So far, we are collecting different aspects of the food security story in Cardinia using surveys, measuring the cost and availability of food across Cardinia and talking with many community organisations. But what we also wanted to do was to hear from people living in Cardinia about their experiences of food security and accessing food for themselves and other people in their household. For more information about the Cardina Food Movement Strategy visit the website.

To see the Cardinia Food Strategy, download pdf.

Reimagining for a Food Secure Future: Harnessing community expertise in understanding and acting on food insecurity in Cardinia Shire is a 2 part project where community were invited to participate to share:

• views and experiences about their access to food including things that help and/or get in the way to accessing and providing food.
• views and ideas on what you think could make this easier.  

In Part 1 people completed an online survey to share part of their food access story. Then in Part 2 people took photos that said something about their experience of accessing food for themselves and their household and used these pictures to tell us more of their food access story. This is a method called photovoice.

Part 1: Online survey here is what people said

Part 2: Peoples Photos and Stories

Over a period of two weeks people were asked to take photos, on their phone camera or digital camera, of anything they believed was important in relation to accessing food for themselves and their household. This included examples such as:

• where they shopped for food,
• transport to the shops,
• food options available where they shopped,
• the price of food,
• types of food retailers they shopped,
• expenses other than food,
• storing, preparing and cooking food and
• mealtimes.

Once people had taken their photos we met with each person individually so that they could share their photos and explain their food access stories and the role of each photo in this this story.

From these stories emerged four main themes with subthemes that told the story of food access. These were experienced to varying degrees by people across the four levels of food security: high, marginal, low and very low.