Diet cost and affordability metrics, their application today and in the future

Ensuring that all people can afford a healthy, nutritious diet is a prerequisite for ensuring food security and ending malnutrition. Diet cost and affordability metrics are useful for revealing the systemic barriers people face in consuming an adequate diet. This seven-article special issue brings together insights and analyses from the application of these metrics in the World Food Programme’s Fill the Nutrient Gap (FNG). The FNG is an analytical process that captures subnational and intra-household variation in the cost and affordability of diets that meet health and nutrition needs (Bose et al). The FNG sheds light on the heightened vulnerabilities of groups such as adolescent girls, people living in fragile food environments, and those far from the threshold of being able to afford a nutritious diet (Bose et al). Standardized data from Fill the Nutrient Gap analyses in 37 countries has also been gathered and made available through FNGSTAT, an open access dataset (see Klemm, Turowska et al and Turowska et al, this issue).