Uncertainty in Thrifty Food Plan Cost Estimates for Community Food Security Assessments

The objective of this paper is to provide insights into the impact of missing price data in food security assessments. We find that the treatment of missing data plays an important role in our understanding of the uncertainty inherent in food cost calculations. We show that imputation techniques tend to bias upwards the estimated cost of a Thrifty Food Plan basket. We find that the standard infill technique commonly employed in food security research (based on taking the average price of individual items) tends to be more biased than the experimental, multiple imputation approach we are suggesting.