Objective. To explore how food insecurity affects individuals' ability to manage their diabetes, as narrated by participants living in a large, culturally diverse urban centre. Design. Qualitative study comprising of in-depth interviews, using a semistructured interview guide. Setting. Participants were recruited from the local community, three community health centres, and a community-based diabetes education centre servicing a low-income population in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Participants. Twenty-one English-speaking adults with a diagnosis of diabetes and having experienced food insecurity in the past year (based on three screening questions). Method. Using six phases of analysis, we used qualitative, deductive thematic analysis to transcribe, code, and analyze participant interviews. Main Findings. Three themes emerged from our analysis of participants' experiences of living with food insecurity and diabetes: (1) barriers to accessing and preparing food, (2) social isolation, and (3) enhancing agency and resilience. Conclusion. Food insecurity appears to negatively impact diabetes self-management. Healthcare professionals need to be cognizant of resources, skills, and supports appropriate for people with diabetes affected by food insecurity. Study findings suggest foci for enhancing diabetes self-management support.
Following the success of our 11th International World Dietetics conference, with the theme "It's High Time: From Awareness to Action: Advancing social justice through critical health pedagogies," we are continuing to see more submissions to the Journal that contend with social justice and equity concerns.In this issue of the Journal of Critical Dietetics, we present articles that assert meaningful critique regarding food security, inclusion, whiteness, food policy, and eating disorders.These topics, and the means by which they are contextualized, are received like a cool glass of water on a stifling hot day; much needed and ultimately refreshing.Despite intending to publish articles as they arrived, we found ourselves with many articles arriving in close proximity, so once again, we are publishing an entire issue.It is a feast for the equity senses.This issue includes several firsts for the Journal; we have our first letter to the editor and a response.Kate Burt's article on the whiteness of the Mediterranean diet from Volume 5, Issue 2, motivated a response from Kelly Toups, to which Kate Burt again responded.This is one of the foundational activities of critical scholarship; a public sharing, responding, and engagement with each other's work.We are pleased to see that happening among
In this autoethnography regarding the writing and sharing of an educational autofiction, I explore the vulnerability inherent in moving from the imagined to the real in a pedagogical context. Autoethnographic fiction is a scholarly method with the potential to disrupt traditional, science-based discourses dominant in health profession education. This potential was enacted in a senior undergraduate dietetics class when students were invited to read and write their own autoethnographies. Marked by vulnerability, I came to embody the transformative theory of being unfinalized as I endeavoured to resist the way things have always been in dietetics and make visible the emotional process of writing autoethnographic fiction as a move towards personal and social transformation.
<p>What is the result of bringing unrealistic and overwhelming conditions of motherhood into the con- text of a global pandemic? This article aims to explore the impacts of maternal expectations and experiences in the context of COVID-19. Through first-person ac- counts of eighty self-identified mothers parenting through COVID, we aim to explore “good” mother myths, feelings of failure, and the paradoxical freedoms that occur under pandemic time. </p>
The three of us (be)come together, yes on Zoom calls and in Google docs, and in a way that re-imagines the sitting together at a well-worn kitchen table to animate our current shared preoccupations. The table has seen many conversations before us, so it’s well-worn by feminist scholars who were also troubled, yearning, and adamant about leaving their marks. We have come to, become at, this type of table for centuries, sitting together preparing food, folding laundry, and washing up, all while also reckoning that our stories matter and can make a difference. In a context that is both practical and intellectual – centring fat liberation in public health nutrition – how do we remain good scholarly support to one another in and through challenging times? Times of dissent. Times of tedium. This chapter reveals the stories we need most now as we grapple with our places in the neoliberal university and public health pedagogy, specifically as a critique of policies that we read as non-liberatory. We grapple with how our complicity within these spaces might be considered from a place of mutual support and a shared commitment to unlearning and unsettling colonial ways of knowing, especially as we contemplate the problematics of public health imperatives regarding “intuitive eating” and health behaviour change. And we ask what this means for scholarship that is accountable to liberation, that is, personal survival and collective healing and learning.
