The November 2022 results from our monthly Consumer Food Insights survey from the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability at Purdue University are now out.
As I discussed in my last post, despite the continuation of high food price inflation, our measures of food insecurity remain steady. Moreover, if we focus on a particular measure: whether more people are getting food from food banks, we also see no substantive uptick.
Broadly, we find that food at home (FAH) spending remain flat and is at roughly the same level as back in May despite continually rising prices since that time.
This month, we did a deeper diver into how consumer spending patterns, behaviors, and beliefs differed across geographic regions of the United States. We don’t yet have enough data at the state level to focus in at that granularity, so we looked at differences across the nine Census Regions across the U.S. (you can check out the map in our report to see which states fall in which regions).
We find that households closer to the coasts spend much more per week on food - both food at home (FAH) through grocery and food away from home (FAHF) through restaurants.
Despite greater food spending on the coasts (or perhaps because of it), households on the coasts are experiencing lower rates of food insecurity.
Intra-region differences in food behaviors demonstrate that broad geographic labels like Northeast vs. South are not terribly precise for comparing the food preferences of Americans.
As was the case last month, we added some new questions to compare with the recent Apollo Academic Survey conducted in collaboration with William Masters at Tufts University. That survey asked leaders, fellows, and awardees of the American Society of Nutrition and the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (i.e., the experts) about their views on nutrition and policy. Our goal, down the road, is to compare views of experts to those of the general public.
We found Americans primarily blame reduced physical activity for the rise in national obesity rates and rank better access to healthy foods as their top policy priority for improving overall health. Using taxes to encourage healthier food consumption was the least popular option among the public.
There is a lot more in the report, which you can download here.