Participatory food events as collaborative public engagement opportunities

Abstract

There is an urgent need to ‘get creative’ with the way we tackle social and nutritional inequalities. The Food as a Lifestyle Motivator (FLM) project has explored the use of creative participatory approaches to engage ‘harder to reach’ communities in dialogues to improve their well-being and life skills. Preliminary findings have confirmed that food can be a powerful catalyst for social inclusion with the potential to empower ‘marginalised’ individuals. Part of this exploratory study has involved two participatory food events (November 2015 and November 2016) run in a local day centre for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. The aim of these events was to bring together key stakeholders (from the service user and provider communities) to exchange food-based knowledge, using collaborative and co-creative participatory approaches. Following ethical clearance, a range of data were collected at the events to assess their ‘social impact’. These consisted of (1) audio interviews (service providers and users), (2) oral surveys (service users and key workers) and (3) observations of social cooking and eating engagement, and creative visual arts (photography, collage, food games and quizzes). In this article, we detail how the range of creative approaches used has successfully engaged individuals (average attendance: n = 80, service users: n = 32) to participate in these food-themed events. We reflect on the overarching themes from data capture of the social and therapeutic aspects of food (activities). We also reflect on the collation (and curation) of findings, systematically critiquing the approaches used, including consideration of ethics, and drivers for engagement. Finally, we consider how the utility of such creative approaches can optimise public engagement activities, not only to enhance research impact but also to inform collaborative developments with and between service users, service providers and other stakeholders, with the potential to lead to transformative food-related changes.

Food on the Margins: A Creative Film Collaboration to Amplify the Voices of Those Living with Food Insecurity

“…This ‘co-produced’ film offers the opportunity to share knowledge and dialogue, both essential expressions of the lived experience of poverty towards political change and transformation (Freire, 1970). Our film showcases the utility of more progressive creative approaches that can offer deeper practices, permitting academics to be more intimately associated with their publics (Burawoy, 2005), which aligns with more authentic public engagement endeavours (See Pettinger et al, 2019: 9). ‘Co-production’ and ‘co-creation’ methodologies are emerging as important approaches in food systems research (e.g.…”

Engaging with ‘less affluent’ communities for food system transformation: a community food researcher model (FoodSEqual project)

“…Community participation is believed to hold a number of benefits, including the incorporation of local knowledge in planning, generation of greater support for and sustainability of local actions and consistency with democratic values (91) . Community engagement interventions have been shown to improve health behaviours and selfefficacy (92) and co-production approaches can, if carried out comprehensively, radically redistribute power within the research process (93) , Participation in food/nutrition projects in particular can build trust, self-esteem and improve food skills (94)(95)(96) . The inherently social activity of engagement with food combines positive health outcomes with other cultural activities, such as the arts (97) .…”

“…Creative expression has the potential to engage individuals in personal and community-level change through reflection, empowerment and connectedness (98) . This suggests that novel methods (with food) can be seen as 'co-creative' in empowering people to re-connect with their food which might have the potential to lead to transformative food discourses (96,99) . Such suggestions form important building blocks of cohesion and social capital and are therefore worthy of investigation.…”

A community-based participatory research approach to understanding social eating for food well-being

“…Food and the sharing of food can facilitate one of the creative kinds of empirical research that are described as 'communitybased participatory research' or CBPR (Chun-Chung Chow & Crowe, 2005;Faridi et al, 2007;Pettinger et al, 2019;Reason & Bradbury, 2006). CBPR moves beyond 'traditional research approaches that assume a phenomenon may be separated from its context for purposes of study' (Holkup et al, 2004:162).…”