Consumers make dietary decisions based on economic, physiologic, psychologic, sociologic and even spiritual considerations, with hardly a nod to societal implications (see, for example, Nestle, et. al, 1998). Eating in a developed country such as the United States becomes a social and family event, an act of pleasure, that goes far beyond the ingestion of the necessary nutrients to sustain life. People eat for both pleasure and as a biological necessity. This must be remembered if we are to understand the complex world of food choices, dietary quality, and change.Complexity necessitates simplification and abstraction. Human behavior is complex, economic relationships are complex, nutrition is complex; put them together and the entanglements are limitless. We must have a framework to help us sort though the possibilities; abstracting from the realities of life is a requirement, not a choice. Human behavior is so complex that to understand anything a great deal must be assumed. Differences of opinion are a natural outcome of intellectual inquiry. Joan Robinson probably said it best: "The analysis can be extended to any degree of refinement but the more complicated the question the more cumbersome the analysis. In order to know anything, it is necessary to know everything, but to talk about anything, it is necessary to neglect a great deal" (Robinson, 1941).Many forces, most outside the consumer's direct control, shape food demand and food consumption behavior. In Senate testimony more than 20 years ago, Dr. Winikoff of the Rockefeller Foundation said of nutrition, "it is affected by governmental decisions in the area of agricultural policy, economic and tax policy, export and import policy, and involves questions of food production, transportation, processing, marketing, consumer choice, income and education, as well as food palatability and availability. Nutrition is the end result of pushes and pulls in many directions, a response to the multiple forces creating the 'national nutrition environment" (Senate Report, 1977). We focus our attention on factors influencing consumer food choices.Our objective is to examine empirical evidence on the role and influence of economic factors, defined rather broadly, on food choices and subsequent hence, nutritional outcomes. It is not an exhaustive review, but rather we focus on selected studies whose conclusions appear to be supported by a preponderance of the literature. Our goal is to do this in a non-technical fashion. We examine factors such as food prices, household income, nutrition knowledge and awareness, time constraints and time preferences. We do break with the central design of the paper in the last section where we discuss some new, as yet unpublished, findings.

This article uses U.S. food consumption data to examine the effect of maternal nutrition knowledge on the dietary intakes of children between two and seventeen years of age. Results show that maternal knowledge influences children's diets and that such influence decreases as children grow older. Nutrition knowledge acts as a pathway through which maternal education influences children's diets. This finding supports the hypothesis that education affects health-related choices by raising the allocative efficiency of health input use. The results suggest that nutrition education may be more effective if targeted both toward mothers with young children and directly toward school-age children. Copyright 1999, Oxford University Press.

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We use double-hurdle or Cragg models to test whether decisions about smoking participation and consumption levels are separate, endogenous choices. We also estimate several dominance models which assume that standard comer solutions are not applicable. A complete dominance model with independence between the participation and consumption decisions is the preferred specification for our data. The most important variables influencing participation are region, number of children, education, and ethnicity. Region, age, race, ethnicity, and health status most affected consumption levels.