RWL #155 - food insecurity
Happy Holidays from the University of New Hampshire! We had a lovely Christmas celebration with family that extended from Christmas Eve with my father and sister and their families to Christmas morning at home with my wife and kids, to an afternoon celebration with my wife’s family. We’re blessed to have all that family to spend time with - which is the best part of the holiday. I hope you have enjoyed some family time celebrating your holidays.
This week I happened across a couple of pieces on organizations working to end hunger, so I decided to add a piece about one of my diet experiments to round out the set and make all three pieces about food insecurity. That seems an appropriate subject given our holidays and the celebration of plenty this time of year encourages. Something to be grateful for and easy to forget about.
See you next year!
(Picture is of my nephew and my dog walking along a frozen stream behind our house. This is what we do in NH during the winter.)
Read
What: Insider, A man shopped only in convenience stores for a month to try and see what it's like to live in a food desert — here's what happened
https://www.insider.com/eating-in-simulated-food-desert-2019-5
Why: Back in 2015 I decided to see what the effects of living in a food desert would be. I embarked on a 30 day experiment to eat only what I could buy in convenience stores on a limited budget (I used a soft target of $7.25/day - the Federal minimum wage at the time). I documented the experiment on my blog and later published a paper about the experience. The experiment was picked up by Insider last summer. I received an e-mail from the editor saying they were interested in interviewing me for a story, but I happened to be on vacation in Rome at the time, so I gave them my blog, paper, and a link to my APHA presentation and they wrote the whole story without talking to me. I find the “food desert” construct to be invalid because it aggregates too many elements of poverty and the assumptions are too loose. Most of the literature I have read has weak results because the definition starts to fall apart when populated with real, thinking human beings who optimize at the margins. While I think the food desert construct is invalid, that in no way means I don’t think people suffer from food insecurity. Mostly I think it is invalid to separate food insecurity from a broader poverty construct.
Watch
What: TED, Jasmine Crowe, What we're getting wrong in the fight to end hunger (12 min)
Why: What I found most inspiring about this TED Talk was that Crowe is working with technology to reduce the transaction costs of transferring excess food from restaurants and grocery stores to shelters and food pantries. She has developed an app that easily allows restaurants and grocery stores to notify food pantries of the availability of excess food that is about to go to waste, and provides the stores the tax deductible value of the food so that if the donation is executed, both sides benefit.
I’m less sanguine about her support for laws requiring restaurants and grocery stores donate their excess food to charity instead of throwing it away. That seems likely to create unintended consequences, one of which would be a reduction in the number of restaurants and grocery stores - particularly in low income areas. The economics is simple: raise the cost of providing a service and less of the service will be provided. But the distribution of the reduction will be uneven. Stores that operate on the lowest margins (in poor communities) will reduce the most because they will not be able to bear the additional cost of compliance with the law. On the other hand her app acts to reduce the cost of making donations of excess food. This will result in more donations and might even result in a greater supply of both charity and base service, particularly if the grocery stores and restaurants have a financial incentive (tax breaks) to participate.
Listen
What: Cold Call, Can the Robin Hood Army Grow with Zero Financial Resources? (35 min)
https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/11/can-the-robin-hood-army-grow-with-zero-financial-resources
Why: I just discovered the Cold Call podcast last week. This one may be of interest to educators in particular. It’s from the Harvard Business School and features HBS professors talking about cases they have written. This one is about a recent Harvard MBA student, Neel Ghose, who developed a volunteer-based organization called the Robin Hood Army. The purpose of the Robin Hood Army is to collect and distribute surplus food to hungry people. So like the video above, this is another effort to overcome the transaction costs of taking excess supply in one place and connect it with demand somewhere else. The Robin Hood Army operates in 103 cities around the world, and operates with no funds. Everything is done by volunteers, and they take no cash, only in-kind donations. That creates some unique challenges. The common understanding of the growth and maturation process of an organization is that it needs professional staff at a certain size. Unable to pay professional staff, the Robin Hood Army won’t be able to follow the typical maturation process (see the Greiner Growth Model, which is pretty much the standard). The HBS case is referenced here if you are an educator interested in using it.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
Have a great weekend and do amazing things!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau