How Latina mothers navigate a ‘food swamp’ to feed their children: a photovoice approach

Abstract

These mothers' feeding choices were influenced directly by their food values, and indirectly by the neighbourhood and school food environments via their children's preferences.

Food Swamps Predict Obesity Rates Better Than Food Deserts in the United States

“…We examined multiple ways of categorizing food environments as food swamps, including alternate versions of the Retail Food Environment Index (RFEI) [ 23 , 34 , 39 ]. This builds upon previous work by Colón-Ramos and colleagues, which employed a relative food environment measure to identify a food swamp in the District of Columbia and predict food acquisition behaviors among recently migrated mothers from Central America [ 35 ]. The other studies that have used relative measures of food access were conducted outside the US, in Waterloo, Canada [ 33 ] and Porirua, New Zealand [ 34 ].…”

“…First, the present study makes a novel contribution by examining the countrywide existence of “food swamps” in the U.S. This builds upon previous work on food swamps abroad [ 33 , 34 ] and studies identifying food swamps in two major U.S. cities [ 21 , 35 ]. For instance, Hager and colleagues identified food swamps as areas in Baltimore City, with four or more convenience/corner stores within 0.25 miles of a study participant’s home.…”

“…We test the effect of food access on obesity rates by using a county-level unit of analysis [ 26 ]. This approach complements the current literature as it is more aggregated than the local community level [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 34 , 35 , 39 ], but less aggregated than the state level [ 32 , 42 ]. Previous work by Dunn [ 26 ] and Blanchard and Lyson [ 43 ] documents significant county-level variations in access to fast food restaurants or grocery stores.…”

New measures for access to emergency food

“…Most research has focused on food purchased for at-home consumption, despite evidence that access to fast food 4 or other non-retail sites may also play significant roles 5 . Furthermore, work on food access has often neglected individuals' everyday food procurement habits 6 and the temporally variable nature of food access, including factors such as store operating hours 7 . At a broader level, a focus on mapping and labelling areas with poor food access may both stigmatize already marginalized communities and distract from more systemic issues such as retailer consolidation and neighbourhood disinvestment 8 .…”

As a mother, I prefer to give a healthy snack, however... : Mothers’ considerations and value conflicts while providing snacks to their 2-7-year-old children

“…Likewise, several studies revealed that health affected mothers' food choice of mothers from, for example, Canada (Walsh et al, 2015), the USA (Johnson et al, 2011), Uruguay (Machín et al, 2016), Senegal (Zobrist et al, 2018) and the UK (Carnell et al, 2011). Moreover, mothers from the USA (Evans et al, 2011;Meers et al, 2016;Colón-Ramos et al, 2017), Indonesia (Rachmi et al, 2018), Australia (Russel et al, 2015Boak et al, 2016) and the UK (Carnell et al, 2011) reported child preference to be important in food choice for their children. However, some considerations seem to be culture-specific, like convenience for Dutch mothers and organic for Polish mothers, which was also found by Markovina et al (2015).…”