(P12-008-23) COVID-19 Pandemic-Associated Changes in Household Food Acquisition: Implications for Child Diet Quality in the United States

Objectives: To estimate how COVID-19 pandemic-associated changes in the food environment, including school closures and limited restaurant access, altered schoolchildren’s diet quality.

Methods: Beginning March 2020, COVID-19 pandemic policies and individual safety concerns altered food acquisition, with households shifting away from restaurants and fast food while those with children also had limited or no access to school meals. This study models the impact on the diet quality, as measured by the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) of children 5-17 years old of changes in household food acquisition during this period. It examines shifts in food acquisition from five food sources: grocery, fast food, restaurant, schools, other, using Federal data on monthly food expenditures and USDA school and summer programs meal redemptions. It estimates differences in nutritional quality of foods obtained from these five sources using known relationships identified via analysis of pre-pandemic nationwide food-consumption surveys. The study compares impacts on children from lower-income households who would receive free or reduced-price school meals with those of children from higher-income households who receive full-price meals.

Results: Decreased consumption of foods from fast food and full-service restaurants in favor of grocery sources led to modest increases in diet quality. However, these increases were counterbalanced by the lack of school foods, which are primarily USDA school meals produced according to Federal nutrition standards. Overall, results suggest full-price students maintained comparable diet quality throughout 2020-2021 relative to previous years, whereas diet quality of free/reduced-price students declined by roughly 3 percent when schools would have otherwise been in session.

Conclusions: COVID-19 Pandemic-related shifts in household food sources likely impacted the quality of lower-income children’s diets via reduced access to USDA school and summer meals.

Funding Sources: This research is supported by a U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service Cooperative Agreement. The findings and conclusions in this paper are those of the authors and should not be construed to represent any official USDA or U.S. Government determination or policy.