Webinar #1 in our Webinar Series on Drivers of food choice in low- and middle-income countries: a synthesis of evidence

(learn more about the series here)

Food choice involves the processes by which people consider, acquire, prepare, distribute, and consume foods and beverages. Viewing nutrition and health outcomes through the lens of food choice ties individual perceptions and behaviors to food environments and food systems. People are the key element of any food system, and their interaction with the food environment is a focal point for understanding what, how, and why people eat. The food environment both shapes and is shaped by individual food choices. The DFC portfolio has generated key insights into the drivers of food choice behaviors across diverse settings in LMICs, along with compelling new directions for research focused on understanding the relationships between food environments, food choice, and health outcomes.

This webinar will include 3 presentations about selected projects to illustrate key findings on drivers of food choice at the individual and household levels with an emphasis on the dynamic and reciprocal relationship with the food environment:

1. Christine E Blake, Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina:
   Key learnings from Drivers of Food Choice Competitive Grants program
2. Mirriam Matita, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (LUANAR), Department of Economics, University of Malawi, and Helen Walls, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine:
   Household participation in food markets and dietary diversity: evidence from rural Malawi
3. Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, Environmental Policy, Wageningen University:
   Transformations of the food retail environment and dynamics in food consumption of low-income urbanites: evidence from Vietnam

Moderator: Edward Frongillo, Professor & Director, Global Health Initiatives at Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, and co-investigator for the Drivers of Food Choice Program.

Speaker profiles can be found below. Presentations will be followed by a 30-minute Q&A discussion session.

Note: To access this webinar, you will need to register and be logged in to your Zoom account. If you don't have a Zoom account, you can create one here for free.

About our Webinar Series on Drivers of food choice in low- and middle-income countries: a synthesis of evidence

(learn more about the series here)

Global food systems are altering local food environments that serve as the contexts of food choice, defined as the processes by which people consider, acquire, prepare, distribute, and consume foods and beverages. The purpose of the Drivers of Food Choice (DFC) Competitive Grants Program is to generate evidence to understand how people make food choices in local food environments, specifically what, how, and why people eat the way they do among low- and middle-income countries. The DFC program funded projects that applied multi-disciplinary perspectives and methods across highly diverse settings and populations in 10 LMICs. The webinar series will aim to disseminate important findings that have emerged from the DFC portfolio regarding drivers of individual and household food choice in changing food environments and foster discussion around next steps for scale-up and application of insights and innovations from the portfolio. The thematic areas of this webinar series articulate with prominent issues and questions currently confronting policy, practice, and research at the nexus of food environments, nutrition, and health. Webinars will showcase the critical contributions of the DFC portfolio in advancing discussions around these areas. 

Resources

• Presentation slides:
  • Christine Blake: Key Learnings from the Drivers of Food Choice Program
  • Sigrid Wertheim-Heck: Transformations of food environments and dynamics in food consumption
  • Helen Walls and Mirriam Matita: Household participation in food markets and dietary diversity: Evidence from rural Malawi
• Research Brief by Helen Walls, Mirriam Matita and colleagues: Do agricultural input subsidies on staples reduce dietary diversity?
• Publications and resources from Sigrid Wertheim-Heck and colleagues:
  • The impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the diets of Hanoi’s urban poor
  • Video: Retail Diversity for Dietary Diversity (RD4DD) - Preventing nutrition deserts for the urban poor within the transforming food retail environment in Vietnam
  • Food policy and the unruliness of consumption: An intergenerational social practice approach to uncover transforming food consumption in modernizing Hanoi, Vietnam.
  • A cross-disciplinary mixed-method approach to understand how food retail environment transformations influence food choice and intake among the urban poor: Experiences from Vietnam
  • Retail diversity for dietary diversity: Resolving food-safety versus nutrition priorities in Hanoi (scroll down to page 61)
  • Food safety and nutrition for low-income urbanites: exploring a social justice dilemma in consumption policy
  • Food safety and urban food markets in Vietnam: The need for flexible and customized retail modernization policies
  • Constrained consumer practices and food safety concerns in Hanoi
  • Food safety in everyday life: Shopping for vegetables in a rural city in Vietnam

Join the conversation on social media

Share quotes from the speakers, reflections, screenshots and more on social media. Use these hashtags and handles on Twitter:

• #foodchoice
• Christine E Blake: @ceblakeRD
• Helen Walls: @helenwalls
• Mirriam Matita: @Miry58n

• Sigrid Wertheim-Heck: @wertheimheck

• Drivers of Food Choice program: @DFC_Program
• ANH Academy: @anh_academy