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in this project that I've been working on with Coors from the USDA and Princeton we've
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been looking at to what extent different households across the US bu different food products particularly focusing on
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how healthy are the food products that these different households are buying what we're interested in here is how
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different or how more or less healthy the food product products that high income more educated households are
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buying relative to low income less educated households and the goal of This research is to not just document those
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disparities but to try to think about the role that access to Food Stores plays in generating those disparities
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we've seen a number of government policies Government funding going towards subsidizing the entry of
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supermarkets into areas that are underserved in this regard so these areas have commonly known as food
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deserts and uh our goal in the paper is to think about to what extent will eradicating food deserts actually have a
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you know a positive impact in terms of improving the healthfulness of the products that your lowi income low
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education households households are buying and and closing the gap between High income High educated households and
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low- income low educated ourselves in terms of how healthy the food products that they're eating um
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are so the first takeaway is uh pretty simple it's just that we see pretty large disparities and differences in
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terms of what households at the higher end of the socioeconomic spectrum and the lower end of the socio economic
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spectrum are buying we uh use a lot of data looking at what individual households are
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purchasing and uh we merge that data with a data set that describes how healthy each of these products are this
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enables us to calculate an index that represents how healthy are the food products being purchased over the course
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of a month by a household and what we see is we see big differences in these healthfulness indexes between High
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socioeconomic status households and low socioeconomic status households olds so we see in particular that
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households with the um higher income so in the top Ts for income relative to the
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bottom tsal for income or the top toile for Education versus the bottom tsal for
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Education are actually purchasing food products that are about 40% closer to the USDA recommend
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recommendations for what households are recommended to spend on different food categories um then households in um that
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are lower in educational income so then when we you know take a step back and we
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think about well why do these differences exist and we try to link it to um looking at differences in access
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to food products there what we find is that we find that access actually plays a very
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small role in generating generating these differences so what we do there is we think about well we see this 40% gap
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between High soci economic status and lo economic status households when we're
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looking at households that live uh you know in different locations across the us but what if you look at different
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households with different socioeconomic characteristics that are living in the same location because presumably these
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households are going to have access to the same retail environment so they'll
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live down the road from the same Supermarket for example and so when we look at the disparities that exist
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between households that are living in the same location and presumably have access to the same um retail environment
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we see that most of the disparities actually persist they're just as large they're slightly smaller but they're
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almost as large as the dispares that we saw when we looked at the differences in
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what's purchased by households that live in different locations so what this
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suggests is it s suggests that um that access actually isn't playing a large
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role in generating these disparities in the first place perhaps the most surprising uh
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result that we found was uh to do with the the fact that we look separately at how high and low income households um
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differ in their food purchases and how more and less educated households differ in their food purchases and what we
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found is we found that the differences along the education Dimension right much larger than the differences that we
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observe along the income Dimension and particularly the differences along the education Dimension are much more
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persistent when you control for Access and the differences across the income Dimension so essentially what that means
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is that it means that when you have two households living in the same location that are of different income types right
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they're going to be purchasing more similar products than house olds um with
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the different income types that live in different locations however when you look at two households living in the
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same location that are more and less educated say you have a college educated and a high school educated household um
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those different households are going to purchase just as different products as they might if they lived in different
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locations so what this goes to suggest which I found quite surprising was uh that perhaps when you think about
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differences in the healthfulness of products that people are buying you hear a lot about income as being sort of the
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big factor um that differentiates households there but the disparities are actually larger and more persistent when
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you're looking at households with different education levels so one of the reasons that we
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embarked on this research agenda was uh the fact that we're observing state local as well as the federal government
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embarking on these policies to subsidize the entry of of food stores into different neighborhoods so you know to
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the extent that these policies are being aimed at reducing disparities in what households are consuming by reducing the
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disparities in what households have access to our result suggests that the policies won't necessarily be so
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effective if they're only just targeting entry of food stores so the key takeaway
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for these policy makers is to think not just about can we put a new grocery store you know nearby you know all of
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the different households in the US but what's in that grocery store um what prices are being offered and what's
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driving different households to purchase different products once they're in the
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store so there are other policies that potentially need to be paired with the grocery store entries such as perhap
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perhaps subsidizing at the prices of healthful food products or putting them displaying them more prominently in
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stores to encourage households that perhaps don't have a taste to buy those products to try them out and uh um to
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become more aware of them so the research has been done to date thinking about differences in
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Access and the role that improving access might play in improving the healthfulness of food products that
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households Buy has been on a much smaller scale than our study so um the research has been done has been thinking
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about when one Supermarket for example enters in a neighborhood of New York you know the researchers will go and they'll
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survey households that were shopping in that neighborhood before the supermarket
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entered and then after the supermarket entered and comparing their their food purchases what we're doing is on a much
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larger scale we're thinking about how these uh the entry of food stores changes the consumption of households
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all across the US so uh our results are much more generalizable in terms of thinking about how the average household
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might respond to supermarket entry rather than just thinking about how a household in a particular neighborhood
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might respond to supermarket entry so this paper and our results here have uh really
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uh left open the question of what actually does Drive most of the disparities in terms of what households
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are buying so if we have households that are shopping in the exact same store buying very different food products we
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see systematic differences between High socioeconomic status households and low socioeconomic status households and what
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they're buying in spite of them having access to the same food products and the
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same prices available to them the question is then why they buying different products so we have two main
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hypotheses here both of which been have been discussed in the media previously one is that you have a low soci economic
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status households not having the money enough money to spend on healthful food products perhaps healthful food products
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cost more in the supermarket they take more time to prepare and that means that low-income households are potentially
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priced out of purchasing these food products another hypothesis is that these different
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households have different tastes perhaps due to different social norms perhaps they grew up buying different food
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products eating different food products so they're just they don't like healthy
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foods and they prefer to eat unhealthy Foods so the question is which of these explanations explains more of the
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differences in what we observe and the reason this is important is because if we actually want to come up with a
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policy that's going to you know shorten or reduce the gap between what these
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different households are purchasing is going to that policy is going to look very different if
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the differences are driven by differences in tastes versus differences in affordability and so if it's differences
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in affordability you might want to think about taxing unhealthy Foods or subsidizing healthy foods whereas if
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it's differences in tastes then perhaps some of these policies such as um um
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improving uh the uh um the access within stores of healthful food products making
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them more prominently displayed or education campaigns to perhaps try to shift social norms um amongst lower
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socioeconomic households towards buying healthier foods [Music]