The retail food sector has been put under substantial stress by the coronavirus pandemic. What started out with runs on toilet paper quickly escalated to empty meat and bread aisles at grocery stores. Scott Irwin will join Jayson Lusk of Purdue University to discuss the how the pandemic has impacted food prices and logistical issues in this crucial sector of the American economy.

Jayson Lusk currently serves as Distinguished Professor and Head of the Agricultural Economics Department at Purdue University.  After earning a B.S. in Food Technology from Texas Tech University in 1997, he received a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University in 2000.  He is a food and agricultural economist who studies what we eat and why we eat it. Since 2000, he has published more than 220 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals on a wide assortment of topics ranging from the economics of animal welfare to consumer preferences for genetically modified food to the impacts of new technologies and policies on livestock and meat markets to analyzing the merits of new survey and experimental approaches eliciting consumer preferences.  He is one of the most prolific and cited food and agricultural economists of the past two decades in a variety of outlets, won numerous research awards, given hundreds of lectures for businesses, nonprofits, trade industry organizations, and universities in the US and abroad, have been interviewed or published editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and have made TV appearances on Fox and Friends, the John Stossel Show, Varney & Co., and Wall Street Journal Live, among others.