Investigating the food environment in Hatfield and Hillcrest, Tshwane

Abstract

This study explored the availability of and accessibility to, healthy and varied food in the Hatfield and Hillcrest suburbs of Tshwane, South Africa. These suburbs are adjacent to the main campus of the University of Pretoria and house many of the university's students, in both university residences (TuksRes) and private accommodation. There are various factors that affect nutrition, such as food availability, affordability and variety; dietary preferences; knowledge and ability to prepare and cook food. A food desert is an area (a food environment) where sufficiently healthy and varied food are not readily available to the residents of the area, typically because supermarkets and greengrocers are too few and too far away. Other barriers to accessing enough of the right food are physical (eg: railway lines or mountains), psychological (eg: personal safety concerns), sociological (eg: cultural or religious dietary practices), personal (eg: allergies, shopping patterns, grocery carrying capacity or hours of work), information (eg: knowing what to eat and where to buy) and economical (ie: poverty). Currently, there are no clear measures to define a food desert or a neighbourhood that lacks access to healthy foods, and there are many complications with identifying one. Further, little research has been done on the prevalence of food deserts in a developing country such as South Africa. This places much flexibility on the researcher, with the risk of overor under-defining the problem. Hence, we investigated only some aspects of the food environment, namely the availability of, and access to, supermarkets that sell a suitable variety of fruit and vegetables. We also looked only at Hatfield and Hillcrest because they are conveniently demarcated by natural barriers and because the first author lives in the area and hence knows it well. Hopefully, this will contribute to a better understanding of food environments in general, and in South Africa in particular.