SOE Graduate Student Lauren Miller shared her research on local food at NAREA Conference

SOE Graduate Student Lauren Miller presented her research at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Agricultural and Resource Economics Associaton (NAREA). Lauren Miller and SOE Assistant Professor Jonathan Malacarne shared their work entitled Are Farmers Markets a Solution for Local Food Access or Simply a Strawman? Theory and Evidence from Maine with a regional audience during NAREA’s first virtual conference. Their work recognizes that promoting access to local food necessitates balancing the availability, affordability, and acceptability of products. Miller and Malacarne are using a multi-dimensional measure of access to study the roles of both farmers markets and conventional stores in ensuring everyone can get nutritious, local food. While farmers markets have many benefits, Miller and Malacarne are interested in exploring how their role in promoting food access can be hampered by limited market hours and social perceptions of affordability, as well as how the lower cost and geographic flexibility of farmers markets gives them certain advantages over conventional stores. Congratulations to Lauren for giving a great talk ! The SOE Community looks forward to future local food insights from this dynamic research team.

For more information about the 2020 NAREA Conference, click here.