Food and Nutrition Policy

Course Description:

The purpose of this course is to familiarize and engage the student in the steps and dynamics of policy making processes that address nutrition problems and issues. An underlying tenant is that, where ever nutrition problems exist, policy and program options may be enacted to address the problem directly (e.g. food subsidies to the poor) and/or indirectly (e.g. income generation or job creation). For the purpose of this course nutrition and food policy is viewed as a specific set of decisions with related actions, established by a government and often supported by special legislation, which address a nutrition or food problem or set of problems. We realize that the lack of an explicit government policy may represent an implicit "hands off" policy; however, in this course we want to focus on explicit government policies.
Effective policies include actions that enable policy goals to be achieved, and therefore should include a means of translating policy decisions into effective programs. Policies that have not been realized through program implementation represent failures and should stimulate interest in understanding why the policies have remained barren. Good programs are the best measure of good policies, and we therefore include programs in our broad definition of policy.

Note: This is not an instructor led course

Course Link:

http://ocw.jhsph.edu/index.cfm/go/viewCourse/course/FoodNutritionPolicy/coursePage/index/