Understanding home food environments

The food we eat represent many features of life including our culture, community, family, history, tradition, and nutrition and health. Food in the home is one expression of those features and other aspects of life including preferences, habits and access. The home food environment offers an opportunity to understand how the food around us impacts what we eat and our health. The Food at Home study research team, including center members Professor Jayne Fulkerson, PhD, study PI, and Professor Mary Hearst, PhD, has developed a way to measure the food that is available in our everyday home environments.

They created a checklist of foods and beverages available in the home called the Home Food Inventory (HFI). Foods that are available in homes are the foods people choose to eat when at home. With new grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, the team updated the HFI so that it is shorter and made sure it is useful for both native English and native Spanish speakers.

An electronic version of the HFI provides the written word of each food, visual images, and links to hear the word spoken aloud in English or Spanish. To ensure the HFI will best serve the needs of the Latinx community, the research team is engaging community organizations for their input and have developed a community advisory board.

They have validated the paper version and are currently validating the electronic versions of the HFI. In the end, they hope to better understand how home food environments are related to the health of both native-Spanish speaking and native English-speaking households. You can read more about the study at z.umn.edu/foodathome. The website also includes a link to contact staff for those who are interested in participating in the study.