The time for macroeconomics in municipal food policy

Abstract

It’s interesting—I’ve never felt like so much of an outsider as being an agricultural economist working on municipal food policy. And I’m a black woman in the United States. Prior to being the food policy and program coordinator for the City of Indianapolis, I was a research economist who studied local food systems, alternative energy, and climate change. Now, as a food policy practitioner, I have found that relevant aspects of classical macroeconomic theory often go ignored in muni­cipal food policy, particularly the concept of economic change over time