This is the resource page for the teaching exercise described in a new Journal of Economic Education article:

Wallingford, J.K. and W.A. Masters (2025), Least-cost diets to teach optimization and consumer behavior, with applications to health equity, poverty measurement and international development. Journal of Economic Education, 56(2): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220485.2025.2465384

The article is gated but you can click here for a PDF preprint of the manuscript, the Excel workbook and the Word template with detailed instructions for students.

The Excel workbook used for this exercise is also a useful starting point for nutrition researchers looking to construct nutrient-adequate diets in different contexts, for which they would adjust the nutritional requirements and replace the food list with locally-available items. In this Excel workbook, each diet is a separate sheet of the workbook, and drawing items from a single set of food prices.

Researchers who want to automate diet cost computations from a food list whose price and availability varies over time and space should use the software tools provided by the Food Prices for Nutrition project, as described in a separate article entitled Measuring food access as affordability of least-cost healthy diets worldwide. That kind of diet cost monitoring uses the lowest cost items in food groups, in contrast to the lower and upper bound for each essential nutrient shown in this exercise.