Growing Health: Urban food growing for health and dietary benefits

Other investigators

To be announced.

Description

Members of disadvantaged urban communities (DUCs) often face challenges relating to diet, health, obesity and limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Our research shows that providing opportunities for community members to grow their own fruits and vegetables in urban areas and increasing their access to fruits and vegetables grown in this way could help to address these challenges. However, it is unclear if people would accept food grown in this way, or how access to urban food growing leads to dietary and health benefits. Working with Groundwork Cheshire, Lancashire and Merseyside’s community food growing projects in DUCs in Northwest England, we will use Photo Voice methods to qualitatively explore how participation in food growing benefits diet and health (e.g. by helping people to value food more) for project members. We will also run workshops with food growers and wider community members in DUCs to co-design an intervention that enables DUC members to grow their own food. Ultimately, the project will result in a co-designed, evidencebased, appropriate food growing intervention that will be presented for public feedback in a webinar and can be implemented and evaluated in DUCs to facilitate fruit and vegetable access and improve dietary quality and health.

Project keywords

1) Food Access 2) Food Growing 3) Co-Design 4) Disadvantaged Urban Communities

Outputs

To be announced.

Email contact

b.mead@liverpool.ac.uk