What's an 'Affordable Healthy Diet'?

The question of how to get low-income Americans to eat better usually carries with it at least some unfortunate dogma. If you say that any of the responsibility for healthy eating should fall on the eaters themselves, you're an "elitist." Ask government and industry to do more to make affordable, healthy food more accessible to poor people, and you're a socialist, or whatever.

The answer, of course, is that both approaches are right. Poor people, like all of us, need to be cajoled—even shamed—into eating better. And government and industry need to do more to make sure that's possible.

Even then, though, some tricky questions arise. What is a "healthy diet"? What is "affordable"?  And as Parke Wilde asks on the U.S. Food Policy blog, is it "reasonable to expect people to drastically change their current consumption pattern?"

Setting the dogma aside and presenting actual data, Wilde, a nutrition professor at Tufts University, addresses the affordability question in an article he co-authored with Joseph Llobrera for the Journal of Consumer Affairs (not available online).

Particularly, he asks whether the Department of Agriculture's Thrifty Food Plan is a good blueprint for a healthy, affordable diet. His qualified answer is yes. His qualifications are big ones, though, so, really, the article doesn't really make an argument. It seeks merely to provide a "framework to clarify the relationship between assumptions and cost estimates for nutritious diets."

There's not much else that can be done given that the Thrifty Food Plan is, like so many government programs necessarily are, a big, clumsy, generalized approach to addressing specific problems that vary widely by neighborhood and by person.

The Thrifty Food Plan is the least expensive of the "plans" the USDA has laid out, which also include the "Low Cost," "Moderate Cost," and "Liberal" plans. The "Thrifty" plan is used to determine eligibility for Food Stamps.

In the end, the determination of whether the plan is "affordable" comes down to testing it against individual cases. Just for example, maybe a particular family can afford such a diet, but they have to take three buses and three hours to get to the nearest grocery store that can provide it. Or maybe they have dietary needs that vary substantially from the average.

Wilde and Llobrera also presented their findings in a seminar at Tufts, available here, complete with slides. A couple of warnings: The presentation is for the most part understandable (and even fascinating—to me, anyway), but it gets a little geeky, with coefficients and graphs and such. Also, somewhat annoyingly, clicking on the page automatically starts the audio. It also might arbitrarily resize your browser window, as it did mine.