Indigenous urban food in the 21st century: researching Aboriginal peoples’ relationships with food

Research for the 21st century for Indigenous peoples must consider what we’re eating and how this relates to cultural survival and sustainability. Indigenous peoples face multiple disadvantages that influences access to food. The disadvantages that Indigenous people experience are not spatially uniform. Remote Australian Indigenous peoples consume the focus of research and policy interventions. However, more Indigenous people live in urban and regional areas than in remote areas. We don’t know if urban and regionally located Indigenous peoples experience food insecurity in similar ways to remote Indigenous peoples, or whether native foods are used as a coping strategies by urban Indigenous peoples for periods where they are unable to access food. This presentation uses preliminary research on pilot testing the US Household Food Security Module (HFSSM) – with additional demographic and cultural protocols modules; photovoice and a food basket method with Aboriginal people in a large urban town in Western Australia.