In June 2024, the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein has launched at North Carolina State University. The Bezos Earth Fund awarded NC State $30 million over five years to lead a center of excellence to create a biomanufacturing hub for dietary proteins that are environmentally friendly, healthy, tasty and affordable. Duke’s World Food Policy Center is a collaborator in the work.
NC State is working with academic partners Duke University, N.C. A&T State University, the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, and Forsyth Tech Community College on research, workforce development, and community engagement efforts. More than 20 industry partners are also be part of the center to facilitate technology transfer and student internships and mentorships. The center plans to engage partners from academia and industry to research, create, and commercialize new technologies, provide training for the emerging industry workforce, and gauge consumers’ protein preferences. Duke’s contribution to the report will include a landscape analysis of the alternative protein sector, policy-related research elements, and collaborative research on outreach and communications.
Bass Connections 2024-2025: Tracing the Roots of Nutrition Access: University to Community
This project team will explore Durham’s organizational and resident barriers and facilitators to addressing food insecurity with a focus on federal programs and funding use. Building upon the findings of the 2023-2024 team, this team will work to support larger systems-level changes through two interrelated goals:
Identifying community-driven, cross-sector strategies to increase food access, reduce food waste and improve food security for Durham residents.
Obtaining community member input on identified strategies, including formalizing a Community Advisory Board to provide support and guidance for putting identified strategies into action.
To reach these goals, team members will divide into two subgroups focused on organizations and residents. The “organizations” subgroup will focus on strengthening connections between Duke Health and other community organizations. Students will draw upon the data collected in 2023-2024 and will gather additional data from Duke and other organizational personnel. Ultimately, this workstream will develop recommendations for Duke to work collaboratively with community organizations to better leverage state and federal policies and to streamline, pool or re-allocate resources to address food insecurity and food waste in Durham. These recommendations will be shared with and refined by community members and Duke personnel.
The “residents” subgroup will focus on engaging community members in developing action plans to carry out identified strategies. The team will leverage organizational relationships formed during 2023-2024 to recruit community members from across Durham. Team members will systematically elicit community input, including recruiting and providing incentives for approximately 10 residents to serve as a Community Advisory Board for this work moving forward.
Both subgroups will learn about community-engaged research methods (e.g., PhotoVoice) and students will select the methods they want to use to elicit feedback. The team will work to ensure that voices of historically underrepresented populations are central in this inquiry.
Background
Food insecurity is a public health emergency in the United States due to its adverse impact on human health and well-being. Locally, one in 10 families in Durham reports skipping a meal because they did not have enough money to buy food. This rate increases drastically for Black and Hispanic households.
In 2022, the White House held its first Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health to develop strategies to end hunger, improve nutrition and reduce diet-related diseases by 2030. Billions of federal dollars are annually allocated to a suite of nutrition assistance programs, including its flagship Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women, Infants and Children (WIC) food assistance program, and school lunch programs.
In North Carolina, Medicaid allocated $650 million to the state’s Healthy Opportunities Pilot to test and evaluate nonmedical interventions related to food and other social determinants of health. Dozens of organizations, including Duke University Health System’s Root Causes program, address food insecurity through charitable food provision, education and outreach.
Despite these federal, state and local investments, food insecurity persists in Durham. Additional research is needed to understand and integrate the roles of the local food systems (e.g., charitable food sector), food waste mitigation and local health systems to generate solutions that draw upon the strengths of all sectors while optimizing resources and ensuring equitable access to services for Durham residents.
Research Poster
Food waste, date labels, and risk preferences: An experimental exploration
This study provides theoretical and experimental evidence that consumers adjust their premeditated food waste by date labels and their risk and loss preferences. The “Use by” date label leads to more premeditated food waste than “Best by” for deli meat and spaghetti sauce. However, changing date labels may not lower premeditated food waste relative to no label at all. Greater loss aversion correlates with higher premeditated food waste regardless of date labels and products. For participants with high loss aversion, they have higher premediated waste with no statistical difference in response for “Best by” and “Use by” labels. These results highlight the heterogeneous response to date labels.
Front-of-pack labels and young consumers: An experimental investigation of nutrition and sustainability claims in Chile
Abstract
A better understanding of youth as autonomous consumers in the food market is needed to guide food and nutrition policies to achieve healthier and sustainable diets because they interact with the food environment to obtain, prepare, and consume food and beverages. Compared to other age groups, evidence on children and adolescents (youth) purchasing behavior and front-of-package (FOP) labeling is limited. The objective of the study was to assess youth’s purchasing behavior by conducting an online discrete choice experiment (DCE) in Santiago, Chile. We assessed four different food attributes: price, FOP nutrition warning label, FOP eco-label, and type of product (i.e., yogurt, cookie, apple). Data were analyzed using mixed logit models complemented with latent class logit models to further explore heterogeneity in preferences. A total of 329 youth aged 10–14 years participated in the study. Our results reveal that youths’ purchasing behavior is mostly determined by price, followed by product type and environmental sustainability as measured by the FOP eco-label; responsiveness to price was not moderated by whether the youth received pocket money from a family member regularly. We further identified five classes (groups) of youth consumers where some exhibited preference for health and nutrition attributes, environmental sustainability, or price. Our findings provide a better understanding of youth as diverse and autonomous consumers and suggest at least some youths are responsive to labeling interventions.
Variations on the Thrift Food Plan: Model diets that satisfy cost and nutrition constraints
Variations on the Thrift Food Plan: Model diets that satisfy cost and nutrition constraints
Abstract
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. The optimization models solve for a 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, with only 29 of 97 food categories being selected. The TFP algorithm was driven
primarily by the cost and food group constraints rather than the objective function. The constraints with the highest Lagrangian semi-elasticities were, in order: the cost constraint, a food energy constraint, a vitamin E constraint, and particular food group constraints such as dairy. The implications for recommended SNAP benefit amounts depend on which constraints are used and on how much difference between the model diet and current consumption is considered acceptable. Relaxing certain food group constraints, such as dairy 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.
This work was supported by USDA NIFA #2021–67023-34479 and Hatch Appropriations under Project #PEN04964 and Accession #7006590. Our funding sources were not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data. The views expressed in this paper are of the authors and should not be attributed to USDA.
Whither convergence? Co-designing convergent research and wrestling with its emergent tensions
ABSTRACT. Convergence has emerged as an important paradigm for conducting research that tackles grand societal challenges. It demands deep integration of multiple disciplines for a holistic understanding of the complexity of these challenges. In the last decade, most convergent research efforts have focused on the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). However, addressing societal challenges necessitates greater integration of the social sciences in order to bring in critical and reflexive thinking. Design, as a discipline, integrates social science foundations with the creative arts and a strong future orientation, to understand human behaviors and interactions across socio-technical systems. Although design has gained attention at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) as a means of identifying use-inspired research and facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration, it has not been more widely recognized as a valuable discipline contributing to convergent research. This paper examines design’s role in activating convergence within Multiscale Resilient, Equitable, and Circular Innovations with Partnership and Education Synergies for Sustainable Food Systems (RECIPES), an NSF-funded Sustainable Regional Systems Research Network. RECIPES aims to develop scientific breakthroughs in characterizing the complex challenges surrounding food loss and waste in the U.S., as well as to develop innovative, circular, and socially equitable solutions for reducing and managing wasted food. The network uses design to help infrastructure convergence. Prioritizing authentic whole person engagement among network participants, fostering critical reflection through convergence and divergence cycles, and making space for open-ended inquiries around emergent tensions are vitally important. This article is a reflection on this role, with insights and recommendations for more effectively leveraging design in convergence.
Key Words: complex adaptive systems; food loss and waste; human centered design; sustainability; transdisciplinary research
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2115405. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Food Waste Attitudes – National Food Waste Tracking Survey data analysis
Project Overview
The WFPC is collaborating with researchers from Ohio State University to analyze food waste. Brian Roe, the Fred N. VanBuren, Professor of Farm Management at Ohio State, led a research team that helped develop two large, nationwide surveys.
The first survey asked about behaviors related to food waste. It included demographic questions and general consumer behavior questions. The follow-up survey was more detailed. Specific categories of questions asked about food waste included events that changed behavior, general attitudes toward food waste and the environment, frequency of attendance at religious events and then food waste behaviors around specific products.
Survey responses were mostly predetermined multiple choices to capture behavior or Likert scale responses to ascertain whether respondents agreed with statements. There were no questions that asked for open-ended reflection. Data was collected in the first half of 2024. The researchers at Ohio State have aggregated into a single Excel file that includes roughly 625 responses to approximately 150 possible queries.
The WFPC is working with graduate students from Duke’s economics department to investigate the statistical relationship between the two surveys. Results should be ready for larger dissemination in the fall of 2024 or spring of 2025.
Have agricultural and applied economists lost sight of the land-grant mission? A textual analysis of Presidential Addresses and Invited Papers from 1919–2022
Abstract
Agricultural and applied economists have maintained a public discourse at the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) meetings and subsequently published papers discussing the mission of land-grant institutions and the role of AAEA members in that mission. With a content analysis of 4001 Invited Papers and Presidential Speeches, we find agricultural and applied economists questioned their profession’s purpose and role within the land-grant system. The reflective questions still apply to land-grant institutions and the agricultural and applied economics profession. We argue that AAEA members are crucial in addressing the food and agricultural challenges connected to society’s deepest needs today and into the future.
Virtual water trade: Does bilateral tariff matter?
Abstract
Virtual water trade (VWT) is the trade of water ‘embodied’ in a product. This paper explores the extent to which bilateral tariffs, World Trade Organization (WTO), and Regional Trade Agreements (RTA) reshape the trade of water across nations and alleviate water scarcity issues. To achieve this goal, we built a panel database on blue (irrigation water) and green (rainwater) VWT among paired trading countries from 1998 to 2002. Using a standard gravity model, we study how the bilateral tariff and WTO/ RTA affect the intensity of blue and green VWT. The results indicate that, on average, a 1% tariff reduction increases the green virtual water trade by 0.219%. In most water-stressed countries, a 1% reduction in tariffs increased blue VWT by 0.416% and green VWT by 0.424%. By crops, we find that tariffs had a negative effect on VWT for the less water-intensive crops, but a positive effect or no effect on the more water-intensive crops. We further find in the most water-stressed countries, RTA facilitated VWT. As a climate mitigation strategy, water-scarce countries can increase VWT, thus reducing the production of water-intensive crops, by lowering tariff rates independently or through trade agreements.
Exploring Farmer Incentives for Gleaning in North Carolina
The WFPC partnered with the Society of St. Andrew to explore opportunities to strengthen North Carolina farmer participation in gleaning. As Covid-19 pandemic emergency food support funding has expired, the ecosystem of food donations has shifted. The Society of St. Andrew is interested in learning how to create the best win-win for farmers and families in need.
Objectives
Conduct research on North Carolina’s now expired tax deduction for gleaned crop donations to determine if it makes sense to lobby for a new deduction
Better understand the needs and motivations of farmers with respect to gleaning, farm safety, and community engagement
Hold a convening of stakeholders to develop consensus-based recommendations for the Society of St. Andrew
