Since graduating from college, Dr. Cayce Hughes, CC Assistant Professor of Sociology, has had an interest in food access and food justice. These interests led him to a graduate program in public health, but he found the focus and methods in addressing the topics unfulfilling.
“The approaches that people were taking in public health at that time, around poverty and food and food security, were a lot about band-aids on the problem and telling poor people what to do and how to eat better. And I was just really not interested in that approach,” says Hughes.
He wanted to get more to the root of these problems by asking different questions. And by talking to the people most affected by food insecurity, who are the real experts on their experience.
That research has now led to the recent publication of two papers stemming from his work with collaborators at Rice University and North Carolina State. Their study focuses on how low-income mothers in Sunnyside, TX, a high-poverty, historically Black neighborhood in Houston, navigate food insecurity. Hughes and his colleagues received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to do the study and began their research in the fall of 2020, looking at pandemic responses and food-related supports.
The papers, “Emergency Food Support Preference and Usage During COVID-19: A Neighborhood Study of Low-Income Black Mothers’ use of School-Based Food Distribution and P-EBT” (Simon E. Fern, Rachel T. Kimbro, Eboni Hill, and Cayce C. Hughes) published in American Journal of Public Health, and “‘If I got it, she got it’: Food Provision and Symbiotic Mothering” (Marbella Eboni Hill, Simon Fern, Rachel T. Kimbro, and Cayce C. Hughes), published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, are based on the teams’ interviews with 45 mothers and grandmothers about the strategies they use to feed their families and the structural barriers that can make that task difficult to accomplish.
“Initially our interest was in how Black mothers in the neighborhood piece together enough support from all these different sources,” says Hughes. “That includes formal public assistance like food stamps, but also informal supports such as sharing meals with neighbors or visiting food pantries to just have enough food on a given day, month, or year. When you use certain survey methods, or if you focus on just one program like food stamps, which is what a lot of research does, you learn a lot about people who are getting food stamps and you don’t really learn about all the people who are excluded from the program or the people who only get food stamps for some part of the year. We wanted to home in on the household and talk to people directly about their day in, day out, often invisible strategies to feed their families.”
The study also addressed the fact that while poverty and food insecurity are related, it’s not always necessarily a linear relationship. Many factors can play into the connection or disassociation between the two. Things like systematic discrimination, red-lining, and the production of food deserts (which Hughes notes that food justice scholars have redefined as “food apartheids”) set up many of these women to fail.
The goal was to talk directly with mothers, who are mostly responsible for food provision , to get a sense of their everyday routines and strategies . Hughes and his team recognized early in their study that some of the challenges within a household, such as having adequate storage or cooking facilities and having the ability to pay their utilities every month, are highly influential in the food security of a family. It’s difficult to cook a meal on the stove or zap something in the microwave if your gas and electricity isn’t working.
“Another thing that came up through the study was the benefit of having a deep freezer,” says Hughes. “It had never occurred to me that being able to have something like that could be a lifesaver because it allows for buying foods in bulk and storing leftovers. Those that had deep freezers could cook a big meal that would stretch for days.”
Through their interviews, the researchers found that, for some people, while they would love to have access to this kind of food-saving method, the onerous rules in public housing wouldn’t allow for the extra utilities required to run one.
“That could be a total game changer if you think about what’s actually going to help people,” says Hughes. “Many of the people in our study would have been like, ‘give me a deep freezer. I can use that. I already know how to make the food stretch. I know how to cook on a budget.’”
These methods of support would also honor people’s agency, Hughes argues. The papers promote the idea of supporting the strategies that these women already have rather than imposing aid that is assumed to be beneficial.
“What we should be doing is supporting and strengthening the existing strategies and social support networks that these mothers already have established,” says Hughes. “We should make it easier for them to do the things they already know how to do.”
Hughes points out that one of the most prominent themes in the study was that the participants had elaborate, detailed, and informed strategies that were passed on intergenerationally. They depend on their social networks. They use social media, like TikTok videos about cost-effective cooking and grocery discounts, to support one another and share information.
“They do not present a deficit framework for their own mothering the way that researchers often do,” says Hughes. “They are of course well-aware of the challenges they face, but they see themselves and other mothers doing the hard work. They are prideful about their accomplishments. It’s collective mothering.” Hughes is now working on a third paper from his research, attempting to take a longer, historical view of what has produced the conditions the mothers are currently experiencing, including the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow policies.
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