Associate Professor
Business and Economics; Global Health
Allegheny College, Carr Hall 205
Meadville, PA 16335
afinaret@allegheny.edu
814-332-2793
I am a food economist. Food economics studies how resources are allocated across the food system from farm production to families in their home kitchens. I am particularly interested in how we choose foods, which is an economic decision that we make multiple times per day.
My research is on child nutrition and dietary quality, dietary transitions, the economics of malnutrition, and data quality in large-scale household survey datasets. My research has been published in journals including Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Food Policy, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, The Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Nature Communications, The Journal of Nutrition, Economics and Human Biology, The American Journal of Human Biology, Nutrition Reviews, Food Security, World Development, and Annual Review of Resource Economics. You can find my publications on Google Scholar here.
My textbook with William A. Masters was published Open Access in 2024 from Palgrave MacMillan. Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition, and Health provides an accessible introduction to the market systems and government policies that link natural resources and the environment to our food supply, nutrition, and health. Anyone can pick up this book, or download it for free, and use it to understand the food economy without prior training in economics.
I have a B.S. in applied mathematics and statistics from Stony Brook University, an M.S. in agricultural economics from Iowa State University, and a PhD from the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. I am also credentialed as a Registered Dietitian (RD) by the Commission on Dietetic Registration. Prior to teaching at Allegheny College, I was a Borlaug Fellow in Global Food Security in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo from 2013 to 2015.