地点：浙江大学紫金港校区创意楼A座729会议室
主持人：史新杰，浙江大学中国农村发展研究院、浙江大学公共管理学院研究员
主讲人：樊琳琳博士
题目：Variations on the Thrifty Food Plan: Model Diets that Satisfy Cost and Nutrition Constraints
摘要：The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) supports Americans with low incomes in acquiring adequate and healthful diets. The maximum SNAP benefit is based on the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), the lowest cost of four U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) food plans. This paper uses optimization models and data replicating those used to reevaluate the TFP in August 2021, solving for a model food plan that is as similar as possible to the national average diet of healthy-eating Americans, while meeting nutrition requirements and cost constraints. This study’s objective was to investigate which model components are most important in driving the results and explore economic tradeoffs between food costs, nutrition quality, and consumer preferences in the U.S. food marketplace. The results showed that model food plans differed greatly from current consumption and were driven primarily by the constraints rather than the objective function. Affordability strongly affected food options even after the 2021 increase in USDA’s official TFP cost target. Results differed little with changes in the objective function to minimize the distance from the current consumption of low- and high-income individuals. Overall, the results illuminated the strengths and limitations of constrained optimization tools for selecting model diets, which may affect policy decisions about the analytic process used to select the TFP. The ultimate implications for recommended SNAP benefit amounts are uncertain: relaxing certain food group constraints for nutrition goals would permit a lower cost target, while seeking model food plans more similar to current consumption would require a higher cost target.
主讲人简介：
Dr. Linlin Fan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education at Pennsylvania State university. She obtains her PhD in Agricultural Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018. Her research expertise is in the economics of food and health and related policy issues. Her current research studies the impact of COVID-19 on racial inequalities in diet quality, the impact of air pollution on comfort food purchases, the use of charitable food assistance and social networks over the SNAP benefit month and the relationship between SNAP and food waste. Dr. Fan has published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Food Policy among others.
