By Rosanna Sheppard, 4th Year BSN Student
My name is Rosanna Sheppard, I am a fourth year Nursing student and recipient of a 2013 Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award. This award is designed to provide support for undergraduate students to participate and engage in a direct research experience. For my research, I am working on the Food Literacy Project. As both a student nurse and a researcher, its important to understand what new and emerging ideas are happening in the world of research.
As the local food movement bursts onto the scene and the word “local” becomes a catch term, it is important to develop an understanding of what this means in terms of food literacy. The Food Literacy Project is a community based research project focused on building and promoting food literacy by increasing community food security and health practices. The investigators are Linda Geggie, Trevor Hancock, Wanda Martin, Joan Wharf-Higgins, and Maeve Lyndon.
What is food literacy?
Food Literacy is complex. As this idea or concept is very much in its infancy, there is still a lot to explore and discover. Food literacy exists on individual, community, national and global scales much like our food industry. There is much to gain by becoming food literate, yet there are many barriers in place to hinder an individual in the achievement of gaining food literacy. Food literacy is based on a cyclical continuum.
A person’s place along this continuum is based on the individual and their surrounding environment. The conceptualization of food literacy is diverse due to the complexities in our food system, involving production, processing, and distribution, along with the social and environmental components. Food literacy encompasses the capacity, opportunity, and ability to obtain, understand, and use knowledge and nutritional information to select and prepare food to make appropriate nutritional decisions that lead to health enhancement. Food literacy is the ability to question the food system’s quality and safety to person, family, community, nation, and the environment. It creates a positive relationship with food which crosses culture and environment to empower and create food-secure individuals, households, communities, and nations. In the end, food literacy is achievable if we are exposed to the right environment and programs.
The project involves both academic and community analysis of food literacy activities through participant-centred engagement. An evaluation process will help determine the efficacy of the approaches in building food literacy and greater health equity. Success factors will include building knowledge, skills, and resources that support positive behaviour change to increase individual and community’s social determinants of health.
This generation of nurses has an opportunity to work within health care to increase the uptake of research by practitioners. Community-based participatory action research is a valuable approach to applied research that may resonate with many nurses and other health care providers, potentially increasing the participation in research and the adoption of emerging research findings.
From the 2014 Spring Communiqué — Student Issue
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