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Objective: This research examines the effects of educational materials, delivered with "take-home and cook-with-friends" meal kits, on college students' food agency. Participants: In the spring of 2021, 186 students were recruited at a US public university and randomly allocated into either an intervention group that received meal kits and educational materials or a control group that received only meal kits. Methods: Meal kits containing local ingredients were distributed weekly to the participants and surveys were conducted to measure participants' food agency, using the "Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale" (CAFPAS). Hypothesis tests and regression analysis were then conducted to examine the educational intervention's effects on the CAFPAS scores. Results: The educational intervention had a positive and statistically significant effect on students' CAFPAS scores. Conclusions: Educational interventions hold promise in enhancing college students' food agency, at least in the short term.

Abstract Objective: The Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) is a widely implemented 12-month behavioural weight loss programme for individuals with prediabetes. The DPP covers nutrition but does not explicitly incorporate cooking skills education. The objective of the current study is to describe food and cooking skills (FACS) and strategies of recent DPP participants. Design: Photo-elicitation in-depth interviews were conducted from June to August, 2021. Setting: Baltimore, MD, USA. Participants: Thirteen Black women who participated in DPP. Results: The DPP curriculum influenced participants’ healthy cooking practices. Many participants reported shifting from frying foods to air-frying and baking foods to promote healthier cooking and more efficient meal preparation. Participants also reported that their participation in DPP made them more mindful of consuming fruits and vegetables and avoiding foods high in carbohydrates, fats, sugars and Na. With respect to food skills, participants reported that they were more attentive to reading labels and packaging on foods and assessing the quality of ingredients when grocery shopping. Conclusions: Overall, participants reported changing their food preferences, shopping practices and cooking strategies to promote healthier eating after completing the DPP. Incorporating hands-on cooking skills and practices into the DPP curriculum may support sustained behaviour change to manage prediabetes and prevent development of type 2 diabetes among participants.

Objective: This research examines the effects of educational materials, delivered with "take-home and cook-with-friends" meal kits, on college students' food agency. Participants: In the spring of 2021, 186 students were recruited at a US public university and randomly allocated into either an intervention group that received meal kits and educational materials or a control group that received only meal kits. Methods: Meal kits containing local ingredients were distributed weekly to the participants and surveys were conducted to measure participants' food agency, using the Cooking and Food Provisioning Action Scale (CAFPAS). Hypothesis tests and regression analysis were then conducted to examine the educational intervention's effects on the CAFPAS scores. Results: The educational intervention had a positive and statistically significant effect on students' CAFPAS scores. Conclusions: Educational interventions hold promise in enhancing college students' food agency, at least in the short term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable diets have been identified as an important component of a food systems transformation that is urgently needed to meet global sustainability and development goals. This study addresses the lack of a comprehensive synthesis and overview of the sustainable diets literature, including its evolution over time and across disciplines, and sheds light on whether and how this body of work addresses dimensions of sustainability as defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation’s (FAO) sustainable diets framework. Topic modeling, a type of natural language processing, was used to perform a thematic scoping review of 855 articles published between 2000–2022 to identify trends and themes in a way that was rapid, transparent, reliable, and reproducible. This research finds demonstrated growth in the field of sustainable diets research, with the majority (66%) of sustainable diets articles considered in this study published in the last three years of the study period. Sixty-three percent of the sustainable diets research articles can be characterized by two topics, ‘sustainability impacts of dietary patterns’ and ‘sustainable diets and food system policy.’ FAO components of sustainable diets related to local and seasonal foods, culture, and equity receive relatively little research attention, whereas components of health, environment, and food security each align with approximately a third of the research literature. This is also reflected in the subject classification analysis, in which nearly half of the research (44%) was classified as Nutrition and Dietetics and/or Environmental Studies. This research highlights the need for more transdisciplinary research that addresses areas of equity, culture, social processes, and context as well as the intersections of sustainability dimensions to better understand the need for, implications, and directions of sustainable diets to support a sustainable food systems transformation.

Agricultural systems are deeply enmeshed in complex social processes and institutions, something Polanyi called embeddedness. Designing policy for sustainable agricultural activity requires understanding and measuring such embeddedness. Due to the difficulty of measuring complex social dynamics, however, most policy is aimed at measurable metrics such as price and production. The focus on these metrics imports the rational actor conceptualization of economic activity and fails to incorporate the values, motivations, and socio-cultural components of agricultural decision-making. This paper develops a tool for measuring embeddedness called the Embeddedness Type Matrix (ETM). The tool utilizes survey responses to elucidate economic actors' instrumentalism (decisions motivated by self-interest) and marketness (decisions motivated by market factors). Instrumentalism and marketness are considered together along perpendicular axes to determine the embeddedness quadrant of economic actors. The ETM allows researchers and policy-makers to better understand producers and consumers and design sustainability policies that are aligned with their values and motivations.

In many rural farming societies, wild plant foods (WPFs) continue to play an important role in everyday diets as well as in coping with hunger during food shortages. However, WPF collection and consumption may pose challenges to biodiversity conservation efforts (e.g., in protected areas), and some “famine foods,” foods not typically eaten under normal conditions, may have deleterious health impacts. Using data from a cross-sectional survey of 328 smallholder farmers and fisherfolk living in 15 villages surrounding Manombo Special Reserve on the southeastern coast of Madagascar, we examine the relationship between food security, dietary diversity, and consumption of WPFs, specifically giant aquatic arrowhead or via (Typhonodorum lindleyanum) and Polynesian arrowroot or tavolo (Tacca leontopetaloides), during the region's main lean season. We complement survey findings with focus group interviews to document traditional ecological knowledge and perceptions of these WPFs, including how tavolo and via are rendered edible, as well as human health effects from collecting, preparing, and eating them. Using multilevel logistic regression modeling, we found that consumption of these WPFs were significantly associated with inadequate nutrition among farmers. Wealthier households were less likely to consume these WPFs as a coping strategy during food insecure periods, while larger and more food insecure households were more likely to consume them. These findings reaffirm the importance of access to natural areas and support the design of protected area conservation strategies that honor local foodways and consider WPFs that serve as food safety nets for more vulnerable populations.

(1) Background: Healthful plant-based diets, especially those rich in minimally processed plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, have been associated with a lower risk of diet-related chronic disease. However, individuals who limit or avoid animal products may be at risk of nutrient deficiencies, especially related to Vitamin B12, Vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, iron, iodine, zinc, and protein. Such deficiencies can result in both short- and long-term health challenges. We used qualitative methods to explore plant-based eaters' knowledge and awareness of these eight nutrients of concern in diets that limit or exclude animal-source foods. (2) Methods: We conducted interviews with 28 rural flexitarian, pescatarian, vegan, or vegetarian adults in Vermont, USA. (3) Results: The participants positively viewed the healthfulness of plant-based diets, but many recognized limitations to accessing Vitamin B12, Vitamin D, and omega-3 fatty acids. They shared the strategies used to meet their needs including eating a varied diet, seeking out specific foods, and taking dietary supplements. Analyses identified gaps in the participants' knowledge related to nutrient bioavailability, food sources of specific nutrients, and the importance of zinc and iodine. Vegans—the highest-risk group—generally presented as the most knowledgeable. The participants noted a lack of local plant-based nutrition expertise. (4) Conclusions: Addressing the identified knowledge gaps and challenges to dietary adequacy, especially among those who limit, but do not fully omit, animal-source foods, may support plant-based nutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many teachers enter the profession through alternative certification programs, completing a master's degree at the same time as they start their teaching careers. This study explores the teaching and graduate experience of one of these teachers. In this collaborative inquiry, this teacher was both participant and co-researcher with two teacher educators. The themes of School Dysfunction, Culture Clash, Disconnect between Coursework and Teaching, and Authenticity emerged through the study of the teacher's work. These findings led to the conclusion that students' experience of teaching needs to be brought into graduate classrooms and treated as valuable knowledge. If new teachers are given opportunities to openly and more authentically confront the disconnections they experience in their teaching and academic work, they may be more able to find meaningful ways to navigate the complexity of teaching and change within schools.

This review of agroecology’s current work on culture and food traditions—a principle of the field and one of the FAO’s 10 Elements of Agroecology—reveals two things. First, although culture and tradition are frequently mentioned in passing, there is little published literature detailing how they intersect with agroecology. Second, mentions of tradition and culture in this corpus reveal scholarly assumptions that practicing agroecology or food sovereignty will naturally result in unspecified healthy, diversified, community-driven food choices. But consumption practices shape production practices at least as much as the reverse. Food cultures are complex, shifting, and geographically and historically informed, and must be considered within their rich contexts. Agroecology needs to critically engage with the kitchen and the table in order to achieve the holistic and multi-faceted agricultural transformations imagined by the FAO and others.

Public interest law has become increasingly globalized in the post-Cold War era, incorporated in national legal systems across the developing world, and deployed in transnational activist campaigns advancing social justice causes. This essay--the introduction to a symposium on public interest law across borders--examines the structural factors shaping the global trajectory of public interest law and offers a preliminary appraisal of its emerging global role. In Part I, we trace the historical movement of public interest law from an insular American project toward a more globalized set of practices and concepts. We suggest two reasons for this shift. The first is the ascendance of the Rule-of-Law movement, sponsored by international financial institutions and donor agencies, which has promoted public interest law around the world as a crucial component of good governance built upon a foundation of rights enforcement and political accountability. Against this backdrop, local activists, particularly in post-authoritarian countries, have turned to public interest law as a way to achieve the promise of new democratic orders while accessing crucial funding support. Second, the institutional framework of global governance has drawn public interest law into the contest over the impact of open markets and the power of human rights at the supranational level. Transnational activist networks have mobilized public interest law in efforts to hold international finance and trade institutions accountable for their distributional impacts, challenge the deregulation of global markets through multi-level advocacy efforts, and leverage the power of the human rights system to strengthen domestic social justice movements and build transnational solidarity. Part II explores the implications of these trends, suggesting that they point toward two evolving conceptions of public interest law: as a global institution and a technique of global governance. With respect to public interest law’s institutionalization in developing countries, we outline the factors shaping its distinctively hybrid form, which incorporates elements imported by global sponsors, while building upon indigenous traditions and adapting to opportunities afforded by national structures. As a tool of global governance, we suggest that public interest law is associated with a broad range of problem solving practices targeted to the transnational context. We conclude by offering a provisional map of the new terrain of this transnational advocacy, highlighting the global arenas in which it operates, the strategies it deploys, and the networks it constructs.

Objective: The Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) is a widely implemented 12-month behavioural weight loss programme for individuals with prediabetes. The DPP covers nutrition but does not explicitly incorporate cooking skills education. The objective of the current study is to describe food and cooking skills (FACS) and strategies of recent DPP participants. Design: Photo-elicitation in-depth interviews were conducted from June to August, 2021. Setting: Baltimore, MD, USA. Participants: Thirteen Black women who participated in DPP. Results: The DPP curriculum influenced participants' healthy cooking practices. Many participants reported shifting from frying foods to air-frying and baking foods to promote healthier cooking and more efficient meal preparation. Participants also reported that their participation in DPP made them more mindful of consuming fruits and vegetables and avoiding foods high in carbohydrates, fats, sugars and Na. With respect to food skills, participants reported that they were more attentive to reading labels and packaging on foods and assessing the quality of ingredients when grocery shopping. Conclusions: Overall, participants reported changing their food preferences, shopping practices and cooking strategies to promote healthier eating after completing the DPP. Incorporating hands-on cooking skills and practices into the DPP curriculum may support sustained behaviour change to manage prediabetes and prevent development of type 2 diabetes among participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]