Christian A Gregory

United States Department of Agriculture | USDA · Economic Research Service (ERS)

We first discuss the genesis and development of the Food Security Module in the United States. We then present a conceptual model of food insecurity, drawing on consumer choice theory. The model shows how food insecurity exhibits a quality–quantity trade-off and has linkages to policy levers. Next, we present new stylized facts pertaining to food c...

This supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2021 (ERR-309), a research report that presents the primary national statistics on house-hold food security, food spending, and the use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. Additional statistics here...

This report provides statistics on food security in U.S. households throughout 2021 based on the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data collected in December 2021. An estimated 89.8 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2021, with access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for...

This report provides statistics on food security in U.S. households throughout 2020 based on the Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement data collected in December 2020. An estimated 89.5 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2020, with access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for...

This supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2020 (ERR-298). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food insecure households. Additional statistics here cover...

This paper makes several contributions to the literature regarding the measurement of food insecurity and implications for estimating factors that affect this outcome. First, we show that receipt of benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has a systematic effect on responses to questions in the 12-month food security modu...

We estimate the impact of involuntary unemployment following employer shutdowns during the COVID‐19 pandemic on American households' past‐week food expenditures, free food receipt, and food sufficiency, as well as confidence about next month's food adequacy. Over April to June 2020, compared with households containing employed respondents, househol...

This Supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2019 (ERR-275). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. This Supplement provides addition...

This paper addresses measurement error in food security in the USA. In particular, it uses a Bayesian 4-parameter IRT model to look at the likelihood of over- or under-reporting of the conditions that comprise the food security module (FSM), the data collection administered in many US surveys to assess and monitor food insecurity. While this model’...

This Amber Waves article explores the distribution of food insecurity in the United States based on data from the annual U.S. Household Food Security report.

An estimated 88.9 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2018, with access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (11.1 percent, down from 11.8 percent in 2017) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 4.3 percent with ver...

This Supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2018 (ERR-270). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. This Supplement provides addition...

A well‐known feature of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is that some recipients spend a disproportionate amount of their monthly benefit early in the month. Using a finite mixture model that optimally separates households into two groups, coupled with the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, we re‐examine th...

This report characterizes the difference in food purchase quality of low-income food-insecure and food-secure households using the National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey, a unique data collection fielded by ERS in partnership with the Food and Nutrition Service focused on household food purchase behavior.

This piece is an introduction to the symposium on Food Access, Program Participation, and Health: Research using FoodAPS. The symposium includes articles presented at the National Bureau of Economic Research Conference on Food Security on December 7 and 8, 2017. The research herein was supported by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Departme...

We study the effects of SNAP participation on food insecurity allowing for a priori unspecified heterogeneous treatment effects. Using finite mixture models, we identify a low food security class comprising almost 60% of the samples for whom SNAP participation increases the probability of no food insecurity by 14–37 percentage points across specifi...

An estimated 88.2 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2017, meaning they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (11.8 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 4.5 percent with very low food security,...

This Supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2017 (ERR-256). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. This Supplement provides addition...

Household food insecurity status in the United States is ascertained by a battery of close‐ended questions. We posit that the monthly nature of benefit receipt from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) creates experiences of food hardship, which become salient in the context of SNAP receipt, and in turn exert influence on the respon...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest food-assistance program in the United States, providing support for low-income families to purchase food from stores. Previous research has found that adult participants experience a decline in caloric intake at the end of their benefit month. Using use data from the National Healt...

Purpose: Diet-related chronic diseases like diabetes can be dangerous and expensive to treat, especially for patients who do not follow a recommended diet. Meanwhile, prescription drugs can alleviate the symptoms of or control many diet-related chronic diseases, but these drugs may also weaken the resolve to follow recommended diets (moral hazard)...

ERS researchers recently used health, demographic, and food security information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health Interview Survey to look closely at the relationship between 10 chronic diseases in low-income working-age adults and the food security status of their households. The researchers controlled for...

This Supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2016 (ERR-237). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. The Supplement provides additiona...

Food security, which USDA has measured and tracked since 1995, has become a key national measure of well-being; therefore, it is important that the measure is accurate. Since the food security measure was developed, USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) has conducted ongoing research on the statistical properties of the measure. ERS researchers hav...

An estimated 87.7 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2016, meaning they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (12.3 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 4.9 percent with very low food secur...

ERS documents the strong correlation between food security status and chronic health conditions among working age adults living at or below 200 percent of the Federal poverty line.

This supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2015 (ERR-215). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by food-insecure households. This Supplement provides addition...

An estimated 87.3 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2015, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (12.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.0 percent with very low food...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Household Food Acquisition and Purchase Survey (FoodAPS) is the first nationally representative household survey to collect data on foods purchased or acquired during a survey week, producing results that are both nationally representative and representative of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance P...

This Supplement provides statistics that complement those in Household Food Security in the United States in 2014 (ERR-194). That research report provides the primary national statistics on household food security, food spending, and use of Federal food and nutrition assistance programs by foodinsecure households. This Supplement provides additiona...

An estimated 86.0 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2014, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (14.0 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.6 percent with very low food...

This chapter reviews recent theory and empirical evidence regarding the effect of SNAP on food insecurity and replicates the modelling strategies used in the empirical literature. The authors find that recent evidence suggesting an ameliorative effect of SNAP on food insecurity may not be robust to specification choice or data. Most specifications...

This is the statistical supplement for USDA's annual report on households' access to adequate food for active, healthy living.

This report examines the extent to which year-to-year changes in the prevalence of U.S. household food insecurity can be explained by changes in the national unemployment rate, inflation, and the price of food relative to other goods and services. Data are from the 2001-12 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplements and statistics on employ...

An estimated 85.7 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2013, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (14.3 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, including 5.6 percent with very low food...

Until recently, many restaurants and fast-food places did not offer nutrition information at the point of purchase. This is expected to change because the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires that nutrition information be posted in many of these venues. Once the law is fully implemented, it will be important to understand how it...

While research establishing the link between high food prices and increased food insecurity in developing countries is robust, similar research about the United States has been lacking. This has been due in part to a lack of suitable price data, but it has also been due to the assumption that prices matter less in the United States, where household...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of food prices on food insecurity for SNAP recipients using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the recently published Quarterly Food-At-Home Price Database (QFAHPD). By constructing this sample we can directly measure the relationship between food prices and food insecurity for U.S. households. W...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) cost Americans billions of dollars per year. High cholesterol levels, which are closely related to dietary habits, are a major contributor to CVD. In this article, we study whether changes in food prices are related to cholesterol levels and whether taxes or subsidies on particular foods would be effective in lowering...

In this study, we use a unique dataset designed by researchers at the University of Chicago and collected by Mathematica Policy Research to investigate whether there is a significant correlation between diet quality and time spent preparing food. Overall, our results indicate that, when controlling for unobserved factors that may affect both prepar...

Recent research has shown that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is effective in reducing food insecurity. Questions remain, however, about whether SNAP also has any effects on the quality of low-income households’ diets. These questions have surfaced in the context of the increasing public costs of diet-related illnesses like di...

Previous research generally finds that body mass does not affect wages for men. But this literature has for the most part focused on young workers and has not examined whether the effect of obesity might change as people age. In this essay, I examine the effect of body mass on men's wages across the age distribution, modeling both BMI and wages non...

In this paper, we estimate the effect of food prices on food insecurity for SNAP recipients using data from the Current Population Survey and the recently published Quarterly Food At Home Price Database. We form a local food price index based on amounts of food for a household of four as established by the Thrifty Food Plan. We use an econometric m...

Previous research generally finds that obesity negatively affects wages for women and does not affect wages for men. But this literature has for the most part focused on young workers and has not examined whether the effect of obesity might change as people age. In this essay, I examine the effect of obesity -- and body mass more generally -- on wa...

The literature examining the relationship between body mass index (BMI) and wages has fairly consistently found that BMI has a negative impact on earnings for women, and less (if any) consequences for men. In this paper, we relax the assumption -- largely unquestioned in this research -- that the conditional mean of wages is linear or piecewise lin...

ERS researchers developed a model of macroeconomic factors to predict the prevalence of food security. Three major factors were found to be important: the highest monthly national unemployment rate in the calendar year, the general inflation level of U.S. goods and services, and the price of food relative to other goods and services. Unemployment,...