A wide body of literature finds disparities in access to affordable, nutritious food in certain regions of the United States; in general, low-income, minority, and rural residents are disproportionately likely to live in such... [ view full abstract ]
A wide body of literature finds disparities in access to affordable, nutritious food in certain regions of the United States; in general, low-income, minority, and rural residents are disproportionately likely to live in such food deserts. Numerous studies have characterized food environments in terms of quantity and quality of food stores, but recent research suggests that people rarely shop at their nearest food stores, which suggests that immediate food environments may not have a big impact on the shopping and eating behaviors of those who live nearby. Increasingly, scholars are moving away from questions of proximity of food stores to instead consider how food shopping decisions are made not only in the context of a given food environment, but also in the context of complex individual and household factors. This has led to calls for more participatory research that examines the actual places where people shop for food, as well as their reasons for doing so. There is a need for this especially in rural areas, which have been underrepresented in research on resident perceptions of their own food environments, despite the fact that the vast majority of U.S. food deserts are in rural areas.
This study utilizes geo-ethnography—a combination of geographic data and qualitative interviews—to explore how food shopping decisions are situated in the context of the daily lives of low-income women living in food poor environments. Participants come from a USDA-supported study, Voices into Action, and include 30 low-income female caregivers of young children living in three North Carolinian counties, two rural and one urban. Participants completed three parts of the study: first, participants filled out a travel log in which they listed the location and trip purpose for every place they went to over the course of one week; second, during an in-person visit, I asked participants to draw a map of what they considered to be their own “food environment,” including their nearest stores and the stores where they shopped for food; and third, I conducted semi-structured interviews with the participants about their travel logs and the maps they drew, with a focus on why they chose to shop at the stores they did.
Preliminary findings suggest that commonly-visited locations such as work, church, and children’s schools did not have much more effect on where people shopped for food than home location did. Price, rather than proximity, was overwhelmingly the strongest motivator for choosing a store. In rural areas, however, women were more likely to talk about the tradeoff between higher transportation costs (gas money) in going to farther supermarkets and lower-priced food they found there. Rural women were also more likely to plan food shopping trips around when they would already be in a certain part of town, and forgo shopping at certain stores other times. As I continue working on the study, I will create travel maps to illustrate the travel patterns of participants, and will explore how the perceived food environment in participants’ drawn maps compare to their “actual” food environments.
