What's for Dinner? (1999)

It Depends on Where You Live and Who You Live With Cornell researchers are looking at how a family's food decisions are influenced by the community in which they They are using this information to help communities support healthful, sustainable, and enjoyable food choices for their residents. Whether they'd admit it out loud or not, nutrition educators once believed that people could change their eating habits if they'd just make up their minds to do it, buckle down, and start eating the right foods. Now they know better. After 20 years of studying family food decision making, we've come to realize that individuals don't make food decisions in isolation, says Ardyth Gillespie, associate professor of nutritional sciences. If we want people to make healthful, sustainable, and enjoyable food decisions, we need to take into account the community as well as the family contexts in which they live. To get a handle on the ways that communities influence what people eat, Gillespie and her colleagues in the Cornell community Nutrition Program designed the Community Plant Food Project: Linking Families and Community Food Systems. This U.S. Department of Agriculture-funded research project, under way now for three years in downtown Rochester, New York, is looking at how community food systems interact with family systems in food decision making. The basic idea is that family food choices are rooted in the communities in which families In addition, the project is setting the groundwork for changes in the community's food system so as to foster more healthful nutrition, with an emphasis on fruits and vegetables. We want families to be more thoughtful about their food decisions and take more control over their choices, Gillespie says. People can't say, 'Well, we'll try broccoli,' if broccoli isn't available where they live, if they can't afford it, or if they have no transportation to get to where they can buy it. To be effective, the project has had to shift away from the traditional intervention model, establishing instead joint relationships that can lead to what Gillespie calls community-initiated change. We've found over the years that it's more effective for us to work with what's already happening in communities rather than come in as outside experts who are going to solve their problems, Gillespie explains. In Rochester, the first step was to gather together the food system stakeholders--community organizations that play an important role in what food is available to consumers who live there. Gillespie and the project's collaborators at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County talked with nutrition professionals from the public schools, restaurant managers, owners of food processing companies, managers of food distribution companies, educators, and farmers from outlying areas. They asked these groups what they'd like to know about how the people living in their community decide what to eat every day. Concurrently, Gillespie and her colleagues turned to families in the community--35 Hispanic/Latino families, 15 African American families, and 25 Anglo-American families--and asked about their family food decisions in the context of the Rochester community food system. We interviewed families as a way to take on the perspective of the families rather than bring our own preconceptions into the picture, Gillespie explains. The input from both groups, combined with the findings of the researcher's previous work, resulted in the following research questions: * What motivates families to make changes in their food choices? * Are the foods they want available locally? * Where do they find the foods they want? In retail outlets and farmers markets, or do they (or friends) grow some themselves? * What determines their choice of a retail outlet? * How does transportation affect shopping choices? …