The Possibilities and Limits of Personal Agency

Abstract

The food environment poses many challenges to low-income rural residents as they struggle to sustain themselves and their families. Rural settings in the United States are characterized by poorer food access and availability, including costlier and lower-quality produce, in comparison with urban settings. The practices employed by low-income residents to cope with these rural food environments have nutritional consequences and sometimes even broader health implications. However, these practices can also be interpreted as acts of creative agency. Using insights from earlier work on the environmental determinants of food-related behaviors, and a sociological perspective on the role of individual agency in the process of structuration, this research categorizes food-related hardships, acquisition strategies, and resources, and demonstrates how food access is negotiated within the more or less flexible constraints of rural settings characterized by the unavailability of inexpensive, high-quality foods.

Keywords:

• rural food environment
• social structure
• coping strategies
• food security
• food access
• spatial access
• cultural access
• WalMart

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Prevention Research Centers Program, through the Center for Community Health Development cooperative agreement #5U48DP000045. The views are those of the authors and do not represent those of the funders, nor of the USDA Food and Nutrition Service. The first author conducted this research while at Texas A&M University. The authors also thank the anonymous reviewers at Food, Culture, and Society, William Alex McIntosh, Rola el-Husseini, Joseph O. Jewell, and their colleagues in the Nutrition, Obesity Policy Research and Evaluation Network—Rural Food Access Working Group for their helpful insights.