Food Systems Institute

CalFresh (known nationally as SNAP) is effective at alleviating food insecurity, but an estimated 300,000+ Los Angeles (LA) County residents are eligible for this program but not enrolled. We are developing rich profiles of people who are under-enrolled in CalFresh, creating science-based outreach and messaging strategies, and disseminating these to local stakeholders to increase program enrollment.

Funding: Angell Foundation

This study documented data and infrastructure relevant to the food needs of Angelenos who have faced historical barriers to food access and capital, and engaged a local network of community-led organizations working across the food system.

Funding: Amalgamated Foundation

Open Access LA is a free online portal designed to connect food entrepreneurs to local resources including capital, permitting, licensing, loan and credit opportunities, technical assistance, training programs, and more. These resources can help Los Angeles’ food entrepreneurs plan, launch, and grow their food truck, restaurant, cafe, private label, catering, or other food businesses.

This project develops a new, community-engaged approach to monitor and understand food security and community food systems, and how these are impacted by crises like COVID-19. We are building a data dashboard called Food Base LA to share this timely information with stakeholders who are addressing food challenges, like policymakers and local organizations, so they can help residents access sufficient healthy food.

Funding: National Science Foundation (Grant No. 2125616), USC Dornsife Public Exchange, American Heart Association, Keck Medicine of USC, Keck School of Medicine, USC Dornsife Emergency Fund

This is the artificial intelligence (AI) and data modeling center for the National Institutes of Health Nutrition for Precision Health Initiative. Precision Nutrition assumes that the best diet for one individual may look different than the best diet for another, because people have different responses to specific foods and nutrients. The AIMINGS Center uses new data science tools to develop algorithms that will predict individual responses to food and dietary patterns, in a way that accounts for the complex systems that impact nutrition, eating, and food access.

Funding: National Institutes of Health (Grant 1U54TR004279)

This study uses big data on human mobility—data from smartphones that capture our location—to understand how people move around urban areas to acquire food, within and beyond their home neighborhood. We use new data science and AI methods to understand how mobile food environments shape food choice, and how these insights can be used in policy and urban planning to improve healthy food access.

Funding: National Science Foundation (Grant 2427150), USC Keck School of Medicine (PI: de la Haye, Moro)

This project draws on digital menus and nutrition data, and applies language modeling and machine learning, to develop an algorithm that estimates the nutritional quality of restaurants. The goal is to develop tools that can generate more nuanced and useful information about the quality of food available within restaurants and neighborhood food environments, and differences in access to nutritious foods.

Funding: National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) under award P50MD017344 to the Southern California Center for Latino Health.

This project is developing a mobile app that will support clinicians in implementing meal prescription interventions that are tailored to the needs of patients with different food preferences. Existing apps for meal planning tend to focus on Western diets. The algorithms we are developing will help to recommend meals that meet the multi-criteria objectives of clinical requirements, dietary restrictions, cost limits, and dietary preferences.

Funding: Keston Exploratory Research Award to the Information Sciences Institute

This study examines how labels on food can be used to promote healthy and sustainable food choices. In a nationally representative survey, we conduct experiments where people choose between two gourmet food gift baskets: one with meat and dairy, and one without. We find that few chose the food basket without meat and dairy when it was labelled “vegan” (20%) or “plant-based” (27%), while more than 40% chose this basket when it was labeled “healthy” and/or “sustainable”.

Funding: USC Center for Economic and Social Research, USC Wrigley Institute for Environment and Sustainability, USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, and the National Science Foundation (Grant 2125616).