Nationally 17.4 million houses in 2009 had difficulty providing enough food for the members of their family due to insufficient resources (Pothukuchi, 2011). For the city of Detroit, food security issues are felt to some degree by over 550,000 community members who live in areas where the food system is “out of balance”—where it is far easier to access low quality, unhealthy foods than it is to find fresh fruits and vegetables (Gallagher, 2007). We conducted group model building workshops and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders concerned with food security in the City of Detroit. The group built a causal loop diagram to identify structural feedbacks that drive household food insecurity. A quantitative system dynamics model was then developed that integrates this community knowledge with secondary academic data. The model is used to simulate a household’s consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables over time, serving as a proxy for the nutritional quality of all meals consumed. Our model demonstrates that singular interventions do marginally reduce general food insecurity and increase the consumption of nutritious foods, but the largest impacts come from utilizing behavioral and household resource stock interventions in combination. The model also shows that solutions may have unintended effects, increasing household food spoilage, and increasing away from home consumption. Our model provides a novel way to examine the experiential dimensions of food and nutritional security. We conclude by supporting research on how time, as a resource stock, is a contributing factor to household food access (McKenzie, 2014) and how perceptions of time scarcity can lead to unhealthy food choices (Jabs & Devine, 2006). We demonstrate how a household’s stock of time is experienced in two dimensions, both temporal distance, the time it takes to procure food, and convenience pressure, the way perceptions of time scarcity affect food choices. We also point to the strength of household resource interventions when coupled with a behavioral component. Largely, we contribute and document how a participatory process can be utilized to better understand food security in an urban environment.
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