Last updated on April 4, 2018
In late 2013, some colleagues and I applied for funding from the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute. Because of the name of the institute, we thought “People think of local and organic foods as healthy foods, and they think of an illness-free life as a healthy life, so why not look at the relationship between local and organic foods and food safety?”
So we submitted a proposal, and it got funded. It was a pretty small amount of money, as far as these things go–less then $5,000–and our research team eventually split along disciplinary fault lines. But because I could not look at the relationship between local and organic foods on one hand and food safety on the other hand in a way that was methodologically satisfactory to me, I chose to look instead at the relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness.
Four years (and a New York Times op-ed) later, I am happy to note that my article titled “Farmers Markets and Food-Borne Illness,” coauthored with my former Master’s student Jenny Nguyen, is now published (gated; please email me for a copy) in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Here is the abstract:
Using longitudinal administrative data on all U.S. states and the District of Columbia for the years 2004, 2006, and 2008–2013, we study the relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness. We find a positive relationship between the number of farmers markets per million individuals and the number per million of reported (i) total outbreaks and cases of food-borne illness, (ii) outbreaks and cases of norovirus, and (iii) outbreaks of campylobacter in the average state-year. Our estimates indicate that doubling the number of farmers markets in the average state-year would be associated with 2.6 additional outbreaks of food-borne illness, 0.8 additional outbreaks of norovirus, and 0.3 additional outbreaks of campylobacter per million, as well as with 34.5 additional total cases of food-borne illness, 22.9 additional cases of norovirus, and 1.5 additional cases of campylobacter per million in the same state-year. Our core results are robust to different specifications as well as to deleting outliers and leverage points.