About

Welcome to our resource page for the new open-access textbook on Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health, published in May 2024 from Palgrave MacMillan. The site is maintained by Will Masters and Amelia Finaret, and was previously a teaching blog for Will’s graduate course at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. You can see recent and past blog posts by clicking on the category of interest in the menu at the top right of this page, here:  ==>

This site will soon have password-protected links to course materials (slides, exercise prompts, past exams and answer keys). For now you we invite you to subscribe to our elist so that you can receive and share teaching material and updates related to the book.

Visitors interested in the textbook authors’ own ongoing research you can visit the personal websites for co-authors Will Masters and Amelia Finaret, including Will’s Food Prices for Nutrition project that measure food access globally using least-cost healthy diets, as in the class exercise described here.  Researchers in related fields might also want to check out the massive Handbook chapter with about 300 citations to recent literature behind the textbook: 

Masters, W.A., A.B. Finaret and S.A. Block, 2022. The Economics of Malnutrition: Dietary Transition and Food System Transformation. Handbook of Agricultural Economics, vol. 6: 4997-5083.  Amsterdam: Elsevier. (If your institution does not subscribe, click here for preprint.)

Will’s food economics course at Tufts is taught in the spring as described in the syllabus for NUTR 238, and in the fall as described in the syllabus for NUTB 238. The fall version is taught online with a short residency (hence NUTB, for blended learning).  Both semesters have similar content, which is designed to be attractive and accessible to students with zero previous experience or interest in economics, while providing depth on agriculture, food markets & nutrition for those with experience in general economics. Students can enroll individually in standalone courses like this one via Courses@Tufts.  To see what it’s like, course evaluations for the last 3 years are here for the small MNSP version (always online) in Fall 2020, 2021 and 2022 skipping 2023 that was taught by Amelia Finaret, and the larger MS-PhD version (in person) during in Spring  2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.

Beyond this one course the Friedman School has an exceptionally strong and diverse collection of faculty, staff and students interested in all aspects of human nutrition, agriculture and food – all on our website.

–Will Masters
http://sites.tufts.edu/willmasters

PS, like everyone else we are in hybrid mode, meeting in person as often as possible like in the olden days:

…but now we’re also happy to meet online, which we take seriously as in our first class after lockdown in 2020: