Extreme Temperature and Diet Quality : Evidence from China

Climate change, which includes not only rising average temperatures but also extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and a variety of negative consequences, is an urgent global issue that has garnered considerable public attention. In many regions of the world, people are already facing a steady increase in average temperatures due to climate change caused by the addition of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Previous literature on the impacts of climate change has been laser-focused on agricultural production, land use, and water resources, in a world where over half of the population resides in urban areas. We provide the first estimates of the impact of extreme temperatures on diet quality in large non-experimental real-world settings, using high-frequency data from more than 1.7 million restaurant transactions in five Chinese cities. Using high-dimensional fixed effects models with temperature bins, we find that higher temperatures lead to the consumption of food with fewer calories, and heat stress or extreme high temperatures lead to an improvement in diet quality, whereas extreme cold temperatures have the opposite effect. These results are robust with alternative temperature and nutritional quality measurements. Further analyses indicate that, in extreme heat, households choose to dine out more frequently but reduce their per capita food expenditures. Overall, this paper emphasizes the significance of considering the impact of climate change on food supply chains and their nutritional implications from the consumer’s perspective