A shiny new year ahead
It’s January 2nd, time to get ready for the year’s firehose of food-related news and data.
Our daily challenge is to make sense of events, without retreating into a comfy filter bubble. Economics can help with that. For students registered in NUTR 238 our course website is now up. Class will start on January 15th, and eventually get into news analysis exercises to diagram the economic principles behind current events, and data analysis exercises to visualize comparisons over time and across countries. Before then, or if you’re just browsing, here are some shout-outs to some numbery news sources for the year ahead:
— My vote for best newspaper innovation of 2014 goes to the New York Times’ Upshot, whose launch was itself newsworthy. Among their great food stories last year were the Fried Calamari Index, and What 2000 Calories Looks Like.
— One media surprise was the rise and rise of podcast journalism. Not just Serial, but also the great Planet Money and NPR econo-news , with fun food stories like Why is Milk in the Back of the Store, and When Do Chefs Buy Generic Foods?
— The dataverse just gets denser and denser, with better and better data visualization. My vote for best quick advice is these great posts about how to clear off the table and remove to improve. In class we’ll see a ton of numbers, try hard to avoid numbo-jumbo,and do our best to be use data thoughtfully like this great chart on how gluten diverged from celiac.
The food world is full of surprises – so keep an eye on food-related news with sites like the food, nutrition and agriculture sources to your right, and if you’re enrolled in NUTR 238, use this blog to share what you find.
Happy new year!
Job listings
- Friedman careers center postings
- Friedman alumni group on LinkedIn
- Sustainable Food Jobs (mostly U.S.)
- Nutrition-related jobs (ASN)
- Devex (US and international)
- Economics-related jobs (search “food”)
- Policy-related jobs (APPAM)
- Boston-area intl. dev. jobs & news (BNID)
- Food policy jobs in the US (Daybook)
- Intl. ag and nutrition jobs+news (Ag2Nut)
- TABLE job listings (UK-based but global)
- Intl. development jobs (search “food”)
- Global health & poverty (80,000 hrs)
Helpful newsletters
- Food Fix – insider scoops on US policy
- Politico – US food & ag policy
- Farm Policy News – from Univ. of Illinois
- Solutions Journalism – stories of success
- ANH Academy – mostly Africa & Asia
- Boston Network for Intl. Dev.
- Ag2nut – international nutrition
- Chicago Council – global food & ag
- The Counter – ‘Fact and friction in American food’
- Food dive – specialist journalism about the food industry
- Food Safety News – nasty stuff to avoid
- Dani Nierenberg’s Food Tank
- Jeremy Cherfas – food culture
- Gro Intel – deep dives into data
- FERN’s ag insider news
- Rudd Center – obesity policy
- David Allison – obesity research
- Econofact – US economic policy
- Best of EconTwitter – in digestible form
Data & resources
- JPAL how-to research resources
- WB DIME data analysis handbook
- Grad school advice (for econ, but applicable to others)
- My list of resources (experimental)
- USDA Econ. Res. Service (ERS) data
- USDA Food & Nutr. program data
- NCCOR – all US food-health data
- World Bank data
- FAO Statistics (FAOSTAT)
- UNICEF statistics
- WHO – child heights and weights
- WHO – global obesity and BMI
- UN system data
- HDX – humanitarian crises
- The dataverse
- IHSN – household surveys
- IPUMS – accessible data (incl. IDHS)
- Euromonitor – branded foods (library subscription)
- Gro Intelligence data
- UNCTAD – international trade
Favorite blogs on ag, food & health etc.
- Noah Smith – economics of everything
- Ethan Mollick – AI in higher ed
- Ugo Gentilini – social protection
- Parke Wilde – food policy
- Econofact – US econ policy
- Jess Fanzo – food systems
- Marc Bellemare – ag & food econ
- Chris Blattman – dev econ
- Jayson Lusk – ag & food econ
- Diane Coyle – economics books
- Marion Nestle – food politics
- Tamar Haspel – food & ag
- World Bank – impact evaluation
- BITSS – research methods
- Susan Dynarski – education policy
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