Food away from home (FAFH) accounts for over 40 percent of food spending. We use NHANES survey data to examine resulting effects on commodity sectors, and find that production/consumption of beef, chicken, potatoes, cheese, and lettuce have increased the most due to FAFH, while fluid milk and all fruits have declined. Such changes have reduced overall nutrition, and nutrition within commodity categories is generally lower in restaurants than at home. FAFH consumers tend to have less healthy home diets than have nonconsumers, suggesting that observed low FAFH nutrition may be partly because restaurant diners select less healthy foods regardless of source.

Prior research demonstrates that responses to surveys can vary depending on the race, gender, or ethnicity of the investigator asking the question. We build upon this research by empirically testing how information about researcher identity in online surveys affects subject responses. We do so by conducting an experiment on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in which we vary the name of the researcher in the advertisement for the experiment and on the informed consent page in order to cue different racial and gender identities. We fail to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference in how respondents answer questions when assigned to a putatively black/white or male/female researcher.