Speaker: Sabine Parrish, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London
Despite a range of policies and interventions across London, there continues to be increasing inequality in child health and weight between different neighbourhoods. This talk will introduce results from the Family Food Experience Study – London, which focused on primary school children aged 4-11 and their caregivers across eight London neighbourhoods to understand how families engage with obesity prevention and healthy eating interventions. Drawing on lived experience evidence, we show how unequal contexts experienced in daily life influence family food practices, allowing more affluent families to prioritise health and diverse diets to a much greater extent than poorer families. It is not a lack of interest in, or knowledge of, feeding children well which stops families from providing their children with healthy foods, but rather, structural and systemic constraints, which are felt with particular acuteness by high-deprivation families. In the wake of COVID-19 disruptions and the current cost-of-living crisis, and with families under ever-increasing financial pressures, we highlight the urgent need for joined up policy approaches which address underlying contexts of deprivation and impact on household food practices and child health outcomes.
Sabine Parrish is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Food Policy. She is currently working on the Family Food Experience - London study, where she supports all arms of the project and leads the qualitative data collection. With a background in food and medical anthropology, she has conducted ethnographic work in the United Kingdom, United States, and Brazil. Sabine is also a Research Associate of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity at the University of Oxford, as well as a Visiting Lecturer at Stanford University, BOSP. She was awarded a PhD DPhil (PhD) in Anthropology from the University of Oxford in 2021.
The talk will be followed by an online Q&A session.
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