Food Systems and Health

Sara Shostak is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Health: Science, Society, and Policy (HSSP) Program at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching interests encompass medical sociology, science and technology studies, and environmental sociology. Across these domains, Shostak focuses on how to understand - and address - inequalities in health. Shostak's first book - Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health (University of California Press, 2013) - won the Robert K. Merton Book Award from the American Sociology Association’s Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology and the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the Medical Sociology Section. Shostak’s current book project is a study of urban agriculture in New England cities; as part of this work, she has collaborated on community based research projects with The Urban Farming Institute of Boston, The Food Project, and Groundwork Somerville. Brea L. Perry is an Associate Professor of Sociology and an affiliated faculty of the Indiana University Network Science Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on the intersections of social networks, medical sociology, biosociology, and social inequalities. Her current NIH-funded projects investigate social network indicators of prescription drug seeking behavior, the role of personal social networks in neurodegeneration and older adults’ cognitive decline, and the coevolution of recent Mexican immigrants’ social networks and oral health attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes.

Sociologists address critiques of the dominant food system, causes of poor nutrition and its public health consequences, food policy and program initiatives at multiple levels, and divergent cultural and political responses to policy interventions. Their topics include rich foods: the cross-national effects of healthy eating on health outcomes, food priorities: socio-demographic variation in constrained choices at the grocery store, educational attainment and dietary lifestyles, extensions of what and to whom: a qualitative study of self-provisioning service delivery in a university extension program, and grounded in the neighborhood and the community: social capital and health in community gardens.

• Introduction: Towards a Sociology of Food Systems and Population Health; Sara Shostak Part 1 - Food Systems and Health Outcomes Chapter 1 - Food System Channels, Health and Illness; Jeffery Sobal Chapter 2 - Rich Foods: The Cross-National Effects of Healthy Eating on Health Outcomes; Jane S. van Heuvelen and Tom van Heuvelen Chapter 3 - Food Insecurity and Mental Health: A Gendered Issue?; Gabriele Ciciurkaite and Robyn Lewis Brown Part 2 - The Social Determinants of Consumption Chapter 4 - Food Priorities: Sociodemographic Variation in Constrained Choices at the Grocery Store; Christy Freadreacea Brady Chapter 5 - Educational Attainment and Dietary Lifestyles; Hannah Andrews, Terrence D. Hill and William C. Cockerham  Chapter 6 - Let them eat cake: Socioeconomic status and caregiver indulgence of children’s food and drink requests; Brea L. Perry and Jessica McCrory Calarco Part 3 - Alternative Food Institutions and Ideologies Chapter 7 - The Promises and Pitfalls of Alternative Food Institutions: Impacts on and Barriers to Engagement with Low-Income Persons in the United States and Canada; Amy Jonason Chapter 8 - Extension of What and to Whom? A Qualitative Study of Self-Provisioning Service Delivery in a University Extension Program; Ashley Colby and Emily Huddart Kennedy Chapter 9 - “Grounded in the Neighborhood, Grounded in Community”: Social Capital and Health in Community Gardens; Sara Shostak and Norris Guscott Chapter 10 - Reclaiming Policy Imagination: Buen Vivir, policy culture, and the policy divide between health and agriculture in Puerto Rico; Gabriel Blouin Genest