Experience and expression of food insecurity across cultures: practical implications for valid measurement

This paper attempts to compare experiences and expressions of food security across cultures. The hypothesis is that the core themes that underlie the Core Food Security Module (CFSM) in the United States are also important components of the experience of food insecurity in other countries and cultures. The paper compares 21 food security studies, complimented with insights from ethnographic literature. The principles embodied in the CFSM do appear to identify different levels of food insecurity in different cultures. However, certain assumptions about the severity of food insecurity are often context-specific.

The U.S. Core Food Security Module (U.S. CFSM) measures five different types of experiences and behaviours indicate insecurity, which serve as a useful starting point against which to assess other country experiences:

• anxiety that the food budget or supply may be insufficient to meet basic needs
• perceptions that household food was inadequate in quality or quantity
• reported instances or consequences of reduced food intake by adults
• reported instances or consequences of reduced food intake by children
• coping actions taken by the household to augment the food budget or food supply

Selected preliminary findings of this exploratory study are summarised as follows:

• food insecurity is handled through a “managed process” across countries. However, the order and assumptions about the severity in each culture is context-specific and is dependent on factors such as social acceptability and the availability of a particular coping strategy
• there is a trade-off between the generic phrasing of a question required for universal relevance and the cultural specificity required to ensure comprehension by the respondent
• existing questions relating to perceptions of diet quality are among the most challenging to convey across cultures
• questions may not be answered the way they are intended if a coping strategy has been exhausted and if the behaviour asked of a male relates to an activity in the female purview and vice versa
• some agreement should be now be possible with regard to develop a set of criteria that can be used to assess the validity of adapted experiential food insecurity scales across different cultures without complete data sets