Christiana Miewald

Negotiating the Local Food Environment: The Lived Experience of Food Access for Low-Income People Living With HIV/AIDS

Good Eats was a 10-week community-based research workshop series on food security for persons living with HIV/AIDS in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada. This is a population that is very food insecure and for whom access to nutritious food is critical for health. We suggest that using methods that engage marginalized populations in the research process can contribute to our understanding of food insecurity in a local food environment. In this example, although there are a number of charitable food programs in the neighborhood, factors such as food provider regulations, inadequate housing, and drug addictions contribute to food insecurity for this population.

Gender struggle, scale, and the production of place in the Appalachian coalfields

Recent changes in the coal mining industry of Appalachian Kentucky have entailed a widespread economic restructuring with profound effects on the character of the social relations that constitute place. As the traditionally male-dominated mining industry has seen a reduction in employment, there has been a parallel rise in service sector employment, in which women dominate many jobs. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fourteen women living in one coalfield community, we discuss how this economic restructuring has produced a series of struggles between men and women over appropriate gender roles relating to waged work and household work. We also show how these gender struggles—which we suggest are most evident in the microsites of the body and the household—influence the character of networks of social relations at the scale of the locality and, therefore, have an important impact on the production of place and scale. This case study contributes to ongoing discussions of the social production of place and the politics that surround this process. It draws on a feminist theoretical framework to argue that understandings of the production of place cannot disregard the role social relations shaped at the microscale play in shaping place and that our understandings of the politics of place and scale must include the gendered struggles of everyday life.

A Warm Meal and a Bed: Intersections of Housing and Food Security in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relationships between housing, food security, and health. We begin by reviewing the current literature on the intersections of housing and food security, emphasizing the current gaps in knowledge in the areas of building infrastructure, in-house food programs, and building context for social housing. Derived from the literature review, we present a model designed to highlight the relationships between food, housing, and health. Following this, we provide a case study of housing and food security for residents of the Downtown Eastside. By examining the experiences of residents struggling to find both food and shelter within a very low-income context, we underscore the ways in which food, health, and housing intersect. We conclude by outlining future research directions that will enhance understanding of these intersections.

Tracing the unintended consequences of food safety regulations for community food security and sustainability: small-scale meat processing in British Columbia

In 2004, as a response to the discovery of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy in Canadian cattle and other food scares, the Province of British Columbia (BC) developed a comprehensive set of meat inspection regulations, increasing the requirements for food safety infrastructure. Through a series of interviews with farmers and stakeholders, we highlight some of the unintended consequences for community food security and sustainability that resulted from these stringent safety regulations in rural and remote communities in BC. These include the loss of meat production and processing capacities as well as the erosion of local food practices and traditions through the criminalisation of farm-gate sales. We suggest that food safety regulations intended to protect consumer health may result in negative effects for community food security and rural sustainability and that these consequences should be accounted for when developing food policy.

Food as harm reduction: barriers, strategies, and opportunities at the intersection of nutrition and drug-related harm

Abstract Research suggests that food insecurity exacerbates the harms experienced by people who use drugs (PWUD). Therefore, improving the food security status can help PWUD reduce drug-related harms. This paper identifies a knowledge gap in public health and harm reduction literatures regarding the relationship between food and harm reduction. We argue that there needs to be a more comprehensive and systematic model of food provision in harm reduction services. Our argument is based on a qualitative case study of 42 people who currently use, or have used drugs in Vancouver, Canada and of staff of 27 programs that provide harm reduction services in the city. The research demonstrates how PWUD experience the effects of drug use on their food consumption, how they access food, and how they practice self-care. It also shows how harm reduction services, while they often provide food, are unable to systematically address the dietary-related harms associated with drug use. This presents an opportunity and a challenge for these organizations and for harm reduction as a public health approach. We call for more research to be done on food as harm reduction and for stable publically funded food provision in harm reduction-oriented services.