Our new paper about relationships between urban agriculture and diet, and what might explain this, has just been published in Appetite! Our research shows that people who were near to or engaged in urban agriculture make more healthy and ethically-motivated food choices, and this is related to having a healthier diet.

In Rurban Revolution we are interested in understanding how urban agriculture might be beneficial for healthy diets. Research suggests that there’s a link between urban food growing and having a healthier diet, but we’re not sure how or why that might be. Understanding this is important for designing future urban agriculture-based interventions. Our new paper is one of the first to investigate this.

We ran a large online survey to investigate how being near to or involved in urban agriculture might be related to a healthy diet, and what might explain this. Adults in the UK answered questionnaires about urban agriculture where they live and their involvement with it, their access to fruit and vegetables, making healthy and ethical food choice motivations, feeling connected to nature, psychological distress, and their diet.

We found that being near to or engaged in urban agriculture was associated with making more healthy and ethically-motivated food choices, which was then linked to having a healthier diet. This tells us that we should focus on these motivations when we design urban agriculture interventions to support healthy diets. Even more, it didn’t matter if people were taking part in urban growing or just lived near an example of it, the effect was the same – just exposing people to urban agriculture could be beneficial even if they’re not growing food themselves. We’re particularly excited by this finding because more people are likely to be near urban agriculture than actually taking part in it.

We also found that being more exposed to urban agriculture was associated with feeling more connected with nature, more perceived access to fruit and vegetables, although these weren’t related to healthier diets in our study. A surprising finding was that greater exposure to urban agriculture was associated with more psychological distress, which was then related to a poorer quality diet. We think that this surprising finding might reflect people getting involved with urban agriculture as a way of coping with stress, but we need to do some more research to confirm this.

Overall, this study gives us a first insight in to what explains the relationship between urban agriculture and healthy diets. It also shows us that just being near to urban agriculture could be beneficial. We’re planning to confirm these findings by testing this in the “real world”. The next step will be to see what happens to people’s food choices, feelings, and diet when we introduce them to urban agriculture in real life.

You can read our paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195666321001252

or contact Bethan Mead to find out more: b.mead@liverpool.ac.uk