Author
Cleary, Rebecca
This article investigates the relationship between the health news environment and the healthfulness of consumers’ food purchases. We estimate an unconditional quantile regression model using household-level purchase data from 2015–2018 and find that more health information is associated with a better diet. The relationship is slightly stronger at the lowest quantile of the Healthy Eating Index distribution, although we cannot reject equivalence with the estimate at the mean for most quantiles. Further, the association between health information and diet quality is weaker in households with higher education, implying that high education households are less likely to be affected by media information.
Food hubs offer a novel solution to connect small and mid-sized local farms, which individually lack the scale to profitably market their products. Because many food hubs rely on grants and philanthropy to provide services and are not necessarily profit-driven, markets may unintentionally oversaturate due to overinvestment.We use a firm-entry model to estimate the average U.S. county population necessary for one, two, and three food hubs to break even. Our findings suggest that policy makers and philanthropists need to consider the carrying capacity of the local food environment and population prior to supporting additional food hubs.