O33 Healthy Eating Perspectives and Food Literacy Needs of Parents Living with Food Insecurity

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<h3>Background</h3> A healthy home depends on parents' health behaviors, nutrition knowledge, food literacy skills, and confidence in making healthy choices. Parents who lack these foundational skills are ill-equipped to model and encourage healthy family habits. Additionally, when parents also face economic barriers that limit food access while struggling with foundational food knowledge and skills, the ability to create a healthy home is diminished even further. Therefore, parental nutrition education programs delivered within an emergency food pantry (EFP) are valuable in targeting food insecure populations. Despite the value of nutrition education programs, little is known about parents' perspectives and barriers that influence their understanding and application of nutrition education to successfully provide a healthful home food environment. <h3>Objective</h3> To explore the barriers to, perspectives on, and nutrition education needs to support healthy eating identified by food-insecure parents within an EFP. <h3>Study Design, Setting, Participants</h3> In Spring 2019, a qualitative descriptive study was conducted using focus groups with low-income parents recruited from a parenting class run by Catholic Social Services in southeastern Pennsylvania. <h3>Measurable Outcome/Analysis</h3> Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Qualitative data were analyzed using a constant comparative method. <h3>Results</h3> Nine parents participated in the focus group (2 males and 7 females). Most were under 40 years-of-age, high school graduates, received federal nutrition assistance, and experienced food insecurity. Four themes emerged: 1) Cooking Confidence Deficit; 2) Healthy Meal Preparation Barriers; 3) Healthy Meal Acceptance Barriers; and 4) Meal Planning, Management, and Adaptability. <h3>Conclusion</h3> Emergent themes support the notion that limited food literacy impairs parents' ability to meet personal and familial nutrition needs. These findings also emphasize the need to develop and evaluate comprehensive and population-specific food literacy programs to promote community health within EFP settings.