As unprecedented unemployment rates and disruptions in food supply chains have continued to unfold around the world, the pandemic has led to a substantial rise in food insecurity, which includes actual and perceived lack of access to nutritious food. In the United States and in New York State, record numbers of people have filed for unemployment since March 2020, leading to reductions in income available to purchase food.

“We were increasingly seeing reports that people were turning to gardening, fishing, backyard poultry, foraging, and hunting during the pandemic, and seeing people outside doing these activities,” says Dr. Kathryn Fiorella, Food Systems and Health concentration chief with the MPH Program. Teaming up with fellow MPH faculty Dr. Karla Hanson and Dr. Amelia Greiner Safi, Cornell ’06, along with researchers from the Department of Natural Resources, Fiorella began to lead an investigation “to better understand use of these activities in New York, people’s motivations for engaging in them, and how these strategies relate to food insecurity.”

After surveying over 500 households from counties across the state, the researchers began to work with four MPH students to analyze the survey data and develop a set of white papers for Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) offices for their capstone projects, across the different food procurement strategies: gardening, fishing, backyard poultry, and hunting and foraging.

“The gardening group was the largest of all four groups,” says Shuai Yuan. Almost all of the gardening respondents had high levels of education and income, “and would normally be considered food secure,” says Yuan. However, she points out that many of them had also experienced loss of employment or income during COVID-19, “so they might be less food secure than we would have thought.” One of Yuan’s main takeaways from the project was that the U.S. literature on public and home gardens seems focused on youth nutrition education and community building, rather than “people really trying to get food from gardening,” which seems to be more common in gardening research from developing countries. She says there is a need to look at gardening more from a food security perspective in the U.S. as well.

“We found that some people are fishing more during the pandemic than before, and some less,” says Zi Wang. Most survey respondents who fish have done so for many years. “It’s a tradition for them, or a hobby.” There are many barriers to fishing, says Wang, including the amount of time it takes to fish, and how safe fish are to eat from different water sources. She says organizations like the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and CCE are supporting people’s fishing practices through water conservation, improving access to fishing waters, and supplying fishing equipment. “Senior support is also important,” she points out, since many of the respondents who fish were older and “health conditions are a big concern that could prevent them from fishing.”

“The poultry group was a relatively small population,” says Lu Liu. She points out that “raising chickens is hard, and has a lot of pros and cons.” Eggs can be a food source or sold for money, and it is easy to find information about raising chickens online. However, it also requires a yard, access to equipment, and constant cleaning, maintenance, and exclusion of predators. Local policy can also be a limiting factor. “Chickens might be part of the food security solution,” says Liu, but for households in New York State, “they may not be as important as some of the other strategies.”

“There is a real opportunity to use these strategies to help with food security,” says Aly Trombitas, “especially for rural populations living further from a grocery store, or with limited incomes.” She was surprised to find that survey respondents were far less concerned about food safety with hunting than with foraging and plant identification. Trombitas thinks this might result from the efficacy of DEC classes, which hunters are required to take in New York. She was interested to discover that many people rely on YouTube for information on these strategies, since “CCE doesn’t necessarily have a huge YouTube presence.” She also points out that the history of foraging strategies being “colonized or co-opted” from indigenous people is important for agencies to consider when working with different populations “without damaging the land.”

Written by Audrey Baker