3 Essays on the Local Food Environment

Download or read book 3 Essays on the Local Food Environment written by Cristina A. Connolly and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant amount of attention has been focused on both the prevalence of obesity in the United States and the corresponding interest in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. My research concentrates on one aspect of this trend: food access. One perceived component of healthy food is consumption of certified organic produce. However, consumers that purchase organic products may be doing so because of an assumed relationship with local or sustainable production. My first essay teases out these two effects by concentrating on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations in order to measure a consumer's willingness to pay for certified organic produce that is already local. CSA farms differentiate themselves on a variety of characteristics, including certification status, and a hedonic model of CSA share prices is used to find the marginal valuation of each CSA attribute. I find that consumers are willing to pay for certified organic produce, even when food is already local, and that this premium does not hold for competing certification programs. I also adapt a firm entry framework from the industrial organization literature to the local food market and find that the majority of the study regions exhibit perfect competition in the CSA market.