- Author: Danielle L. Lee
During the COVID-19 pandemic, mass unemployment and loss of income have contributed to rapid increases in food insecurity in the US. Latino households, in particular, have faced multiple health, social, and economic vulnerabilities. The Nutrition Policy Institute welcomed UC Merced's Denise D. Payán, PhD, MPP, assistant professor of public health in the Department of Public Health, to speak on this topic during a virtual NPI Brown Bag event on Thursday, December 3, 2020. Her talk was titled "Structural barriers influencing food insecurity, malnutrition, and health among Latinos in the San Joaquin Valley during COVID-19". Dr. Payan's presentation reported preliminary findings from two COVID-19 related studies examining: 1) the socio-economic impacts of the pandemic on Latino immigrants in rural communities, and 2) changes to food delivery in emergency food outlets during the pandemic. Policy and programmatic recommendations were also shared. Payan is the principal investigator of the Community Health & Innovative Policy (CHIP) Lab at UC Merced and is Deputy Director of the state-wide research translation center known as the California Initiative for Health Equity & Action (Cal-IHEA). Payan's Brown Bag presentation slide deck is available online and her presentation recording is available for viewing online. Learn more about the NPI Brown Bags here.
The Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI) hosted an online Brown Bag event on Tuesday, June 30 from 12:00-1:00pm PDT titled "CalFresh Healthy Living, University of California - Programmatic Strategies, Adaptation to COVID-19, and Areas for Intentional Collaboration with NPI". CalFresh Healthy Living, University of California previously known as UC CalFresh Nutrition Education Program is a SNAP-Ed program implemented by UC Cooperative Extension teams in 32 counties. The Brown Bag session highlighted programmatic strategies - including adaptation due to COVID-19 - with the goal of identifying potential areas of more intentional collaboration with NPI. Speakers included Kamaljeet Khaira, Barbara MkNelly, and MaryAnn Mills. The presentation slide deck is available online.
Caitlin Daniel, a postdoctoral researcher with the Nutrition Policy Institute and University of California, Berkeley Sociology Department will present at the next NPI Brown Bag on Thursday, February 6 at 12:00 noon on "How Low-Income Parents Use Food to Create Meaningful Social Experience". Drawing on interviews and grocery-shopping observations, this talk shows how low-income families use food for social and symbolic reasons: to make their children happy, to convey care, and to feel like competent caregivers. It discusses how attending to the social dimensions of food choice complements structural and material perspectives that emphasize access, money, and time. Dr. Daniel is a sociologist who examines how parents across the socioeconomic spectrum decide what to feed their children, with a focus on the interactions between parents' economic resources and their ideas about food. Her work integrates insights from cultural sociology, public health, and behavioral economics. Currently, she is writing a book under contract with Columbia University Press. The Brown Bag talk will take place at the UC Berkeley Way West building, room 5401, 2121 Berkeley Way, Berkeley.