Integrating coordination of food purchasing into activity space-based food environment research: Toward a household perspective.

Despite the advances in person-based approaches to studying food environments, most studies using these approaches have relied on individual-centered activity space measures and largely ignored cohabiting household members who play crucial roles in shaping an individual's food access, food behaviors, and diet. This can be problematic for completely capturing food environments relevant to an individual and add uncertainties to explorations of how individuals' food environments relate to their food behaviors. This viewpoint discusses the need for, and implications of, considering household members when measuring food access and disentangling the behavioral pathways connecting the food environment to diet. Ultimately, a conceptual framework and potential questions are proposed to integrate household members into food environment research.

Who's cooking tonight? A time-use study of coupled adults in Toronto, Canada.

Understanding how coupled adults arrange food-related labor in relation to their daily time allocation is of great importance because different arrangements may have implications for diet-related health and gender equity. Studies from the time-use perspective argue that daily activities such as work, caregiving, and non-food-related housework can potentially compete for time with foodwork. However, studies in this regard are mostly centered on individual-level analyses. They fail to consider cohabiting partners' time spent on foodwork and non-food-related activities, a factor that could be helpful in explaining how coupled partners decide to allocate time to food activities. Using 108 daily time-use logs from seventeen opposite-gender couples living in Toronto, Canada, this paper examines how male and female partners' time spent on non-food-related activities impact the total amount of time spent on foodwork by coupled adults and the difference in time spent on foodwork between coupled women and men. Results show that both male and female partners took a higher portion of foodwork when their partner worked longer. When men worked for additional time, the couple-level duration of foodwork decreased. Without a significant impact on the gender difference in foodwork duration, women's increased caregiving duration was associated with a reduction of total time spent on foodwork by couples. An increase in caregiving and non-food-related chores by men was associated with an increased difference in duration of foodwork between women and men, which helped secure a constant total amount of foodwork at the couple level. These behavioral variations between men and women demonstrate the gender differences in one's responsiveness to the change of partners' non-food-related tasks. The associations found among non-food-related activities and foodwork are suggestive of a need to account for partners' time allocation when studying the time-use dynamics of foodwork and other daily activities.

An exploration of how meal preparation activities relate to self-rated time pressure, stress, and health in Canada: A time use approach.

While previous work has provided a foundation for understanding the importance of the links between time use and diet, there has been little done to link time use to health outcomes. In this study, time use and self-rated health variables from the 2015 Time Use Cycle of Statistics Canada's General Social Survey are used to explore whether there are direct associations between time spent on meal preparation and health for Canadian Adults. In addition, this paper uses respondents' sequences of activities data from a time use diary to provide novel findings about the context of activities that precede and follow meal preparation. Proportional odds and logistic regression models are computed and show that there are significant relationships between spending more time on meal preparation and improved mental health and lower levels of stress. More time on meal preparation is also linked to general feelings of having less time. The analysis of activities preceding and following meal preparation activities demonstrates that individuals with different levels of self-rated stress or feelings of having extra time have significantly different activity sequence distributions (e.g., those reporting higher levels of stress are more likely to participate in chores and care activities). Exploring activity sequences related to meal preparation provides a first step in furthering the research community's grasp of the causal relationship between food-related time use and health and well-being outcome variables. Ultimately, this paper builds on the past literature on time use and meal preparation by establishing direct links between time spent on meal preparation activities, self-rated health and time use variables, in addition to offering insights into what activities surround this important activity via a novel sequence analysis.