In the past I have, at times, been somewhat critical of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) guidelines destined to make school lunches healthier by reducing calories, sodium content, saturated fat, etc. It's not not that I'm against healthy kids! Rather, I bristled at the idea of a bunch of nutritionists, policy makers, etc. setting rules and guidelines for how they think kids should eat without considering how the children would respond to the rules. Nutritional content is but one of the components we care about when eating - don't we also care about how the food tastes, how much it costs, whether it leaves feeling full, whether it is safe to eat, etc. etc. In short, the guidelines were established with limited understanding of what children want to eat, and as such we knew very little about whether the rules might increase food waste, increase the frequency of home lunches, cause unintended substitution patterns, and so on.
In an interesting paper in the most recent edition of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, a team of six researchers sought to do what should have been done prior to implementing nutritional guidelines. In particular, the authors studied almost 280,000 school lunch choices of about 5,500 elementary age children in a suburban South Carolina school district. The authors know the precise foods available at each lunch offering, the nutritional characteristics of the foods, which foods the child selected (or whether the child brought a lunch from home - note that lunch menus were published well in advance), and some of the characteristics of the child who made the choice such as their grade, gender, race, and whether they received free or reduced price lunch.
The authors are able to take all this data to estimate demand curves associated with different food offerings. Their demand models let them answer questions like the following:
- If the sodium content of a pizza offering were lowered, how would that change the number of children who select it?
- If a low fat pizza is paired with a peanut butter sandwich, which would most people choose?
- If the caloric content were unilaterally lowered on all offerings, how many more children would bring their lunches from home?
Here's what the authors find:
“If the protein content of Entrée 1 is increased by 3.2grams (one standard deviation of all entree offerings over the course of study), students are, on average, 2.8 percentage points more likely to select that offering. Increasing the fat content of Entrée 1 by one standard deviation (3.9grams) has a similar effect, though smaller in magnitude; students are only 0.2 percentage points more likely to select Entrée 1 because of this increase in its fat content. Increasing the carbohydrate content has the opposite effect; the average probability of choosing Entrée 1 over the alternatives decreases by 3 percentage points if the carbohydrate content increased by 6.8grams (one standard deviation). Thus, the first row of table 3 reveals that students prefer more fat and protein but dislike additional carbohydrates. While the results for sodium are positive, the effect is not statistically significant.”
There are important differences across children:
“While an increase in the fat content of Entrée 1 increases the average probability that a student receiving free lunch will select it, the same increase in fat reduces the likelihood a student who pays full-price will select Entrée 1. The results also suggest that students who pay full-price are more likely to select offerings with more protein than students receiving free or reduced-price lunches (Bonferroni p-value <0.0001), and those who received free lunches are more likely to reject entrées with additional sodium relative to students who pay full-price or students who received reduced-price lunches (Bonferroni p-value =0.0044).”
The authors use their results to suggest how "schools can increase the healthfulness of their students’ meals by replacing unhealthy options with relatively healthy options that are already popular amongst the students." One things the authors didn't do (but which is possible given their estimates) is to ask: are the children better or worse off (at least as measured by their own preferences revealed by their short run choice behavior) with the new nutritional standards? Which types of children are now happier or sadder? Because there is no price variation in the dataset, the authors can't provide a monetary measure of the loss (or gain) in student happiness, but they could covert it to some other unit they measure - such as grams of protein or calories.
Nonetheless, this is a really interesting study, and it has a number of important findings. Here's some from the conclusions:
“Nationwide between school year 2010–11 and 2012–13, the number of students receiving free lunches increased while the number of students purchasing full-price lunches decreased, leading to an overall reduction in participation by 3.7% (Government Accounting Office 2014). The results of our analyses suggest that the underlying preferences for offerings with higher levels of fat and lower levels of carbohydrates may be driving the decline in NSLP participation. Full-price participants are most likely to respond to changes in the nutritional content of the offered entrées by opting out of purchasing a school lunch altogether. Our findings have particularly important implications for the NSLP’s stated goal of reducing childhood obesity as they indicate that children are likely to reject those entrées that are most compatible with this particular aim. However, our results do suggest that the future guidelines reducing sodium levels may not trigger additional participation declines.”