Household food security: Perceptions, behavior and nutritional quality of food purchases

•Food-secure and food-insecure households purchase a similar amount of calories.•Food-secure households purchase only more calories and variety of healthy foods.•Food quality helps to conciliate food security perceptions and behaviors.

Food security is an encompassing concept that includes several dimensions: sufficiency, acceptability, safety, stability and nutritional quality. Lately, diverse studies discuss how much objective and subjective indicators are able to characterize some of the above-mentioned dimensions. This has opened the door to some apparent contradictions between different food security measurements that reflect perception (through specific surveys) and behavior (expenditure data).This article aims to extend the food security debate, focusing on the dimension of nutritional quality and classifying food products as healthy or unhealthy, in addition to computing their calorie value. Using a nationally representative database of nearly 6700 households in Mexico, we found that food-secure households (55% of the total sample) purchase an overall food basket that is 0.7 items less diverse, spend $85 Mexican pesos per week more, and show no significant difference in terms of purchased kcals compared to food-insecure households. After controlling for confounding factors, we found that food-secure households purchase a wider variety of healthy food items (and a smaller variety of unhealthy food items), spend more money on food, and purchase more calories in healthy food items compared to food-insecure households. Therefore, with this article, we enhance the relevance of the nutritional quality of food purchases in the food security debate.