Table 4 Sample comments from urban and rural focus group participants regarding food insecurity and coping strategies

On more frequent shopping:

• “The majority of the time, I’m buying food for two days. I don’t go in and buy for a month. It’s just like, ‘this is what we need for tonight and tomorrow, and then we’ll figure it out from there’. But I feel like when I shop every two days I spend more money than if I knew what I was going to have for the week.”

On shopping options:

• “So you shop at different places, so you can get the best deals.”

• “Lots of times, we’ll drive all over town looking for certain things at the best prices.”

On less frequent shopping:

• “I guess toward the end of the month it’s a little hard, because fruit don’t last about two, three days in the house. But then the only times I get out is about once every two weeks.”

• “And then your fruits and vegetables go bad really quick. Like if you buy lettuce you’re going to have to eat that right away---you won’t have that later on in the month.”

• “I have to buy for two to three weeks at a time.”

• “We go to grandma’s house.”

On loss of control:

• “My mom and dad tend to give them what they want: soda, ice cream, doughnuts, candy, whatever it is.”

• “Whatever, I don’t want my grandma feeding them Oreos for dessert, or dinner!”

• “I just go to my parents so I can go through their cupboards.”

• “I go to my mom and dad’s freezer and go home with shopping bags.”

On loss of control:

• “When we eat at my mom’s, she’ll make comfort foods which aren’t always the healthiest, but at least I know my kids will eat.”

• “We go to the food pantry, and we get a food box from the school. There’s also a church that gives out food boxes.”

• “My kids get a lot of it [produce] from that gardening program at the Boys and Girls Club, so they help with the gardens around the community and they get sent home with whatever is ripe.”

• “Our school district has snack packs that they send home and I think that helps a lot of parents too.”

• We will get a big, maybe, chicken and then when we get home we just immediately repackage so we get the whole thing out.”

• “We buy stuff we know will keep, like boxes of cereal and pasta, like when you can get ten boxes of noodles for $10.”

“The times when we have money, I do big meals and then I freeze them.”

• “Summertime we have gardens, and we have friends who have gardens. So it’s kind of nice, we kind of do our exchange. Like my husband will fix their computer in exchange for something and then the ranching wife always has her garden and we do a lot of exchanges.”

• “Where we live, we’re around farmers and stuff so there’s always chickens for eggs. And my mother in law, she’s into the whole canning and big gardens and stuff like that.

• “People donate a lot of those zucchini, and there’s so many cucumbers”

• “You can eat healthier, but it’s so expensive, just for salad alone. You can have a budget, but for salad, it’s so expensive.”

• “When you buy healthy foods it doesn’t seem to fill them up. You’ll feed them salad but you have to buy a lot of it in order for your kids to feel nourished.”

• “Whatever is fast and quick, like frozen pizza.”

• “I look in the papers for sales all the time.”

• “My biggest factor is the financials, the eating out thing. I don’t want to do it but it’s so much cheaper to just go out to eat then it is to buy things like fruit.”

• “Fresh is more expensive, and doesn’t last.”

• “When I’m tired and stressed, I just want whatever is going to get food on the table the fastest, and that’s usually a frozen pizza or something easy like that.”