Individual Choices: Explaining Food Consumption and Production

Every person sometimes chooses different foods, based in part on preferences developed over time in their family, cultural and community context. Similarly, each farmer has their own way of helping crops and livestock grow, and every food producer transforms ingredients into final products in a unique manner. Individual actions by millions of consumers and producers underpin the food systems we observe. In this chapter, we use analytical diagrams with indifference curves and budget lines to explain food consumption choices and predict how food consumption might change in response to different prices, incomes and preferences. Then we explain production choices using a set of three different analytical diagrams, explaining what is produced using a production possibilities frontier and its revenue line, as well as an input response curve and its profit line, and explaining how each thing is produced using an isoquant and its cost line. Together, these diagrams reveal how changes in prices, natural resources and technology affect agriculture and food production. Finally, we show how consumption and production together explain the choices of family farmers, allowing us to describe a variety of current events in the agricultural sector using economics principles.