Equitable Access to Healthy & Sustainable Diets

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Food security exists when “all people, at all times, have economic, physical, and social access to adequate safe, nutritious foods that meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Nearly 30 years after that definition was adopted, hundreds of millions of people remain food insecure, cannot afford a healthy diet, or face other barriers to accessing and choosing healthy foods. This body of work focuses on understanding the constraints to accessing and choosing safe, nourishing, and satisfying foods that promote health and support well-being, and that contribute to more sustainable production systems and value chains — in the US, Rwanda, Malawi, and beyond.

Ongoing

• Crops that Nourish — a transdisciplinary agenda for agricultural research on “opportunity crops” that improve nutrition, soil health, resilience, and prosperity together, published as a commentary in Nature Food. Ongoing work includes demand modeling of opportunity crops in Malawi with Yawotse Nouve, Sieg Snapp, and Kevin Murphy.
• American consumer demand for healthy and sustainable diets — the Soil to Society program with Andrew Thorne-Lyman (PI), through a USDA AFRI grant with Washington State University, examining willingness-to-pay, informational interventions, and dietary shift barriers for whole grains and legumes among American consumers; upcoming scanner data work with Vicki McCracken as part of that project; and a related study with Carola Grebitus and Chad Stetcher on nudge and mindfulness interventions. I am also mentored on this work by Chen Zhen (University of Georgia), outside the Soil to Society project.

Completed

• Whose diet quality is most at risk when food prices rise? A project funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation using USDA Consumer Food Data System assets to understand how consumer diets change in response to food prices, and which sub-populations are most vulnerable in the short and long term. Published in Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. USDA press release · Preregistration
• The cost and affordability of new dietary recommendations in Rwanda, with Rhys Manners (lead author), James Warner, David Spielman, and colleagues, deploying high-frequency market price data to track diet cost and affordability over time. Published in Food Policy.
• Cost of nutritious diets for households in Malawi (dissertation) — household consumption, individual nutrient requirements, and the affordability of nutrient-adequate diets in Malawi, completed at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy, Tufts University. Published across the Journal of Nutrition, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Food Policy.

Peer-reviewed publications

• Manners, R., Schneider Lecy, K., Warner, J., Matsiko, E., Vasanthakaalam, H., Benimana, G., Spielman, D.J. (2026) “Cost and affordability of recommended diets in Rwanda using [near] real-time market data.” Food Policy, 141, 103085. — Article
• Schneider Lecy, K.S., Sun, B., Cash, S.B., Feng, W., Thorne-Lyman, A., Love, D.C. (2026) “What Happens to Diet Quality When Food Prices Rise? Revealed Preference From National Household Scanner Data, 2015-2018.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, 1-12. — Article · USDA press release · Preregistration
• Schneider Lecy, K., Gonzalez, F.A., Becker-Reshef, I., et al. (2025) “Agricultural research approaches for crops that nourish by improving nutrition, soil health, resilience and prosperity.” Nature Food, 6, 1103-1106. — Article
• Thorne-Lyman, A., Schneider, K., Altema-Johnson, D., Ramsing, R., et al. (2025) “Strategies to Boost Consumption of Beans, Peas, and Lentils: Results of a National Survey of Americans.” Current Developments in Nutrition. — Article
• Fanzo, J., Schneider, K., Wood, S. (2024) “Health Impacts Due to Food and Nutrition Insecurity.” Climate Change & Public Health, 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. — Article
• Schneider, K., Webb, P., Christiaensen, L., Masters, W. (2023) “Assessing the affordability of nutrient-adequate diets.” American Journal of Agricultural Economics. — Article · Data & replication code · World Bank Policy Research Working Paper
• Cliffer, I.R., Marshak, A., Schneider, K., Venkat, A., Naumova, E.N. (2023) “Seasonality of nutrition.” Encyclopedia of Human Nutrition, 4th Edition (B. Caballero, Ed.), pp. 350-368. — Article
• Schneider, K. (2022) “Nationally representative estimates of the cost of adequate diets, nutrient level drivers, and policy options for households in rural Malawi.” Food Policy, 102275. — Article
• Schneider, K., Webb, P., Christiaensen, L., Masters, W. (2021) “Assessing diet quality when families share their meals: Evidence from Malawi.” The Journal of Nutrition, nxab287. — Article · Data & replication code
• Schneider, K., Oslund, J., Liu, T. (2021) “The impact of the Community Eligibility Provision program on school meal participation in Texas.” Public Health Nutrition, 1-9. — Article
• Schneider, K., Herforth, A. (2020) “Software tools for practical application of human nutrient requirements in food-based social science research.” Gates Open Research, 4(179). — Article · Data & replication code
• Seymour, G., Masuda, Y., Williams, J., Schneider, K. (2019) “Household and child nutrition outcomes among the time and income poor in rural Bangladesh.” Global Food Security, 20, 82-92. — Article
• Schneider, K., Masters, W.A. (2019) “Orange Fanta versus orange fruit: A novel measure of nutrition knowledge in Malawi.” Maternal & Child Nutrition, 15(1), e12656. — Article