Addressing the issue of food deserts

[Selah23]

Hi,

We're working on our university project which is focused on food deserts. Our brief is to design a solution which makes grocery shopping more convenient and to educate parents around food nutrition.

The solution we are proposing is a food package service which will be provided through your child primary school. Ingredients as well as fun, nutritious recipes will be provided for the whole family to get involved with making dinner.

Does this sound like a service you would use?
Are there any issues with this service?
Is there anything else that may make it easier for those living in food deserts to access healthy, nutritious meals?

Grocery shopping is already pretty convenient. I use an app and then it's delivered to my door.

I think people who use Hello Fresh etc do so be they are busy. People don't want to come and start making pasta with their children.

Not everyone can use online grocery shopping due to minimum order limits and some people may not have a debit/credit card.

To be fair, online delivery doesn’t help - because the cheaper supermarkets don’t do online delivery. And those living in more deprived or urban areas don’t have cars, so they need to shop locally. And that raises the question of public transport. It explains why I lug my shopping around by bus.

OP: I think the biggest problem with the idea is the current energy crisis. Families in actual or imminent fuel poverty are not going to be increasing the amount they use on anything, including for longer cooking times

And there’s the question of those who have no internet access at home, so that rules out online ordering as well. If your only access to the internet is an hour trip to use the computer at the library, you are a bit limited.

yes I remember this being pointed out 10 or 15 years ago...that those " cheap cuts of meat that only need long slow cooking to make a delicious and economical meal" are actually very expensive to cook assuming that you have got a working oven or stove or slow cooker.

Just had another thought, one of the things that is done in my area is that supermarkets pay for bus services from deprived areas which are offered free.

There's a bus every Wednesday and Friday from just down the road from me that goes to a huge Tesco on a retail park, several stops along the way to get as many people as possible. They allow a 2 hour window from being dropped off at the retail park to pick up for the route home so everyone who uses the service has time to do a supermarket shop as well as get anything they need from Wilko, pound shop, Iceland.....

It's a really good little service and the bus is always full. In comparison it would be a day ticket at about £5 for the standard bus.

That’s a good idea. I wasn’t aware of such a service. Of course, you’d have to be available at that time to make use of the service.

I taught in deprived areas for many years.
There are many ingrained issues which are not solved simply by giving people fruit and veg.
1.The majority of our parents were the children of parents who didn't cook. They had no skills at all.They might possibly have engaged with lessons ( possibly) but probably not.They knew veg was better than beige food but had no idea what to do with it.

1. If money is limited you buy what you know your children will eat. If that is chicken nuggets and chips then that is what you will buy. You don't have the luxury of trying new things because, if they aren't eaten, you can't afford anything else and your children will go to bed hungry.
2. Fun recipes for the whole family. ....you have to be able to read to follow a recipe. .Many of our parents were illiterate. They wouldn't have engaged with any part of it.Not because they didn't care , but because the gulf between wanting to ,and having the skills to ,was so enormous
3. Lower paid work is often physically very demanding. The last thing you want to do after a 12 hour shift is deal with the effort,faff and mess of tackling a 'fun family recipe'.

Other things to consider as well -

The sort of recipes and food you provide - are you going to take into account the background of the families? Is a family from Somalia going to want to cook a pasta bake? What if they’re vegetarian?

Are you going to provide all ingredients-or will it be one of those “just whip up a white sauce” with milk, butter and flour that the family doesn’t have?

Are you going to need a minimum signing up for it to run?

Are families going to have to commit for a certain amount of time? A term? How many meals in that term?

Are you taking into account the number of people in the family? Will a family of two get the same box as a family of eight?

I wouldn't want to deal with my child's school for food shopping! I feel school is too intrusive into our lives anyway.

I think this sort of thing would be based on those who get "free school meals" and would be similar to the food packages they got through school holidays. I think education, for the children from quite a young age on nutrition, cooking and budgeting would be far more beneficial in the long term.

My local council runs a "pantry" that's open to absolutely everyone. They receive excess food from supermarkets and you can just collect what you need. I'm not sure if it's free or if there's a minimal charge. The trouble with it is its in town, so us more rural areas don't benefit from it, unless we have transport. We have 6 buses in 24 hours, so anything frozen or chilled is likely unsuitable for us. The only improvement would be, therefore, to take the Pantry to other, rural, areas via a van, like a mobile shop.
Maybe you could consider some sort of mobile pantry, like a mobile library.

Have you spoken to any people in those communities about barriers? Things that usually come up is that you have to be a confident cook with lots of store cupboard additionals such as spices and lots of pots and pans to make cheap tasty and nutritious food which often requires lots of expensive energy to cook and your kids might turn their noses up at. If you only have a couple of quid to feed the family you can buy processed food which they are guaranteed to eat and won’t take long to heat up in the oven.

Honestly, I agree with other posters - this sounds logistically nightmarish and ridiculously patronising, even if it is done with the best of intention.

I't think a more useful service would be some kind of mobile (refrigerated) service by supermarkets (or in partnership with supermarkets) that would visit set places at set times. The challenge of course would be the cost of setting up and, potentially, the cost of fuel and energy to run it.

But asking overworked teachers to take this on, on top of everything else, for families who may well not want to engage with it because it's not what they need/takes even more control away from them/is patronising, does not seem helpful.

Have you contacted town councils, they did this during lockdown and shielding. Many also run schemes over school holidays. Plus there are community fridges, larders and cupboards that use food donated by public, shops and manufacturers.

Improving nutritional knowledge is done by 6 week courses when people can get a useful qualification {level 2 food hygiene} plus they help make enough food to provide more than one meal for their family.

Lots of work has been done on this subject. Do research, be very careful not to be patronising.