If you’ve read my Project Introduction page, you know my research is aimed at determining what (if any) changes are made to migrant diets when they move to an urban area (Cali, Bahir Dar, and Hanoi in this case) and how those changes impact the health and sustainability outcomes of the urban area’s food system. After just over two months of research, I have learned a very valuable lesson about research: the road you walk doesn’t always look like the one on the map.
My research period is quite short — only four months from first day to final draft — and that time constraint is a barrier to collecting primary data, which requires ethics approval, survey drafting, dissemination, and analysis. However, after weeks of researching, I concluded that there also just wasn’t enough secondary data in these three cities to answer my research question. Census data was not complete or detailed enough to give me an accurate picture of the demographic changes over time, data on dietary components, especially disaggregated by ethnicity, did not seem to exist anywhere, and on top of this, migration is such a complex, resource-intensive thing to measure that many sources I found had outdated migration data. When I realized what a lack of useful information I had after weeks of scouring datasets and papers, I was disappointed. It felt like my project might not succeed. But then I realized how interesting it was that I couldn’t answer my research question with the data available, because that suggested something I hadn’t expected: there are gaps in this area of study.
As it turns out, studying post-migration dietary change is an area picking up speed in the research world, with several papers published in the last ten years or so. However, when I compared the topics of 40 of these papers, I found some interesting patterns. Most of the studies agreed on one thing: most migrants moving to new areas adopted more “western,” “modern,” or “industrialized” ways of eating (we’ll unpack what that means in a different post). But 31 of the 40 studies looked at migrants moving from developing countries to developed countries, with only 6 of 40 looking into internal rural-urban migration within developing countries. 19 of the 40 studies looked specifically at the role of migrant dietary changes in health outcomes, such as the risk of developing a diet-related disease like obesity, high blood pressure, or metabolic syndrome. Zero of these studies aimed to determine the sustainability outcomes from migrant dietary changes. I had myself a gap.
My thesis supervisors and fellow researchers suggested I shift from viewing my project as a study to viewing it as a piece of thought leadership, with the new end product being a Perspective Paper. A Perspective is a mix between a literature review and an opinion; it proposes a new perspective on an area of research and then backs it up with evidence. The result can be that future research is nudged in a certain direction.
So, my new objective is clear: to write a Perspective paper that argues for the collection and use of migrant dietary change data on the city-region level to determine the impact of the changes on urban food system sustainability. Using this data, urban areas can leverage migrant dietary habits toward food system sustainability.
Has this project followed the road I laid down on the map? No. But I’ve learned that this is normal in research, and I’ve learned to adapt. I’ve learned that the way the face of a project morphs as questions are answered (and not answered) along the way is the research. And that’s what I’m here to do: learn.
Now that I’ve got my feet on the ground and am beginning to draft my paper, I’m excited to share some ideas and information on migration, diets, and urban food systems here on the blog.