1 million (includes direct and indirect costs), depending on the scale and scope of the proposed intervention.

The THIS-WIC team will hold three, one-hour webinars to provide additional details about the application process, to provide deeper insight into telehealth innovations, and to further layout expectations for the evaluation of proposed projects.

All the webinars will include time for potential applicants to ask questions of the THIS-WIC team.

• RFP Overview: 3-4 pm (EST) on February 13th, 2020, hosted by the THIS-WIC team to provide an overview of the RFP and application process. Register here.
• Designing a Telehealth Solution: 3-4 pm (EST) on February 19th, 2020, will be jointly hosted by THIS-WIC and the TRCs to provide a deep dive into telehealth innovations related to each priority area and an overview of best practices when designing telehealth solutions. Register here.
• Unpacking the Evaluation: 4-5 pm (EST) on February 24th, 2020, will be led by the THIS-WIC team to clarify further roles and expectations related to the evaluation of the telehealth solutions. Register here.

For more information about this opportunity and the application process, please visit the THIS-WIC website.