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, building on 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 which appears at the bottom of this page on phones, and on computers is at the top right of this page here ==>

The book is aimed at advanced undergrads, graduate students and general readers with a professional or personal interest in the topic. The first half is a gentle introduction to economic principles using food-related examples, and the second half explains how food systems work using tables and charts with links to authoritative sources of updated data. Other than data sources the book does not cite references, because it builds directly on our massive Handbook chapter with about 300 citations to recent literature: 

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.)

In the book’s first five months since publication, it has been accessed by over 9,00 unique users from 156 countries. Outreach efforts have included symposium sessions about teaching at the AAEA in New Orleans on July 30th 2024, at the ICAE in Delhi on August 6th (using these slides), and will have a session at the ASSA in San Francisco on January 3rd 2025.  We’ve also done a few fun podcast discussions of 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.  The book mostly builds on our teaching, starting with Will’s food economics course at Tufts that 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 — and Allegheny is among the few small liberal arts colleges to bridge into the health professions with a strong program in global health studies.  Check it out!

— Will Masters and Amelia Finaret
http://sites.tufts.edu/willmasters | https://amelia.finaret.net  

PS, like everyone else we are in hybrid mode, meeting in person as often as possible but now we’re also happy to meet online, which we take seriously as in our first class after lockdown in 2020