Research
How Americans Eat: Time and Goods Inputs Into Meals
Principal Investigator: Daniel S. HamermeshFunded by: Economics Research Service, US Department of Agriculture
Hamermesh will use 1985 and 2003 American Time Use Survey data to examine how rising real earnings, changing household composition, and rising inequality have altered the mix of time and goods, and the amounts of time devoted to eating (and its components of meal preparation, consumption, clean-up, as well as the distinction between eating at home and eating out) over 20 years. The following four research questions are being addressed:
1. How much time do Americans spend in meals, and how is that time divided among meal preparation, meal consumption, and meal clean-up?
2. How does this answer differ among households in relation to their demographic and economic characteristics?
3. How does the production of meals by poorer Americans differ from that of the average American in terms of the time that is used along with the (well-known) lower dollar expenditure on food?
4. How has the time intensity of meal preparation, consumption, and clean-up changed in the past 20 years, in particular, how have such fundamental economic trends as rising inequality affected these changes?