Food Journeys: Place, Mobility, and the Everyday Food Practices of Young People

Abstract

We examine the everyday food practices of a group of high school students living in an urban, multicultural, and lower income community in San Diego, California. We integrate theoretical and empirical insights from research in health, food, and youth geographies and offer a relational conceptualization and analysis of the food environment that is sensitive to young people's everyday mobilities and encounters with food. We pay particular attention to how young people journey through the local food landscape and navigate contradictions between food norms across places, including home, school, and neighborhood. Our goal is to uncover young people's personal and emotional engagements with what, how, and where they eat. Our methodology begins by recognizing young people's agency and centers on an analysis of the spatiality of their food routines. We present results of a year-long participatory study involving Global Positioning System–tagged photography, Photovoice interviews, and surveys. Our results provide a fine-grained analysis of young people's daily engagements with their food environments and reveal how their food journeys are structured and governed by social relations, physical and material constraints, biopolitics, and emotional geographies. Our approach permits a critical and dynamic understanding of the food environment and its relationship to young people's food practices, with useful insights for health research and policy.