That’s the title of a paper Brandon McFadden and I wrote for Choices Magazine. Here’s the introduction:
“COVID-19 caused significant disruptions in food supply chains and altered consumer buying behavior. The impacts of COVID-19, most notably in the restaurant and food service sectors, are still being realized in food markets months after the initial shutdown. COVID-19 is a unique event with idiosyncratic effects on food consumption. Nonetheless, there are likely longer-term effects of the pandemic that are perhaps more predictable. The pandemic has caused a recession and spike in unemployment during the first quarter of 2020 (NBER, 2021), and there is much that has been learned about consumer food spending and buying behaviors during prior economic downturns that can be leveraged to gain insights about consumer food spending during the pandemic.
There are many differences between the present pandemic-induced recession and the Great Recession, which was associated with a deterioration of the housing market. The Great Recession’s impacts on food spending operated almost exclusively through changes in income and unemployment, whereas the COVID-19 impacts on food spending include these channels and more, including consumer demand shocks (increase in demand for food at grocery and reduction in demand for food away from home) and supply shocks (regulations affected the supply of food service options and temporary slowdown in meat processing from worker illnesses). Additionally, government support during the pandemic actually caused aggregate personal income to increase (FRED, 2021a), and along with a fall in spending on entertainment and travel, aggregate savings rates to increases as well (FRED, 2021b), although the effects are highly heterogeneous across households (Chetty et al., 2020). Despite these differences, understanding the impacts of changes in income, unemployment, and time availability that accompany recessions remains relevant to the current environment.”
The paper goes on to discuss research on how food demand changes with income, eating during the great recession, food insecurity during the great recession, and time allocation, income, and food spending, among other topics.