One of the driving questions my students want to know (and will ultimately answer) is how to get healthy food options to people in need for a cheaper price than they are currently available. Everyone that has been grocery shopping knows fruits and vegetables are far more expensive than processed chips or other factory-produced items.

As part of that process, each student came up with a policy/plan on how to get more healthy food to people in need (check out their blogs; in particular the blog post from February 14 titled “How to help close the hunger gap”). Those plans were a great start, but something was missing. Numerous students for example stated the government should just raise/lower prices in order to make food cheaper.

These statements directly correlated with some economic principles and curricular standards. Understanding the role of competition in an economy is one of the standards our students have yet to master. As a class, we began to study the meaning of and impact of price floors (minimum price something can be charged at) and price ceilings (maximum price something can be charged at) and how it impacts consumers and producers differently.

Feel free to ask your student to draw out a supply and demand curve, label everything, and explain in their words how price floors and ceilings impact people in our society. Hopefully we will use this information to better understand how to make policy/plans to get healthy food to people without harming others in our society.