Food insecurity, fruit and vegetable consumption, and use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in...

Food insecurity and inadequate nutrition are two major challenges that contribute to poor health conditions among U.S. households. Ohioans continue to face food insecurity, and rates of food insecurity in rural Southeast Ohio are higher than the state average. The main purpose of this project is to evaluate the associations between Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation and food security in rural Ohio, and to explore the association between SNAP participation and fruit/vegetable consumption. We control for food shopping patterns, such as shopping frequency, because previous research reports a significant relationship between shopping patterns and food security. To achieve our purpose, we use novel household-level data on food insecurity and SNAP participation in rural Southeast Ohio, collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that people who experience higher levels of food insecurity than others are more likely to participate in SNAP, though this is likely a function of selection bias. To correct for the bias, we employ the nearest neighbor matching method to match treated (SNAP participant) and untreated (similar SNAP nonparticipant) groups. We find that participating in SNAP increases the probability of being food secure by around 26 percentage points after controlling for primary food shopping patterns. We do not find any significant association between SNAP participation and estimated intake of fruits and vegetables. This study provides policymakers with suggestive evidence that SNAP is associated with food security in rural Southeast Ohio during the pandemic, and what additional factors may mediate these relationships.