Home

Healthy environments need to be created that enable easy access to healthy and nutritious food. Cities in an increasingly urbanising world are ideal places for such transformation. Current public health strategies fail to effectively promote adequate nutrition in populations because they focus on individuals’ behaviours and choices without addressing larger influences such as food cultures and food systems.

A systems approach is needed to address the so far intractable global challenge of malnutrition leading to chronic diseases in all but the poorest countries in the world. The governments of the Caribbean Community have recognised the challenge of high obesity and chronic disease rates in their social and economic development and committed to policy solutions that improve local healthy food production and consumption. To inform their efforts and accelerate action, we are historians and public health researchers and aim to identify the ways cities in low and middle-income countries impact on their populations’ food practices, opportunities and in turn health.

We aim to develop an in-depth understanding of underlying mechanisms that have led to both ‘unhealthy’ spaces (e.g. fast food dense neighbourhoods) or ‘healthy’ spaces (e.g. urban gardens). By investigating how these social, political and economic determinants of nutrition have developed historically and shaped into contemporary foodscapes, the goal of our project is to inform the prevention of chronic diseases by enhancing healthy eating strategies.

The project is funded by the AHRC (GCRF UKRI Collective Programme: AH/T00407X/1)

Map of Caribbean Foodscapes Symposium Attendees
We’ve put together a map of all the attendants of the symposium. The breadth of knowledge and expertises is fantastic and we hope you use the map to connect with others working on food systems across the globe.
Click here!

Twitter feed is not available at the moment.

Symposium

Global Food Systems in Local ContextsUnderstanding Contemporary Food Systems Through Time Virtual Symposium: 16-19th February 2021 University of Exeter European Centre for Environment and Human Health and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health with the University of the West Indies Caribbean Institute for Health Research The field of food systems research must… Continue reading Symposium

Transdisciplinary Data Assemblages

This transdisciplinary project aims to understand how historical data of Caribbean food systems can be identified, curated and used to inform current policy and practice strategies for better nutrition and health.There is an urgent need to understand global and local food systems to support easy and equitable access to healthy and nutritious food, particularly in… Continue reading Transdisciplinary Data Assemblages

Jamaican Foodscapes

This project focused on the historical and epidemiological transitions in urban Caribbean foodscapes and aims to understanding the past to enhance future healthy eating practices. The projects built interdisciplinary methodological capacity to tackle this challenge. Based in Kingston (Jamaica) and Port-au-Prince (Haiti) this project explored the ways cities impact on their populations’ food practices and… Continue reading Jamaican Foodscapes