Quinoa quandary: Cultural tastes and nutrition in Peru

Using a model of household food demand that incorporates regional preferences (tastes) for culturally appropriate food, I investigate whether tastes for quinoa in the Puno region of Peru reduced household nutrition intakes when quinoa prices dramatically increased between 2004 and 2012. Adapting a model from Atkin (2013) and utilizing data from a national Peruvian household survey (ENAHO), I am able to deconstruct regional changes in household nutrition over time into several general equilibrium effects; in particular, I isolate the effect of regional tastes for quinoa on nutrition outcomes. This effect is identified by an exogenous spike in quinoa prices driven by international demand for quinoa. While I find evidence that regional tastes for quinoa do exist in the Puno region, these tastes do not have a statistically significant impact on nutrition outcomes. My results lend support to the conjecture that tastes for culturally appropriate food do not meaningfully affect household nutrition if the food in question is a sufficiently small component of a household's overall diet.