(OR09-01-25) The Carbon Footprint of the Thrifty Food Plan Can Be Reduced Without Increasing Cost or Reducing Nutritional Quality

Objectives: The Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) is a set of nutritious, low-cost food baskets used to set maximum allotments for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. TFP is based on an optimization model that meets current nutritional requirements at a low cost while minimizing the deviation from current consumption patterns. No previous TFP has considered sustainability information in this optimization process. This paper seeks to include food-related greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) in the TFP optimization process and assess whether the overall carbon footprint of the TFP can be reduced without sacrificing nutritional quality or increasing cost.

Methods: USDA revised the TFP in 2021 with various datasets linked to the 2015-16 What We Eat in America (WWEIA) survey. We merged GHGE data from DataFRIENDS, a food-environmental impact database, to the food codes of WWEIA, and ran the same optimization model as USDA (Model 1). We calculated the carbon footprint of the TFP market baskets that came from this base model. We then ranked the 95 TFP food groups used by USDA by their contribution to this carbon footprint. We divided the top 5 groups into high and low carbon food groups and included these along with all other constraints used by USDA in our Model 2. We calculated the carbon reduction for the market baskets of the standard reference family of four.

Results: The carbon footprint of the 2021 TFP, for a reference of family of four, was 15 kg CO₂-equivalents per day. Adding a carbon constraint to TFP 2021 and subdividing the top 5 carbon contributing food groups (Model 2), while maintaining all other constraints used by USDA, decreased the overall carbon footprint of the TFP for this reference family by 16%. Our model reduced carbon emissions across all age-sex groups. These decreases were obtained without increasing costs or decreasing nutritional quality.

Conclusions: We developed a method for assessing the carbon footprint of USDA’s Thrifty Food Plan. Subdividing top carbon contributing food categories decreased this carbon footprint within USDA’s modeling approach. Analytic models that determine SNAP allotments can be adjusted to include an environmental constraint without negatively impacting nutrition and cost objectives.

Funding Sources: No external funding supported this research project.