Diets, Nutrition, and Poverty - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 354

David Bloom, and Peter Timmer for their support, encouragement, and advice. We are
grateful to Anil Deolalikar for valuable advice throughout this study, and to P. Svedberg,
L. Haddad, and Kenneth Hill for useful discussions. Sonal Desai was most helpful in
acquainting us with the use of the India Human Development Survey, which she had
designed and conducted jointly with the National Council of Applied Economic Research.
Raj Bhatia carried out the statistical analysis with great efficiency. Last but not the least,
we are grateful to Ron Herring for his meticulous suggestions. Any errors are our sole
responsibility.
2. We follow a more disaggregated classification of vegetables in our analysis with NSS
household data for 1993 and 2004.
3. FAO follows a classification different from that used by us. For details of the former, see
Pingali and Khwaja (2004).
4. As observed by Popkin, Adair, and Ng (2012), on the global level, new access to technolo-
gies (e.g., cheap edible oils, foods with excessive “empty calories,” modern supermarkets,
and food distribution and marketing), and. the regulatory environments (the World Trade
Organization and freer flow of goods, services, and technologies) are changing diets.
5. This curve denotes a relationship between calorie intake and income proxied by
expenditure.
6. Srinivasan (1992) is deeply sceptical of such requirements on the ground that energy
expenditure adjusts to intake within a range.
7. Although calorie deprivation is an aspect of undernutrition, we sometimes use them
interchangeably for expositional convenience, as also undernutrition and malnutrition.
8. For details, see Gopalan (1992), Gopalan, Sastri, and Balasubramanian (1971), and ICMR
(1990).
9. Gopalan et al. (1971) observe: “The quantity of fat that should be included in a well bal-
anced diet is not known with any degree of certainty. However, it appears desirable in the
present state of knowledge that the daily intake of fat should be such that it contributes
no more than 15 to 20% of the calories in the diet. A total of about 40 to 60 gms of fat can
therefore be safely consumed daily, and in order to obtain the necessary amounts of essen-
tial fatty acids, the fat intake should include at least 15 gms of vegetable oils” (p. 8). Also see
ICMR (1990).
10. For a rich and insightful analysis of dietary changes in India—specifically, the higher
fat consumption by the bottom six per capita expenditure deciles over the period 1993-
2004—see Deolalikar (2010).
11. Often, some of these commodity groups are referred to by their main components (e.g.,
pulses, milk).
12. A reduced form demand relation (Gaiha, Jha, and Kulkarni 2010 a, 2012) is used in which
the dependent variable is consumption of a food commodity, and the right side/explana-
tory variables include own and other food prices, income, household characteristics, and
the general environment. We have pooled the rural and urban samples and over time (1993
and 2004). To avoid cluttering the text, our remarks are confined to own price effects and
income. For details, see Kaicker and Gaiha (2012).
13. Price elasticity of demand refers to proportionate change in quantity demanded divided
by proportionate change in price.
14. This builds on Kulkarni and Gaiha (2010), and Nidhi Kaicker et al. (2011).
15. The FDI is calculated as the sum of the squares of the shares of various food commodities
in the food consumption basket or food expenditure. This is akin to the Herfindahl index
which is used to measure the competitiveness of an industry. In particular, given the 0-100