This book contains a sampling of recent ERS research illustrating the breadth of the Agency’s research on current policy issues: from biofuels to food consumption to land conservation to patterns of trade for agricultural products. What you won’t find in this collection is any mention of...

The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) serves more than 29 million children each day, but there is little information on the characteristics of those children. This study reports new estimates of NSLP participant characteristics using two national surveys: the 2001 Panel of the Survey of...

Until recently, many restaurants and fast-food places did not offer nutrition information at the point of purchase. This is expected to change because the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires that nutrition information be posted in many of these venues. Once the law is fully...

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides supplemental food, nutrition education (including breastfeeding promotion and support), and referrals to health care and other social services to low-income, nutritionally at-risk women, infants, and...

This report provides the latest estimates by USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) on the amount and value of food loss in the United States. These estimates are for more than 200 individual foods using ERS’s Loss-Adjusted Food Availability data. In 2010, an estimated 31 percent or 133...

Household access to food over time in Tanzania is measured by comparing the cost of representative food baskets to household income. Consumption patterns, estimated using household data from the 2010/11 National Panel Survey conducted by Tanzania’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), show...

This study tracks food products introduced from 1989 to 2010 to better understand the adoption of voluntary health- and nutrition-related claims by companies. New food products introduced with health- and nutrition-related claims accounted for 43.1 percent of all new U.S. food product...

This report uses preliminary administrative data from USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), the agency responsible for managing the programs, to examine trends in the food and nutrition assistance programs through fi scal 2013 (October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2013). The report uses ERS...

Indonesia’s food market has changed in response to a changing and growing economy. The report examines changes in the food consumption pattern and measures the growth of modern food retail chains, packaged food purchases, and food imports in the world’s fourth-most-populous country. The...

Most Americans consume diets that do not meet Federal dietary recommendations. A common explanation is that healthier foods are more expensive than less healthy foods. To investigate this assumption, the authors compare prices of healthy and less healthy foods using three different price...