The “Stinger gap”: the difference between the “cost of subsistence” and that of a minimum-cost noninstitutional diet with palatability

This study presents two different 1976 diets for a moderately active male, age 23–50, buying foods at retail. The first of these is a “subsistence” diet just adequate for nutrition at minimum cost, with standard serving sizes for all foods, and an upper limit of 90 servings per month. There are upper and lower limits for each of 11 nutrients such as calories, calcium, phosphorus, etc. The solution was obtained by Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) from a candidate list of 392 foods available in Stillwater, Oklahoma supermarkets in January, 1976. The diet costs $15.55 per month or 51.8¢ a day and includes 20 different foods.The second diet “nutrition plus palatability” has a wider variety of foods obtained by incorporating into the MIP model additional constraints reflecting tastes. This diet costs $34.51 a month or $1.15 a day and includes 68 different foods. The difference between these two costs $1.15–$0.52 = $0.63 is an estimate of the 1976 “Stinger gap,” the cost of palatability in an optimum diet.