Exploring the links between biodiverse foods, nutritional quality, and food security

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar at the intersection of the anthropological sciences, environment and human health. In the tropics, reliance on wild food systems and unsustainable hunting threatens food security and livelihoods long-term, and increases risk of disease transmission from wildlife to humans. Despite the risks to human health and food security, the issue of wild game hunting remains a target of conservation, but is rarely considered in public health and development strategies. The aim of this research is to understand the role of nutrition and culture in driving consumption of bushmeat (meat from non-domesticated mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds hunted for food in tropical forests) in West Africa. The postdoctoral research fellow, a woman in environmental science, will be trained in nutritional ecology and cultural anthropology. Through combined field and laboratory research, the fellow will be introduced to unique research resources, sites, and facilities that will foster international collaborations between institutions in the United States and Nigeria. These activities will provide unique mentoring and training opportunities for students and Nigerian scientists. This research will further the progress of science by deciphering the role of dietary quality of bushmeat, and bringing the issue into the scope of development and public health policy. Results will have implications for national health, prosperity, and welfare beyond this study system. For example, understanding the drivers of bushmeat consumption assists policy in developing complementary food sources and preventing emergence of infectious diseases from wildlife. Research activities in the field will have both direct and indirect benefits to human health, endangered species, and vulnerable habitats.

This research integrates methods from nutrition and ecology, with both quantitatively and qualitatively driven methods from the social sciences, to measure the unique role of bushmeat in determining dietary choices and maintaining food security in Nigerian hunting communities. The project will generate original data through: 1) comparative nutritional assays of wild and domestic animal food resources; 2) quantitative analyses of semi-structured surveys of household dietary diversity and food insecurity; and 3) qualitative analyses of focus group discussions, key informant interviews, participant observation, and storytelling to assess the cultural contexts of hunting and consumption. Nutritional composition will be related to dietary choices and food security across multiple cultural contexts to provide new insights into interactions between human culture and nutritional science. Wild meat consumption is a pressing environmental and health concern, and findings will provide the basis for integrative recommendations that will inform food security, public health, and conservation policies. The project involves international collaboration at multiple levels, and is co-funded by the NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.