Voices matter: Understanding neighborhood food environments and residents' food choice

Literature on neighborhood food environments (NFE) and healthy food acquisition practices of low-income urban dwellers largely points to disparate measures of physical availability, accessibility and quality of healthy food options in grocery stores. This body of work expands our understanding of NFE characteristics, however, it provides limited insight into how residents of low-income communities navigate NFE to make healthy food choices in the context of inadequate transportation systems, community-level violence, and food insecurity. A mixed-method design study in three distinct neighborhoods in Newark, NJ, characterized the NFE and interviewed residents to gauge interaction between food environments and other factors that guide food choice. Phase I of the study, used GIS and 2010 census tracts data to map the locations and density of all food venues (grocery stores, restaurants, food truck and carts), identify routes of public transportation, neighborhood SES, and integrate crime incidents. Phase II utilized two surveys to evaluate all restaurants (n=75), grocery stores (n=91) and other (n=6) for availabilty, quality and prices of standard and healthy food options. A third survey was used to observe food price fluctuation on same brand food items across neighborhoods, stores during different periods of the month. Findings of previous phases informed phase III, qualitative interviews with community residents (n= 108). Methods of Grounded Theory guided data gathering and analysis. Results indicate disparate access of healthy food options vary by neighborhood, store type and time of month. Qualitative findings point to nuanced differences in food choice by neighborhood, age, gender and class. Finally we saw change of prices across time and neighborhoods were consistently higher at the beginning of the month for certain ethnic identified food groups, beverages and children's cereals. This work underscores the significance of mixed-method designs for revealing the complex interactions between social and food environment associated with food choice.