Abstract
The counties with the highest rates of food insecurity are disproportionately rural and located in the South. However, few studies have examined why food insecurity rates are higher in rural areas or looked at the lived experiences of food-insecure rural residents. In this chapter, drawing on a mixed-methods study of poor and working-class families in two rural North Carolina counties, we offer a qualitative analysis of the ways poor rural families access food and their experiences coping with and preventing food shortages. We find that place shapes people’s access to food and the resources they draw on during food shortages. Rural residents confront specific barriers, including higher travel costs and fewer emergency food resources, but they also draw on place-specific resources, including gardens and farms and strong social support networks. Latino/a/x immigrants in rural areas experience distinct challenges related to accessing culturally appropriate food, especially in contexts of intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric and surveillance.
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Notes
- 1.
Categories come from the Census, which distinguishes between race and ethnicity. Percentages for the white population are for white, non-Hispanic.
- 2.
Although Puerto Rico is part of the USA and subjects born in Puerto Rico are not immigrants, they faced similar challenges in terms of accessing specific herbs, fruits, vegetables, and meats to make dishes from their childhood and so we include them here.
- 3.
In contrast, rural counties were found to have more emergency food providers per capita in a 2017 study, but these county-level measures likely mask significant spatial variation within counties (Gundersen et al., 2017).
- 4.
The study found that 67% of rural adults said they had “ever received help from a neighbor or people in their local community, including help handling an emergency situation, finding a temporary place to live, or getting important work done” (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), 2018).
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Bowen, S., Hardison-Moody, A., Elliott, S. (2021). How Families Cope with Food Insecurity in the Rural South. In: Francis, L.A., McHale, S.M., King, V., Glick, J.E. (eds) Families, Food, and Parenting. National Symposium on Family Issues, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56458-2_2
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