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Food at home production and consumption: implications for nutrition quality and policy

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Abstract

The production and consumption of food at home is one of the most frequent and ubiquitous of all human activities and yet little is known about some of the basic economic constructs of this activity. Increasing our knowledge of food at home economics is important for improving the nutritional quality of diets and nutritional policies of the United States. This paper reviews the empirical literature on food at home production and consumption and food away from home consumption, demonstrates how the effectiveness of some nutrition policies depends on the magnitudes of a few key parameters, and identifies numerous areas in need of further research.

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Notes

  1. Certainly what is true of a comparison of aggregates may not be true of individual food items within or across aggregates (the fallacy of composition) and this holds true across all attribute dimensions (e.g., calories, protein, serving size). The interest in the FAH and FAFH aggregates stems from several sources but mainly policy relevance (see next paragraph), data availability, and analytical tractability. As Jaworowska et al. (2013) point out, more disaggregate analysis is needed in multiple dimensions.

  2. An advantage (limitation?) of optimization models is that the analytical time frame is a choice variable for the researcher, so what may be exogenous (e.g., wages) and endogenous (e.g., nutrition) to one researcher may be endogenous to another (e.g., nutrition and therefore health ‘causing’ wages). In all that is reviewed here the implicit assumption is that the left hand side variables (goods and time) do not ‘cause’ any of the right hand side variables.

  3. The overriding criterion for inclusion in this survey was the study incorporated a measure of opportunity cost of time as that has been one of the main arguments for the change in FAH consumption. There are numerous other studies looking at food expenditures either in aggregate or disaggregate that do not use the opportunity cost of time as an explanatory variable and therefore are not consistent with household production theory or are implicitly assuming labor and goods are separable in the utility function.

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Acknowledgments

Appreciation is extended to two reviewers, the editor, Jackie Yenerall, Wen You, and especially Mellie Davis for comments and insights on earlier versions of the paper.

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  1. Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, Virginia Tech, 214 Hutcheson Hall, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    George C. Davis

  2. Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise, Virginia Tech, 214 Hutcheson Hall, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    George C. Davis

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Davis, G.C. Food at home production and consumption: implications for nutrition quality and policy. Rev Econ Household 12, 565–588 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9210-0

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