Many older adults in rural Indiana are considered low-income, creating barriers to quality of life, including food insecurity. Since 2019, Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement has partnered with Sustainable Food Systems Science (SFSS) and collaborated to explore strategies for combating food insecurity across rural Indiana counties. This project specifically investigated the barriers to accessing and consuming sufficient, culturally appropriate food among older adults, and the complex provisioning strategies elders used to mitigate household food insecurity.
Defining food insecurity
Food insecurity is the inability to access enough safe, nutritious, culturally appropriate food. Older adults are more vulnerable to food insecurity due to limited incomes; health conditions that may both limit diets and further decrease incomes; limited cooking ability due to increasing age; and limited access to stores and meal sites. Rural, or nonmetro areas, have higher incidences of poverty and food insecurity than metro areas.
Conducting the project
The project involved five steps:
- Focus discussion groups to gather older adults' and community stakeholders' perspectives on barriers to food security
- A survey to further explore themes unearthed in the focus groups
- In-depth interviews with older adults, including photovoice, a method where participants shared photographs of their foodways
- Diet modeling to ascertain the degree to which current government programs meet needs of senior populations and common challenges that require dietary restrictions, such as lactose intolerance, type 2 diabetes, and renal disease
- A co-design phase to identify community assets and devise sustainable solutions to barriers
The focus
The team worked with residents of Crawford, Greene, Lawrence, and Orange counties, four rural counties in the Indiana Uplands, focusing on individuals age 60 and older. This population accounts for 28,617 individuals according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and of that population, it is estimated that 4,108 are food insecure.
The participants
In all, 1,632 people participated in this study.
This included:
- 65 focus group participants
- 1,482 survey takers
- 23 interviewees
- 40 co-design participants
The objective
Through the four-county case study, the team explored:
- What food insecurity looks like among seniors in rural Indiana
- How provisioning strategies of seniors change throughout a typical year and how they changed over their lifetimes
- How various provisioning strategies shape food access and consumption by older Americans
- What program and policy-specific leverage points exist to improve food security among older Americans
- The extent to which communities, based on their existing assets, can devise sustainable programs to improve food security among older Americans
Finding the barriers
Food insecure households navigate a blend of federal, state, and local programs to procure food, in addition to employing informal strategies. The research team determined that barriers to food security existed at the individual, community, and societal (structural) levels. Individual barriers included physical limitations, loneliness (loss of partner, relatives, and friends), limited income, and technological barriers. Community barriers included lack of public transportation, the widespread recent closure of public congregate meal sites and senior centers, and lack of knowledge about assistance programs. Structural barriers included rising costs, stigma, declining societal food knowledge, the inability of government programs to accommodate special diets, and unrealistic SNAP benefit levels. All counties except Orange County identified the issue of getting nutritious, safe and culturally appropriate food to people or people to food as a principal concern. In Orange County, the identified issue was the cost of nutritious, safe, and culturally appropriate food.
Moving forward
The research team determined that food insecurity, poor health, and loneliness are inextricably linked. Importantly, any solution to food insecurity must not only address issues of food access but also must address the loneliness many older adults in rural locations face.
The research team recommends ongoing community support in the form of grant writing to provide food processing facilities, cooperative groceries, transportation, and food delivery vouchers; coordination with local schools and foundations to create volunteer programs catering to older adults; reopening and enhancing the congregate meal sites once COVID concerns are mitigated; and working with housing authorities to restructure rules to provide space, supplies, and equipment for patio gardening.
Resources
Research
- Navigating Food Insecurity as a Rural Older Adult: The Importance of Congregate Meal Sites, Social Networks and Transportation Services
- Food Routines Among Older Adults Survey Data
Articles and media coverage
- Senior food insecurity connected to isolation, program barriers in rural areas
- 'Food apartheid' remains a hurdle for millions of Americans, but it severely harms the elderly
- IU researchers: food insecurity in southern Indiana linked to transportation
Webinars
- Complex Food Provisioning Strategies and Food Insecurity among Low-Income Older Americans | 2021 Indiana University Rural Conference
- Teen Food Insecurity in Southern Indiana | 2021 Indiana University Rural Conference
- Navigating Food Security with Community Compass™
- Trauma-Informed Basics in Food Security Initiatives