Comida Casera's strategies for enhancing availability, affordability, accessibility, and preference for fresh and healthy food options in a low income, food desert community

Comida Casera (Homemade Food) is a community-based, participatory initiative designed to influence the informal food environment of a low income, immigrant school community. Insight from our mothers group revealed a previously obscured contradiction: While professional cross-sector collaborations had improved the quality of the formal food environment – school meals, family food support – economic realities, customs, and new neighborhood networks were reinforcing an inadvertently obesogenic and widely influential informal food system. In this community, like many others, hidden access challenges, competing policy goals (i.e., immigration control vs food security objectives), and top-down assumptions about family capacity significantly limited otherwise well-developed and broadly accepted systems approaches to family health across the lifespan. Comida Casera uses four strategies to influence the informal environment in support of broader systems changes for family food security, nutrition, and obesity prevention: 1) Engaging women and girls in transforming informal food systems of the school community, 2) Influencing social norms and expectations to decrease unhealthy food options and increase healthy food consumption, 3) Implementing environmental and organizational changes that ensure access and use of healthy food options, and 4) Developing a replicable model for engaging community and university partners in effective collaboration for food security and health equity. Through practical skills training, social reconnaissance, and planned environmental change, Comida Casera participants changed the food landscape in their community. This strategy has proven to be a powerful addition to contemporary “upstream” approaches to addressing food deserts and disparities in underserved populations.