Opening the door to dialogue: Experiences from equity-seeking students in dietetic education

Lack of diversity and barriers persist for marginalized students both when entering the dietetic profession and during their education. Through generative dialogue, as four dietitians in Canada, we discussed and reflected on our experiences in dietetic education and training. Our dialogue generated three themes: barriers, belonging, and resilience. We concluded by providing key recommendations for dietetic educators to support the learning of students from marginalized communities and call for difficult conversations about social justice in dietetic education.

Bouncing forward in challenging times

The COVID-19 pandemic is a disruption which has posed challenges to food sector organizations. Yet it may also provide an opportunity for growth of and change in these organizations. Our aims were to describe the surge in demand and innovations introduced by a rural food distribution cooperative and to critically assess responses in light of organizational resilience literature. We chose an organizational case study approach with mixed methods. Data sources included: existing reports, newsletters, policies and quantitative indicators; and new stakeholder interviews (n=20). We describe: the development and nature of the cooperative; its consolidation and anticipatory planning; the March 2020 surge in orders (133/week in February to 205/wk in March); the prioritization of health and safety in modifying product receiving and delivery methods; the warehouse reorganization and product aggregation doubling to twice per week; the strains on employees and human resource challenges; yet the growing organizational resilience. We reflect on the small role of the cooperative in the inequitable agri-food system of the counties it serves, yet the strong role it plays with other food security oriented organizations in keep with its values. Further work, both research and practice development, can continue to explore the ways in which complex multi-stakeholder, not-for-profit, socially and environmentally principle food organizations can better navigate disruptions in the coming years, particularly in rural areas.

A historical analysis of the Mediterranean Diet’s rise to prominence through the lens of Critical Race Theory

Ample evidence indicates that adherence to the Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) decreases the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, cancer mortality, type 2 diabetes, overweight, and obesity. The MedDiet is widely accepted as a gold standard diet, yet its adoption and promotion as the healthiest cultural diet reflects systemic racism and inherently biased research, rather than evidence-based science. This analysis establishes that while the Mediterranean region is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, the MedDiet is a White diet. It also asserts that a lack of causal research and other methodologic issues in research about the MedDiet has resulted in a hyperfocus on the MedDiet over other cultural diets. Third, this essay compares the MedDiet to the traditional Chinese and African diets to assert that many cultural diets are healthy and may be as healthy as the MedDiet. Ultimately, health professionals promoting the MedDiet as a gold standard marginalize people from non-White cultures by maintaining White culture as normative. In order to better serve and include people of color, dietary recommendations need to become as diverse as the US population. Doing so will also improve cultural competence among professionals, lead to a more equitable profession

Cooking up an injustice: A critical examination of the role of cooking programs in reducing health inequalities

The way we eat is one of the biggest causes of preventable illness and death, particularly for those living in more deprived areas. Public health interventions often include courses teaching cooking ‘from scratch’ as an affordable means of dietary improvement, but this paper questions the effectiveness of such programs. Using an in-depth case study of a leading healthy cooking programme, including ethnographic observations of seven cooking classes and interviews with 35 participants and three members of staff, we show that the impact of this programme was limited by its adherence to conventional ‘nutrient-focused’ framings of healthy eating. Teaching based on this framing created confusion by separating nutrients from foods, hampered embodied learning of skills and ultimately failed to address how learnings could be integrated into the everyday lives of participants Unable to engage with inequities in access, preparation time, food environments or other sociocultural influences on eating habits, courses built on similarly nutricentric foundations will never be able to address the major barriers to healthy eating faced by their target participants. As an alternative, we propose that cooking courses grounded in a more ‘practice-based’ understanding of healthy eating would be more effective at changing dietary behaviours, especially in areas of higher deprivation.