Revision of USDA's low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal food plans - Center Reports - United States. Department of Agriculture

Family Economics and Nutrition Review, Spring, 2003 by Andrea Carlson, Mark Lino, Shirley Gerrior, P. Peter Basiotis

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal Food Plans are national standards for nutritious diets at various costs. These three plans--as well as the fourth, the Thrifty Food Plan (1)--are the official food plans maintained by the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP). Each plan represents a set of market baskets applicable to 1 of 12 age-gender groups. Each market basket contains a selection of foods in quantities that reflect dietary recommendations, food consumption patterns, food composition data, and food prices. The three plans have various policy uses:

* Bankruptcy courts often use the value of the Low-Cost Plan to determine the portion of a bankruptee's income to allocate to necessary food expenses.

* The Department of Defense uses the value of the Moderate-Cost and Liberal Food Plans to set the Basic Allowance for Subsistence rate for all enlistees.

* Many divorce courts use the value of the food plans to set alimony payments, and all three plans are used in USDA's Expenditures on Children by Families report, which is used to set State child support guidelines and foster care payments.

* Policymakers and others use the food plans as national standards in educational programs and as references for policies that are designed to help families budget their food dollars effectively and improve their diets.

This study presents the revision of the previous market baskets of the Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal Food Plans. Each plan reflects recent changes in dietary guidance, as well as updated information on food composition, consumption patterns, and food prices. Data and methods used in revising the food plan market baskets are described; then, the revised baskets are discussed. (2)

Data

CNPP used two main data sources to revise the market baskets of the food plans: (1) USDA's 1989-91 Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals (CSFII) and (2) the Food Price Database, which was created by CNPP by merging foods from the CSFII with data on national food prices.

The CSFII, administered to a nationally representative sample of households in the 48 conterminous States, assesses the food and nutrient intake by individuals both at home and away from home. One-day food intakes by 9,961 individuals, ages 1 and over, were used for this revision. One-day data have been shown to be reliable measures of usual food intakes by groups of people (Basiotis, Welsh, Cronin, Kelsey, & Mertz, 1987).

In the 1989-91 CSFII, people were asked what foods they consumed in a day both at home and away from home, resulting in about 4,800 different foods reported as being consumed. For children under age 12, the parent or main meal planner provided the information, often with the assistance of the child. These data were collected by using in-person interviews and a 24-hour dietary recall method. Information on the ingredients, nutrient content, and amount consumed of each of these foods is contained in the data set. CNPP used CSFII sampling weights that make the data representative of the U.S. population and weighted all the data in this study.

The CSFII does not contain information on food prices or expenditures for consumed foods (i.e., information needed to assign a price to a market basket). Thus, CNPP developed a method to estimate the price of foods "as consumed" in the survey and created the Food Price Database.

To do so, CNPP used information on national average food prices from several sources: the Scantrack system developed by A.C. Nielsen; the retail prices database from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor; wholesale prices for fresh produce from the Agricultural Marketing Service, USDA; and fish prices from the National Marine Fisheries Service, U.S. Department of Commerce. Because the USDA food plans provide the cost of eating at home, for purposes of calculating the cost, CNPP assumed that all foods that people said they ate were prepared at home.

The Food Price Database was created by first identifying all foods reported in the CSFII as being consumed at home and away from home and using recipes to disaggregate foods into their specific ingredients and adjusting ingredient quantities for cooking and waste factors, when appropriate, to convert foods to a purchasable form. The database was completed by pricing the purchasable ingredients by using the data on national retail prices and then converting the priced retail ingredients back to the consumed form of the food with a price now attached to it. (For more details on the creation of the Food Price Database, see Bowman [1997].)

Methods

An overview of the methods used to update the market baskets of the Low-Cost, Moderate-Cost, and Liberal Food Plans is shown in figure 1. For each plan, CNPP calculated a revised market basket for 12 age-gender groups: children whose ages were 1, 2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-11 ; females whose ages were 12-19, 20-50, and 51 and older; and males whose ages were 12-14, 15-19, 20-50, and 51 and older. For modeling purposes, CNPP assigned each of the 4,800 foods reported in the CSFII into 1 of 44 food categories. These foods were assigned to food categories based on similarity of nutrient content, food costs, use in meals, and their placement in the Food Guide Pyramid. A food-waste factor was a component of each plan.