Determination of Food Basket for Various Income Groups by Using Fuzzy Logic

As the main element of economy, human being has requirements the main one of which is the need for food security and healthy nutrition. Unfortunately, in the Iranian society there are two groups of people who do not enjoy food security. These groups include people who either do not have the financial means to provide healthy and nutritious food or those who, despite having the financial means, lack the necessary knowledge regarding proper combination of various food groups. Therefore, the two main factors which play important role in creating people’s food security are 1) income (financial ability) and 2) knowledge regarding nutrition and preparation of proper food basket. In this paper at the first time by using fuzzy logic with trapezoidal membership function, data from statistical center and food ingredients tables, a food basket for urban and rural families is defined and we will see that fuzzy logic is preffered to other methods.for this problem (obtain basket food) we have 21 objectives, 27 variables, 10 nutrition and 78 constrains that by using goal programming we receive a food basket which, requires the least cost. The cost of the said basket determines which income groups are capable of providing for their nutritional needs and which are not. Findings of this study indicate that I) Urban families within the first ten percentile point and rural families within the first ten and twenty percentile points do not have the necessary financial means to provide for desired food security.