Trends in National School Lunch Program

Back in 2010, the U.S. Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. The Act, championed by Michelle Obama, provided funding for free and reduced price school lunches and breakfasts, introduced a variety of new nutritional guidelines, and provided incentives for schools to offer healthier options.

The law went into effect at the beginning of the 2012-2013 academic year. There was a fair amount of initial push back. A video from these Kansas students protesting the calorie restrictions has been viewed more than a million times, and other students took to social media with photos of the new lunches using the hashtag #ThanksMichelleObama. This CNN article from 2017 provides some background and also reports on the efforts of a large school food service industry association to roll back some of the guidelines.

The new guidelines may well have generated some positive health benefits for students who ate school lunches. But, how have these policies potentially affected participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP)? Students are not required to eat the school-provided NSLP lunches. Students can bring food from home, go off campus, or find other substitutes at school.

I downloaded some data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Food and Nutrition Service (FNS). These data show that in 2017, 4.89 billion lunches were served under the NSLP, with 73.6% being free or reduced price and the remaining 26.4% of students paying full price. How have these statistics changed over time?

As the figure below shows, there was a nearly linear increase in the number of lunches served each year in the NSLP right up until 2010, after which there was a slowdown and then a slow decline.

The effects can be seen even more dramatically by converting the data in the above figure to annual percentage changes in the number of NSLP meals served. From 1990 to 2008, the school lunch program grew every year. Since 2011, the program has gotten smaller every year except in 2016. In the six years prior to the law’s enactment in 2010, there was an average annual increase of 1.4% in the number of NSLP meals served, but in the six years since the law’s enactment (from 2012 to 2017), there was an annual average decrease of -1.2% in the number of NSLP meals served.

The data also suggest another interesting dynamic at play. Below is the percent of NSLP meals that are free or reduced priced. Throughout most of the 2000’s just under 60% of NSLP meals were free or reduced price. Since then, there has been a fairly steady increase in the share of meals that are subsidized. Given that the increase started prior to the enactment of the 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, it is likely that other factors (such as the Great Recession) were playing a role. However, there has continued to be an increase in the share of NSLP meals that are free or reduced price well after the recession ended.

These data show there are fewer meals being served that fall under the National School Lunch Program umbrella and that students who pay full price have increasingly chose to eat meals not governed by the program.

The figures presented above do not causality prove that the 2010 Healthy, Hungry-Free Kids Act led to the decline in the meals served under the USDA National School Lunch Program, but they are interesting trends about which I was previously unaware.

Market Impacts of GMO Labeling

Readers might recall the result from the study Jane Kolodinsky and I published in Science Advances earlier this year. We found that the provision of mandatory labels in Vermont appears to have reduced opposition to GMOs in that state. However, as I noted at the time,

“Our result does NOT suggest people will suddenly support GMOs once mandatory labels are in place. ”

Indeed, the data suggest consumers will still want to avoid products with GMO labels, which provides incentives for food retailers and manufacturers to find ways to avoid GMO ingredients.

Colin Carter and Aleks Schaefer just published an interesting new study in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which powerfully shows that mandatory GMO labels are already having significant market impacts. They found a creative way to explore this issue by focusing on the market for sugar. They provide the following background:

“In the United States, sugar is produced from both sugarcane and sugarbeets. Sugarcane stalks are milled to produce raw sugar. Raw cane sugar is then sent to a refining facility to be transformed into refined sugar. Sugbarbeets, in contrast, have no raw stage; they are processed from beet to refined sugar in one continuous process. The U.S. market share for beet (cane) sugar is approximately 58% (42%). Almost all U.S. sugarbeet production is GE, while cane sugar is GE-free. However, sugar derived from beets is chemically identical to sugar derived from cane.”

This summary data they provide on prices of sugar from cane and beet sources suggests “something” change around the same time as the Vermont mandatory GMO labeling law.

Source: Carter and Schaefer, American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Here are the main findings.

“Our analysis supports the explanation that the divergence in U.S. prices for refined cane and beet sugar was the result of Vermont’s mandatory GE labeling. The divergence occurred on or around July 2016— the month the Vermont Act took effect.

Counterfactual price estimates generated by a regression model suggest that GE food labeling initiatives generated a small premium for cane sugar and a price discount for beet sugar of approximately 13% relative to what prices would have been in the absence of such legislation.”

These changes in raw ingredient prices will ultimately have impacts on retail food prices. All this is suggests that mandatory labels aren’t a free lunch.

Are Consumers Eating Out Less Frequently?

According to this Grub Street article, the answer is yes.

“The average American’s restaurant visits reached a 28-year low this year, falling from an average of 215 a year in 2000 to 186 a year in 2018. Data gathered by the NPD Group shows a particular and precipitous decline since 2008. Today, 82 percent of meals in America are made at home.”

And, they speculate on causes in the slow-down on restaurant spending:

“Going out to restaurants doesn’t seem like such a good idea when you’re saddled with student debt and contending with wage stagnation. (In fact, many Americans saw their wages decline over the last year.)

Meanwhile, restaurants are becoming increasingly more expensive compared to eating in. ”

I’m a little skeptical of these data? Why? Well, here’s data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) data on personal consumption expenditures (these are the data that feed into calculation of GDP) for food at home and away from home.

In inflation-adjusted terms, all consumer spending is up about 36% since 2001. Spending on food at home only rose about 24% over this time periods, but spending away from home increased 54%. (I’ve also shown spending on clothing for reference). Spending on food away from home fell during the Great Recession, but it has significantly rebounded since.

Now, it’s not impossible for both of these statistics to be simultaneously true - one can eat out less frequently but spend more money on each trip, and total expenditures could still rise.

But, the BEA also reports quantity indices, which provide an estimate of the volume of food sold away from home. Here are those data. These data suggest little evidence for a slowdown in the amount of food consumed away from home.

The headline on the Grub Street article asks “Should Restaurants be Worried?” The BEA data suggest the answer is “no.”

Dealing with Lazy Survey Takers

A tweet by @thefarmbabe earlier this week has renewed interest in my survey result from back in January 2015, where we found more than 80% of survey respondents said they wanted mandatory labels on foods containing DNA. For interested readers, see this discussion on the result, a follow-up survey where the question was asked in a different way with essentially the same result, or this peer-reviewed journal article with Brandon McFadden where we found basically the same result in yet another survey sample. No matter how we asked this question, it seems 80% of survey respondents say they want to label foods because they have DNA.

All this is probably good motivation for this recent study that Trey Malone and I just published in the journal Economic Inquiry. While there are many possible reasons for the DNA-label results (as I discussed here), one possibility is that survey takers aren’t paying very close attention to the questions being asked.

One method that’s been around a while to control for this problem is to use a “trap question” in a survey. The idea is to “trap” inattentive respondents by making it appear one question is being asked, when in fact - if you read closely - a different question is asked. Here are two of the trap questions we studied.

About 22% missed the first trap question (they did not click “high” to the last question in figure 2A) and about 25% missed the second question (the respondent clicked an emotion rather than “none of the above” in question 2B). So far, this isn’t all that new.

Trey’s idea was to prompt people who missed the trap question. Participants who incorrectly responded were given the following prompt, “You appear to have misunderstood the previous question. Please be sure to read all directions clearly before you respond.” The respondent then had the chance to revise their answers to the trap question they missed before proceeding to the rest of the survey. Among the “trapped” respondents, about 44% went back and correctly answered the first question, whereas about 67% went back and correctly answered the second question. Thus, this “nudge” led to an increase in attentiveness among a non-trivial number of respondents.

After the trap questions and potential prompts, respondents subsequently answered several discrete choice questions about which beer brands they’d prefer at different prices. Here are the key findings:

“We find that individuals who miss trap questions and do not correctly revise their responses have significantly different choice patterns as compared to individuals who correctly answer the trap question. Adjusting for these inattentive responses has a substantive impact on policy impacts. Results, based on attentive participant responses, indicate that a minimum beer price would have to be substantial to substantially reduce beer demand. ”

In our policy simulations, we find a counter-intuitive result - a minimum beer price (as implemented in some parts of the UK) might actually increase alcohol consumption as it leads to a substitution from lower to higher alcohol content beers.

In another paper in the European Review of Agricultural Economics that was published back in July, Trey and I proposed a different, yet easy-to-interpret measure of (and way to fix) inattention bias in discrete choice statistical models.

Taken together, these papers show that inattention is a significant problem in surveys, and that adjusting results for inattention can substantively alter one’s results.

We haven’t yet done a study of whether people who say they want DNA labels are more or less likely to miss trap question or exhibit other forms of inattention bias, but that seems a natural question to ask. Still, inattention can’t be the full explanation for absurd label preferences. We’ve never found inattention bias as high as the level of support for mandatory labels on foods indicating the presence/absence of DNA.

Slow Growth Chicken - What do Consumers Think?

What do you think about slow-growth chickens?  If you're like most people I've asked, your answer is probably "what the heck is a slow growth chicken?"  

Food retailers, however, aren't wondering because they're being asked by animal advocacy organizations to make new commitments to only buy chicken from slower-growing birds (here is the request in the EU and here is the Humane Society of the United States on the issue).

First, what is slow growth chicken?  Here's from my new paper on the topic just released by the journal Poultry Science (references omitted):

“Genetic improvements have allowed poultry producers to rear broilers faster and to heavier weights than was possible in previous decades , with the result being more affordable chicken for consumers. However, some research has suggested that rapid growth may result in broilers that suffer from leg damage and pain. These ideas have recently gained traction in popular media and have led to calls for older heritage breeds of chickens, or newer slower growing chickens that are argued to be associated with improved taste and higher broiler welfare. Some research suggests little to no independent relationship between days of growth and consumer sensory evaluations of chicken , and other research suggests that slow-growing breeds are deemed less tender and less juicy than conventional chicken breeds. Nonetheless, consumer preferences for chicken may be as much affected by perceptions and labels than by actual sensory characteristics.”

The new paper reports on the results of some surveys I conducted late last year with about 2,000 U.S. chicken consumers for a project funded by the Food Marketing Institute, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, and the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research (a fuller, un-gated report of the results is here).  One of the main results is that most consumers don't know much about slow growth chickens, and as a result, positive or negative information can really sway people one way or the other.  

One group of people were given no extra information.  Another group of people received "pro" slow growth information from articles in NPR (as reported by Dan Charles) and the New York Times (as reported by Stephanie Strom), and yet another group of people received "anti" slow growth information from the National Chicken Council.

After receiving this information, consumers made a number of choices in a simulated retail environment showing packages of chicken breasts with different labels and prices.  These choices were used to back out consumers' willingness-to-pay for the slow-growth label (at present there is no widely adopted slow-growth label, so I created one myself for use in this study).  Here is the distribution of willingness-to-pay ($/lb) for slow growth and organic labels in the different information treatments.

Some of the most interesting results related to the extreme lack of knowledge people have about broiler production in general and slow-grown in particular.  For example, here are some results when they were asked what they thought a variety of different labels implied.  

The table shows the average beliefs about animal welfare, expense, healthfulness, safety, and taste of different labels. Without extra information, slow growth labels tended to be associated with disadvantageous beliefs. Without additional information, slow growth labels are associated with signaling the lowest safety, taste, and health of the labels considered.

Here's how I concluded the article:

“Given the disadvantageous beliefs consumers hold about slow growth claims, a substantial marketing effort would likely be needed for the attribute to become a major determinant of consumer choice. Given consumers’ lack of knowledge about broiler production, simply informing consumers of already existing practices (e.g., cage free and no added hormones) could be a more cost-effective way of boosting chicken demand. That said, it is possible that the presence of hormone absence labels may exacerbate the misinformation problem by indirectly suggesting that there are some brands of chicken that use growth hormones. While organic labels are associated with positive beliefs and are valued relatively highly by consumers, organic production entails significantly higher costs in comparison to non-GMO or no antibiotic claims.

Perhaps the most significant factor explaining the increase in chicken consumption over the past several decades is price. Increases in production efficiencies have reduced chicken prices relative to the price of beef and pork. Perhaps not surprisingly then, this study also shows price to be a major determinant of choice for consumers. Nonetheless, there is a non-trivial minority of consumers who are relatively unconcerned about chicken prices, and these consumers are the target market for the label claims considered in this study.”