"Feeding Kids or Feeding the Garbage: Fruits and Vegetables in the School Lunch Program," with David Just, Cornell University. October 29, 3:40 pm - 5:30 pm, 368A Heady Hall.

David Just is an associate professor at Cornell University, and received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests center around the use of information, and more particularly, how differences in human capital and information availability affect decisions. Some research questions addressed by his research include: Why do individuals and firms use the information they do? Do firms with greater informational resources take advantage of smaller firms? How do problems with information updating affect risk-averting behavior? How can economists' interpretations be tainted by ignoring issues of information? These concerns are of particular importance in agriculture, where firms of widely differing sizes compete in a market replete with profit risk. Other areas of interest include the introduction of food psychology in the design of food assistance programs, product perception, and the impact of family interactions on purchasing behavior.

Abstract: The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act introduces new guidelines for school lunches, including a requirement that a meal must include a serving of fruits and vegetables to receive federal reimbursements. This approach may be thought of as emphasizing the nutrition on the tray. This new policy represents a default option in which the items go on the child¹s tray by default, but the child can choose whether or not to discard the items. The results of several field experiments suggest that while some of the additional fruits and vegetables will be eaten, the majority of the additional cost is in fruits and vegetables that children choose to throw away. Results of a wide scale field experiment substantiate some of these fears. The current approach is compared to two alternatives: 1. Providing direct incentives to children who eat servings of fruits and vegetables, 2. Pairing the current guidelines with behavioral economic mechanisms to encourage fruit and vegetable consumption. In both cases we find our alternative approach to reduce waste and improve cost effectiveness.