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(THE CONVERSATION) While researching how hard it is for low-income Americans to eat healthy on tight budgets, I’ve often found a mismatch between what people want to eat and the diet they can afford to follow. This made me wonder what eating right costs and how much of this tab gets covered by the largest federal nutrition program, commonly known as SNAP or food stamps.

To find out, I teamed up with Kranti Mulik, an agricultural economist.

MyPlate and SNAPWe based our nutrition ass...