Foundational Publications
The year of my PhD graduation (2010), I gave birth and was thus rendered ineligible for (non-existent) maternity leave or sensible flexibility within a regular job. Thus, my unintended career as an independent woman-owned business began.
After a brief start at the World Bank where I helped launch the Scaling Up Nutrition movement in 2010, I worked for several international agencies as a consultant. I learned the landscape of the multilateral and bilateral development community, and was afforded many opportunities to explore and synthesize what agriculture could do for nutrition. I am grateful to this learning ground provided by the World Bank, FAO Nutrition Division, USAID (SPRING, FHI360, Advancing Nutrition), GIZ, DFAT, the UN SCN, and CGIAR, among others.
The outcomes of those years are summarized in the following foundational documents. They established my mission and vision.
1. Herforth A. 2015. Access to Adequate Nutritious Food: New indicators to track progress and inform action. In: Sahn, D (ed.), The Fight against Hunger and Malnutrition. Oxford University Press.
This is the most important document I have written. It proposed the Cost of a Healthy Diet, and regular monitoring of a suite of diet quality indicators reflecting minimum dietary diversity, protective food consumption, and unhealthy food consumption. This was the blueprint for my career. It took a decade, but the monitoring of these indicators has now been globally adopted within the UN.
New indicators are needed for global monitoring of access to and consumption of adequate nutritious food. These indicators would fill a basic information gap necessary to understand the causes of malnutrition, and to inform policy options to support food security and nutrition. Globally collected indicators of food security have remained virtually unchanged since the 1960s, largely derived from the single indicator of national-level dietary energy supply. This simple and unidimensional characterization of “food” was a guidepost toward pressing needs 50 years ago, but it is no longer adequate for the nutritional realities of today’s food systems, or the worldwide distribution of nutritional problems. Suggestions are made for how new indicators of food access and dietary quality can be mainstreamed in the nutrition and agriculture data sets and parlance, to shift the generalized construction of “food” from one of caloric adequacy to one of nutritious food to meet dietary needs.
2. Herforth A and Tanimichi Hoberg Y. 2014. Learning from World Bank History: Agricultural and Food-based Approaches for Addressing Malnutrition. Agriculture and Environmental Services Discussion Paper No. 10 Washington, DC ; World Bank Group.
In collaboration with the World Bank Archives, we scoured historical documents and interviews surrounding the work of the World Bank on poverty reduction and malnutrition reduction (conceptually closely linked from the start), over the 40 years from 1973-2013. The main finding was that while “food insecurity and malnutrition” were frequently cited as justifications for work in agriculture, these outcomes were not measured within any project impact. Methods and metrics to measure them in a way that made sense for agriculture did not exist. Food security and nutrition were generally considered synonymous with food supply and income.
“If agriculture is to respond to a different problem than lack of calories and income, then there is a need to collect and report data on the problem that needs to be solved... The food shortage paradigm, appropriate in the 1970s, no longer fits today’s data, which show stronger evidence of a nutritious food shortage.”
3. Herforth A, Ahmed S. 2015. The food environment, its effects on dietary consumption, and potential for measurement within agriculture-nutrition interventions. Food Security 7(3): 505-520.
This paper articulated the food environment and why it shapes diets in low- and middle-income countries. It built on previous food environment literature to apply the concept beyond high-income countries, and detailing how the food environment is shaped by agriculture. We defined the food environment as the availability, affordability, convenience, and desirability of food items. These aspects could be monitored using a set of indicators.
4. Herforth A, Arimond M, Alvarez-Sanchez C, Coates C, Christianson K, Muehlhoff E. 2019. A global overview of food-based dietary guidelines. Advances in Nutrition, nmy130.
This paper was written to understand the commonalities and differences across dietary guidelines, shortly after FAO assembled them in a global repository. We identified aspects of implicit consensus that laid the groundwork for both the Healthy Diet Basket (the nutritional standard for measuring Cost and Affordability of a Healthy Diet), and diet quality indicators of adherence to dietary guidelines.
