Julian M. Alston, Abigail M. Okrent Effects of Farm and Food Policy on Obesity in the United States

Annotation

TARGET AUDIENCEThe book will be pitched at a broad general audience. It will be accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students across a range of disciplines in the sciences and social sciences in particular in schools of nutrition, public policy, public health, economics, and agricultural economics as well as decision-makers in the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors, and the general public. The book will be suitable for use as a supplementary text for classes in food and nutrition and related policy, and in agricultural economics courses dealing with food policy, but it will not be written primarily for those purposes. Emphasis will be placed on making the material interesting and accessible to a broader audience but without undue sacrifice of substance. Technical treatments of topics will be minimized. Unavoidable technical detail will be included in appendices. Ideas and arguments will be supported with detailed data, presented in graphs and tables, as well as simple economic models, mainly in graphical form. Text boxes will be used to present digressions or anecdotes to lighten the (sometimes dry) material and make the work more attractive and engaging for the reader. MAIN ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONSThe main original contribution of this book will be to bring together and synthesize the extensive body of existing work in the area, distill the main lessons, and communicate them clearly to the target audience in accessible prose, supported with up-to-date quantification of the relevant aspects. For several chapters we will be able to draw on our own recent work as a primary source. Of necessity, some marginal extensions to the existing work will be necessary to complete the story on some elements, including some updating of less-recent work. In addition, some significant new work may be undertaken on some elements where the relevant results are not available from prior work.