This paper analyses the linkage between the 'Five Vertical and Seven Horizontal' National Trunk Highway System (NTHS) program and rural residents’ dietary quality in China. The NTHS program began in 1993 and completed in 2007, with different places being exposed to the program in different years. The empirical approach relies on staggered differences-in-differences, taking advantage of residential nutrition data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey between 1991 and 2009 as well as road data between 1993 and 2009 in China. Road data were created by measuring the distance between villages and the nearest NTHS highway in ArcGIS environment using the traffic map layer for each year. Results from econometric analyses suggest that the NTHS program was associated with significant improvement in rural residents’ dietary quality in terms of higher dietary diversity scores (DDS), higher shares of high-quality proteins and fats in energy whereas lower shares of carbohydrates and incomplete protein in energy. We also found higher income and better access to more integrated markets are underlying the observed positive linkage between NTHS and rural residents’ dietary quality. Our results are robust to a range of alternative specifications.