Making Something from Nothing: Food Literacy Among Youth, Young Pregnant Women and Young Parents who are at Risk for Poor Health

The locally driven collaborative research project (LDCP) representing 8 health units in Ontario identified teens, and young parents and pregnant women aged 16 to 25 with highest priority in terms of health risk factors. For these groups, the project aimed to explore the meanings of food skills and develop a working definition, identify the barriers and facilitators to food skills acquisition and practice and use the findings to inform programs and policies that could improve healthy food preparation among young people at risk for poor health. Food deskilling in the general population has been identified as a major impediment to healthy eating, creating a greater reliance on convenience foods that are higher in saturated fat, salt and sugar, as well as putting strain on food budgets, which has a greater impact on at risk populations. The project is based on an awareness that designing effective programs for these ‘at risk’ groups requires more knowledge about what they do and how they think about food preparation, as well as what they want to learn.