Choices. The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resources Issues 

About: Choices. The Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resources Issues is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Agriculture & Food safety. It has an ISSN identifier of 0886-5558. Over the lifetime, 1176 publications have been published receiving 10123 citations.

Local food consumers: how motivations and perceptions translate to buying behavior.

Abstract: Local Food Consumers: How Motivations and Perceptions Translate to Buying Behavior Yuko Onozaka, Gretchen Nurse, and Dawn Thilmany McFadden JEL Classifications: Q13, D12 Emerging market demand for local foods represents an interesting phenomenon, as small-scale direct markets operate side by side in communities with much larger competitors, such as food supercenters, which also seek to procure locally grown produce. Moreover, the wide spread differentiation of food offerings and venues has allowed consumers to more carefully search out attributes that are important to them. These attributes may include any labels or information on private—such as quality, safety, and health—and public—such as social fairness and sustainability—assurances, some of which may be more closely associated with local foods by consumers. In this article, we explore the underlying factors that motivate consumers to choose local food and how motivations vary among buyers in different market venues, based on a national survey administered in late 2008.

Smarter Lunchrooms: Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Meal Selection

Abstract: At the same time, strong demands are placed on district school lunch programs to be financially solvent. With declines in property values and other income, school budgets are declining. While not run for profit, school lunch programs must keep participation levels high and must meet costs in order to preserve the education budget of the school district. Thus, school lunch administrators must also worry about what will sell. It may be possible to replace the standard cheese pizza on white flour crust with pizza smothered in spinach, artichoke hearts, and other vegetables on a whole wheat flaxseed crust. But the healthier pizza is more expensive, and fewer children may want to eat it. Hence many school districts walk a tightrope. School districts must increase the health content of their sales while trying to avoid any reduction in their financial viability. Eliminating the less nutritional items often means eliminating the meal budget’s highest margin items. Further, child patronage of the school lunch program is understandably dependent upon schools offering foods that students are familiar with and that they like, and that will satisfy their appetites. Economists and psychologists are developing a new set of tools that promise to help relax the tension between these two competing views of school lunches. These new tools are based in the emerging discipline of behavioral economics. Behavioral economics combines the behavioral models of psychology with the decision models of economics to help highlight how biases in perception, memory, or thought processes may influence purchasing decisions. This new approach helps us to identify the behavioral triggers that lead to the selection and consumption of healthier foods and healthier quantities of food. As well, we can determine the subtle and inadvertent signals that school cafeterias may send that trigger less nutritional eating. Moreover, many of the factors identified by behavioral economics can be exploited with very little investment. Much of the apparent tension between health and cost is due to the particular approaches taken to each problem. Introducing ultra-nutritious products into the lunchroom requires a significant increase in spending while risking reductions in unit sales and total participation levels. Banning popular items for their content also directly reduces sales. But suppose that instead of these drastic measures, we could simply rearrange items that are currently offered within the school to encourage children to buy more of the more nutritional items and less of the less nutritional items. Such a strategy costs very little, has a negligible impact on overall revenue, and may provide a way for school districts to show a demonstrable increase in the nutritional content of their meals. By using tools that will both increase the sales of more nutritional foods and decrease the sales of less nutritional foods, behavioral tools can achieve nutritional goals while having a minimal impact on the bottom line.

Bioenergy and the Rise of Sugarcane-Based Ethanol in Brazil

Abstract: Brazil’s rise to be the world’s preeminent bioenergy producer provides three important lessons. The first lesson is about the complex task for developing countries balancing government intervention with market forces as they try to develop an industry. The second is how critical research and development (R&D) is for lowering costs to allow for market entry of an infant industry. The third is about the new challenges for bioenergy as it increasingly competes with the food industry for the same raw materials. The Industry Increases in petroleum prices and demand are creating pressure to develop new sources of renewable energies. Biofuel will represent 30% of the global energy used by 2020 compared with only 2% today (International Energy Agency, 2005). In 2004, the global ethanol market was US$30-40 billion, of which $4 billion involved international trade. Brazil, China, India, Malaysia and South Africa, the United States (US), and the European Union (EU) are important players in the burgeoning global market. Brazil is one of the world’s most competitive biofuels producers because of its comparative advantage in producing ethanol and soybeans. The US, the 2 nd leading ethanol producer in the world, has variable costs of production of corn-based ethanol of US$0.96 per gallon. Fixed costs range from US$1.05 to US$3.00 per gallon. While in Brazil the total cost of production was approximately US$1.10 per gallon during the 2005 crop year, with variable costs of US$.89 per gallon and fixed costs of US$.21 per gallon. In early 2006, the wholesale price paid to the mills for anhydrous ethanol was US$2.05 per gallon, while the retail price at the time for ethanol-gasoline blends was US$3.41 (including taxes). Total world ethanol production (all grades) in 2005 was 12.2 billion of gallons, with 70% of this total produced by the US and Brazil (Figure 1). Other significant producers are China, the EU, and India. Production in the

Is Local Enough? Some Arguments for Regional Food Systems

Abstract: The focus on local food systems has been quite strong over the last decade, and the phenomenon has appropriately been given a lot of attention by consumers, researchers, and food supply chain participants. As a complement to the other papers in this issue, we devote our attention here to the concept of regional food systems. While many food system advocates use—and think of—the concepts as synonymous, we argue that such a merger obscures critical distinctions and fails to provide a meaningful framework upon which to build a more economically viable and environmentally sustainable food system. We suggest that a regional food system includes “local” but operates in a larger, more comprehensive scale. Many of our arguments and assumptions have not been tested yet, but offer fruitful opportunities for analysis, ways to work together, and a useful research agenda.