Food Prices, Nutrients and the Least-Cost Diet

September 26, 2018

Food Prices, Nutrients and the Least-Cost Diet
This exercise is intended to give you a sense of the magnitudes and trade-offs involved in the nutritional aspects of food consumption choices. You will use real data from authoritative sources.
Write a 2-3 page (double-spaced, standard margins, 11 or 12 point) response to this exercise. As you work through the exercise, pace yourself and don’t take too long on any one question. Please put your student ID on the assignment so that the assignment can be graded blindly.
For this assignment your numerical results are best presented in tables rather than charts. The data should be formatted carefully so as to present data clearly – use the tables you see in your readings as exemplars. Place your text below or above the tables, but always make sure to label the tables and refer to them directly in your text (e.g. as “Table 1” not “the table”.) Write as thoughtfully as possible in concise but complete sentences. If a sentence contains more than 1 idea, then it should be more than 1 sentence.
Part 1. If you suddenly became very poor, what would you eat?

1.1 What would you buy? During your next grocery shopping trip identify a small basket of food items that you think might be the lowest cost way to meet what you would guess to be a biologically sustainable diet for a day. The key here is to compile a short list of foods, including only what’s actually available for you to buy right now. Please include no fewer than 5 items and no more than 10 items. You should spend no more than 15-30 minutes actually choosing the foods, their units of measure, and their prices. Please include the generic or brand names of your items. Please also think about when you might eat these foods (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks).

[Note: collecting the data at your grocery store is easy, but if you wish you can get your data from an online source, such as one of the on-line grocery delivery services that serve major cities, such as www.peapod.com for which you’d enter a Boston zip code such as 02148, or www.freshdirect.com for which you’d enter a New York zip code such as 10025.]

1.2 In a spreadsheet, begin to make “Table 1” of your assignment by listing the items (generic or brand names), their quantities or package sizes, and their prices. Compute their cost per kilogram, making any necessary measurement conversions. Then enter your guess as to how much you would actually buy and consume in kgs per day, and compute this diet’s total cost per day.

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