Conference on Food Resilience, Access & Equity

During the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity and food access issues came center-stage, and usually research lags behind. Anticipating the need for timely data, researchers from UTHealth School of Public Health and the Dell Medical School’s Population Health Department independently yet collaboratively sought to better understand how food insecurity and food access issues were being experienced by lower-income, racially/ethnically diverse community members during the pandemic. Leveraging existing partnerships and COVID-specific research projects , teams from these institutions gathered quantitative and qualitative data at various stages of the pandemic to see how these issues were impacting community members . Although the researchers worked with different communities in Central Texas, both research teams found that pre-existing disparities and inequities in food access and food insecurity were exacerbated and widened during the pandemic. Their data brings to light barriers in access to services, such as language spoken, immigration status and family size. These community-specific findings are crucial to understanding not only how food insecurity and food access issues are occurring locally, but how we can develop policies and programs to support those most in need. To that end, data from these projects was shared with the City of Austin to inform food access planning.