About

Norbert Lance Weston Wilson is a Professor of Food, Economics and Community at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He serves as the Director of the World Food Policy Center and is an affiliate of the Duke Center for International Development. His contact information includes an email address at nwilson@div.duke.edu and an office located at 304 Gray, Durham, NC 27708. Professor Wilson's role involves engaging in research and policy related to food systems, economics, and community development, contributing to the academic and practical understanding of global food policies and their impacts.

Research topics

• Business
• Marketing
• Medicine
• Economics
• Biology
• Political Science
• Agricultural economics
• Geography
• Food science
• Environmental health
• Virology
• Econometrics
• Waste management
• Engineering
• Psychology

Selected publications

• Meeting the needs of the whole person: food pantry staff perspectives on addressing diverse client needs and strategic sourcing

  Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition · 2026-03-09

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Daily Reality of Food Insecurity: A PhotoVoice Study of Food Insecure Residents in a Rural, Southern State

  Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition · 2025-05-18

  articleOpen access

  Arkansas has the highest prevalence of food insecurity in the U.S. This qualitative study is one of few to explore the daily reality of food insecurity in a rural, Southern state in the U.S. through PhotoVoice. A sample of seven food insecure residents participated in a PhotoVoice project as part of a food insecurity community of practice. Thematic analysis of participant discussion was conducted. Four themes emerged: 1) "community receiving and community giving"; 2) high cost of healthy foods; 3) time cost of food assistance; and 4) navigating resource scarcity. Findings can inform interventions that better support food insecure residents.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Cultivating an ethos of “everyday convergence”: insights from the Multiscale RECIPES Network for food waste reduction

  Humanities and Social Sciences Communications · 2025-10-30

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Convergence is a research approach that aims to deeply integrate insights across disciplines to tackle complex social and societal grand challenges. However, while convergence is gaining popularity as the most integrated way to tackle such vexing challenges, researchers are not always clear how to operationalize convergence. By interviewing Network members, we collected insights about the convergence process from the Multiscale RECIPES Network, a research endeavor developed and funded to advance convergent approaches to tackling food waste. Participants identified six key challenges to convergence. To overcome these challenges, participants often described ways of imbuing everyday events and interactions with an intentionality of Network members working toward convergence. Thus, convergence thinking must permeate the everyday activities of Network members. We discuss five strategies the RECIPES Network uses to develop an ethos and intentionality of everyday convergence: community building, discussing what convergence meant to the Network, top-down guidance from leadership, funding roles to support convergence, and accepting convergence in all its forms. Research groups can adapt these strategies to enhance convergence within their project. However, not all challenges can be overcome through ‘everyday interactions.’ We point to the need for further structural and policy changes within universities and funders to better support convergence.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global Food Demand: Overcoming Challenges to Healthy and Sustainable Diets

  Annual Review of Resource Economics · 2025-06-10 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We review the research on global food demand and examine modeling efforts to address the complexities of dietary transitions. We also highlight challenges affecting the economic feasibility of dietary targets aimed at promoting both human health and environmental sustainability (e.g., EAT- Lancet ). The relationships among income, prices, and food demand play an important role in understanding how economic growth impacts nutrition and sustainability. As countries become more affluent, and food accounts for a smaller share of income, dietary transitions often lead to increased consumption of both resource-intensive and energy-dense foods. Modeling strategies must account for these dynamics to accurately project future resource needs and nutritional outcomes. Research should also consider the cost of healthy diets within the context of both food and nonfood expenditures. When both are considered, considerably fewer people can afford proposed sustainable diets. Economic, environmental, and health perspectives should all be integrated when developing strategies to promote healthy and sustainable diets.

  PublisherDOI

• Ontologies relevant for improving data interoperability for food loss and waste: A review and research agenda

  Cleaner and Responsible Consumption · 2025-09-09 · 1 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Food loss and waste (FLW) is a global challenge. Interoperable FLW ontologies will foster more comprehensive data sharing and inform better solutions to reduce and recover excess food and to valorize wasted food and food byproducts. This review reveals that only eight ontologies currently address FLW with most emphasizing valorization. Notably, few are designed explicitly to support FLW reduction, and none facilitate food recovery, which is critical given that reduction and recovery are the preferred means of mitigating FLW. Furthermore, existing FLW ontologies show limited alignment with recognized gold-standard frameworks, for example the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry, and none support ongoing connectivity to external ontologies, restricting their utility across stakeholder domains. Looking ahead, there is a pressing need to create or expand ontologies that adhere to best practices from relevant foundries to ensure robust linkage and interoperability and undergird structured data ecosystems that support food systems stakeholders in FLW prevention and mitigation. Achieving this goal will require active collaboration among a diverse range of stakeholders, including builders of food systems cyberinfrastructure, scientists, innovators, regulators, public and private funders, community-based organizations, policymakers, and international NGOs as each rely on critical ontological elements to inform decision-making, measure impact, and drive improvement across the food supply chain. Finally, large language models offer promising capabilities for expediting ontology creation, broadening inclusivity in ontology creation, and enhancing the accuracy of resulting data infrastructures. • Ontologies facilitate data interoperability and machine learning approaches. • We review the food loss and waste (FLW) literature and find 8 relevant ontologies. • Most support valorization of wasted food; none support food rescue or recovery. • Future efforts should adhere to best practices and leverage stakeholder insights. • Large language models offer promise for expediting creation of FLW ontologies.

  PublisherDOI

• Food waste, date labels, and risk preferences: An experimental exploration

  Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy · 2025-02-22 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This study provides theoretical and experimental evidence that consumers adjust their premeditated food waste by date labels and their risk and loss preferences. The “Use by” date label leads to more premeditated food waste than “Best by” for deli meat and spaghetti sauce. However, changing date labels may not lower premeditated food waste relative to no label at all. Greater loss aversion correlates with higher premeditated food waste regardless of date labels and products. For participants with high loss aversion, they have higher premediated waste with no statistical difference in response for “Best by” and “Use by” labels. These results highlight the heterogeneous response to date labels.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Control Over Food and Autonomy in Life: A Qualitative Study With Low-Income Consumers

  Health Education & Behavior · 2025-07-22 · 3 citations

  article

  Past research suggests interrelationships between housing, sense of autonomy, health behaviors, and overall mental and physical health, raising the possibility of similar interrelationships for another basic need, namely food. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between low perceived control over food acquisition, preparation, and consumption, and sense of autonomy in life in general among people with resource constraints. To explore this relationship, we conducted qualitative interviews between March and November 2022 with 34 participants who met federal criteria for having an income at or below the poverty level. Interview participants were recruited from four U.S. states: two in the Northeast, one in the South, and one in the West. Topics included ideal eating patterns, constraints to the goal eating pattern, the role of food in life, and the relationship between perceived control over food and autonomy in life in general. We used a directed qualitative content analysis approach to data analysis. Participants described a central role of food in maintaining health, including mental health, and they aspired to an eating pattern related to this role. Because of constraints, most did not feel a strong sense of control over food, which they associated with lacking a strong sense of autonomy in life in general. Additional qualitative and quantitative research is needed to test and expand our findings. A better understanding of the relationship between food and a general sense of autonomy can help inform food assistance programs and policies.

  PublisherDOI

• Nonrandom Missingness in Child Race and Ethnicity Records and the US Federal Data Standards: Pooled Analysis of Community-Based Child Health Studies

  JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2025-11-13

  articleOpen access

  Background: Racism perpetuates the unequal distribution of power, resources, and privilege within and between societies to the detriment of marginalized groups. Racialization involves categorizing people based on traits to which socially constructed meaning and value have been ascribed. In public health, this process can manifest when tracking racial health disparities in children, which requires aggregating parent-reported race and ethnicity data into federally recognized categories. The demographic surveys used to characterize children's identity in the United States mirror those administered in adults and typically follow federal race and ethnicity data standards, which include ambiguous response options (eg, other race), "select all that apply" directives, and open-ended fields followed by a request specification, with limited guidance for coding and interpretation. These methodological challenges could contribute to nonrandom data missingness and misclassification bias and must be resolved to better harmonize historic data, especially given recent revisions to the country's federal race and ethnicity data standards. Objective: We aimed to explore the prevalence of systematic bias within past, current, and recently revised federal race and ethnicity data standards in the United States and develop a standardized method for improving the reporting of child race and ethnicity in public health research, policy, and practice. Methods: We developed a replicable decision-making process to uncover racial heterogeneity obscured by key components of US federal race and ethnicity data standards (open-ended and ambiguous response fields). We applied it to a pooled sample of 8 community-based child health studies with 8087 participants and examined changes in the dataset's racial and ethnic diversity. Results: Overall, 93.11% (7530/8087) of parents provided child race and ethnicity data, with 3.73% (281/7530) identified as other race and 9.72% (732/7530) identified as multiracial. In total, 101 distinct open-ended written responses (eg, "Haitian") were provided. The replicable decision-making process resulted in 4.02% (303/7530) of children being reallocated from their parent-reported race or ethnicity category, of whom 38.6% (117/303) were moved into the Black category based on written responses. Within the multiracial group, we identified 22 unique combinations, including White-Hispanic (269/732, 36.7%) and White-Black (169/732, 23.08%). Conclusions: These findings demonstrate how the current paradigm of assessing race and ethnicity in the United States may contribute to the erasure and further marginalization of individuals disproportionately enduring the effects of racism. While updated federal race and ethnicity data standards may soon take effect, persistent gaps in demographic and health surveillance will remain. Our data reallocation decision-making process offers a novel and practical framework for harmonizing race and ethnicity data across time, populations, and datasets, emphasizing the relevance and longevity of preexisting datasets and tools. Efforts to build equitable public health surveillance and data systems should expand the survey response options, avoid aggregating diverse populations, and develop new statistical techniques for data analysis.

  PublisherDOI

• Front-of-pack labels and young consumers: An experimental investigation of nutrition and sustainability claims in Chile

  Food Quality and Preference · 2025-01-16 · 4 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Process Evaluation of Culturally Preferred Food Pilot for Arkansas Food Pantries and Farms

  Journal of Trauma-Informed Community Health Nutrition and Physical Activity An Open Access Publication · 2025-04-30

  articleOpen access

  Background: Limited research documents how organizations implement programs to increase culturally preferred foods. This project explores organizational factors in implementing a cultural food preference pilot across food pantries and farms, with specific attention to Hispanic and Marshallese culturally preferred foods. Methods: Food pantry and farm partners were engaged through a low food security community of practice (i.e., a partnership with community-based organizations). Six partners were funded for seven months to grow and distribute culturally preferred foods. An evaluator conducted semi-structured interviews with partners, which were recorded and transcribed. Transcripts were analyzed using rapid thematic analysis. Results: Rapid thematic analysis revealed six themes: 1) frequent organizational discussion about culturally preferred foods; 2) positive client feedback; 3) incorporation of knowledge into broader programming; 4) new partnerships with procurement and distribution sites; 5) sustainability concerns; and 6) ongoing commitment to growing culturally preferred foods. Discussion: Findings can inform practitioners in food pantries and farms implementing interventions with culturally preferred foods and highlight the need to address sustainability concerns related to food access and cost to ensure long-term impact of such interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ashok K. Mishra

  Arizona State University

  12 shared

• Jeffrey Gillespie

  Economic Research Service

  10 shared

• Daniel A. Sumner

  9 shared

• Carl Johan Lagerkvist

  Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences

  8 shared

• James Matthew Fannin

  Louisiana State University Agricultural Center

  8 shared

• Ephraim S. Leibtag

  8 shared

• Denise Y. Mainville

  8 shared

• Robert G. Nelson

  Joslin Diabetes Center

  7 shared

Education

• PhD, Agricultural and Resource Economics

  University of California Davis

  1999

• MSc, Agricultural Economics

  Wye College

  1994

• BSA, Agricultural Economics

  University of Georgia

  1993