Money or Time: Which is More Important for a Nutritious Diet and Public Policy?

The two main resources of any household are money and time (labor). With sufficient money and time, a household can produce enough food to exceed some basic nutritional recommendation. However, with insufficient money or time a household cannot reach the nutritional recommendation. Most food assistance programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), focus exclusively on the money input, while ignoring the time input. This one-dimensional focus could undermine the effectiveness of food assistance programs. This paper reports results from two different approaches to determining if money or time is the more limiting factor in reaching a targeted nutrition threshold consistent with the SNAP, based on USDAs Thrifty Food Plan. We find households spend about 35% more than enough money to reach the SNAP money consistent threshold but they do not spend enough time to reach the time threshold and consequently fall short of the SNAP money-time consistent threshold by about 40%. In terms of poverty rates, we find that only considering a money poverty rate implies on average about 65% of the households spend enough money to reach the money consistent threshold. However, once we take into account time we find that this number decreases significantly to only about 15% of the households are meeting the money-time consistent threshold. The policy implications of these findings are discussed focusing on practical and low cost means of reducing the effects of the time constraint and improving the effectiveness of nutrition policy when time is a limiting factor.