Marc F. Bellemare Posts

For those of you who (i) are thinking of going to graduate school, (ii) have an interest in food security, and (iii) happen to be US citizens (seriously, this is a real requirement; the last time I talked about this, I had about a dozen inquiries from non-US citizens…), I still have one, possibly two National Needs Fellowships from the  National Institute of Food and Agriculture‘s (NIFA) to award to prospective PhD students with an interest in food security. Thanks to our department’s rolling admissions deadline, it is not too late for you to apply for those fellowships. If you are interested, however, I urge you to (i) let me know via email as soon as possible, and (ii) apply as soon as possible for admission in September, since the funds have to be awarded before July 1, 2015.

Each fellowship provides the recipient with a three-year fellowship. The theme of the grant is food security broadly defined. So for example, a fellow could study any aspect of food security, from undernutrition in sub-Saharan Africa to food stamps in the US, and everything else in between. That said, for students interested in international development, the grant does include some money for international travel–not enough to fund data collection, but enough to fund exploratory field visits.

This past Sunday I was presenting at the annual conference of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. The topic of my talk was “Smallholder Participation in Contract Farming and Food Security,” a paper in which my coauthor Lindsey Novak and I look at the relationship between smallholder participation in agricultural value chains and the duration of the hungry season–how many months those households went without eating three meals a day over the last year–experienced by those smallholder households in Madagascar.

In our paper, we find that

For the past five years at least, I have been suffering from migraines. Though I don’t suffer from “classic” migraines–I don’t have the painful headaches that force one to lie down in a darkened room, for instance–my migraines are debilitating enough, as they make me sensitive to light (and sometimes to noise), they can last up to seven days, and in the worst of cases, I have severe nausea and have to spend a few days in bed while I recover.

My migraines have gotten a lot better since coming to Minnesota, thank God, but one of the things I have been abstaining from these past few years has been drinking wine, because wine is often thought to cause migraines. The upside is that I have discovered the wonderful world of whiskeys as a result of not drinking wine; the downside is… Well, having to abstain from wine is a serious downside.

After a few years of not drinking wine and still suffering from migraines, I decided at the beginning of this year to determine once and for all whether my migraines were actually caused by drinking wine. So I did something simple enough: I ran an RCT on myself. I took a spreadsheet and, for a period of 50 days, I decided to randomize each day into treatment (i.e., a day where I would drink wine) and control (i.e., a day where I would abstain from wine).