How Low-Income Mothers Select and Adapt Recipes and Implications for Promoting Healthy Recipes Online
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Study Design
2.2. Recruitment
2.3. Instruments and Procedures
2.4. Data Analysis
3. Results
3.1. Theme 1: Home Meal Preparation Habits and Characteristics of “Go-To” Family Recipes
- Inexpensive, Easy and Appealing. Recipes needed to include inexpensive ingredients that appealed to most or all family members and could be prepared with minimal time and effort and in some cases with or by children. Participants (~80%) seldom experimented with new recipes unless they could be prepared using familiar ingredients they were confident their families would eat. Many reported preparing “go-to” recipes from memory.
- Customizable and Kid-Friendly. Participants often mentioned family members’ ingredient aversions, including aversions to specific foods (wild/brown rice, peas, mushrooms, onions, tomatoes), food groups (vegetables, meat) or textures (slimy). An example of a common sentiment was, “I like to cook things that my daughter will enjoy and eat and she’s a picky eater.” Participants identified their top strategy to minimize ingredient aversions as choosing recipes that allowed them to easily substitute ingredients they knew family members, especially children, would prefer. Participants also managed ingredient aversions by engaging children in meal planning and cooking. Recipes that combined both strategies were the most common “go-to” favorites across all groups. As one participant explained, “I like to cook tacos because they’re easy… and all the kids will eat them. If one only wants meat and cheese, they can have meat and cheese. If one likes something else, you can throw everything out there and they can make them. Put out the taco bar and everyone makes their own.”
- Healthy. Participants frequently stated that “go-to” recipes should be healthy because they wanted healthier eating for themselves and their families, including to comply with any medically prescribed dietary restriction/s of a family member. However, their definitions of healthy eating varied widely, for example, going dairy-free or gluten-free; using organic FV when possible; or occasionally substituting ground turkey for beef in a main dish. One participant captured the cohort’s commonly cited criteria in her definition of healthy eating: “Whole grain, fiber… so, a variety of the different food groups. And organic if you can afford it. No sugar. Lots of fruits/veggies. Lots of water.” Comparing participants “go-to” recipes to their definitions of healthy eating revealed several inconsistencies. For example, some participants voiced healthy eating aspirations, yet described “go-to” recipes that were nutritionally limited, such as: “Baked potato soup. It’s so easy. You just make mashed potatoes and put cream of chicken and celery in there and broccoli. Then, you bake it and add sour cream—you put that on top. It doesn’t have meat, it’s one meal and there’s a vegetable inside it.” “Macaroni and cheese but like homemade, from scratch. I make big portions to last.” “I have two things that I am known for: my chocolate chip cookies and then my fried fish.”
- Culturally Diverse. Throughout the FGs, participants named favorite dishes from many cultures, including Indian, Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian, Russian, Southern US Creole, soul food, Japanese and Thai. For example: “I like to know about some of the Chinese recipes and the Vietnamese and even any other culture, just how they came to be.”
3.2. Theme 2: Sources and Motivation for New Recipe Use and Adaptation
- Sources of New Recipes and Meal Ideas. Most participants (~90%) reported regularly using the Internet for meal ideas and recipe searches. In order of significance, the primary sources of new recipes were: websites, social media (especially Facebook, Pinterest and YouTube); cookbooks; magazines, newspapers and television channels such as the Food Network; and friends and family (Figure 1).
- Motivation for Seeking New Recipes. There were five main reasons participants sought new recipes: (1) to add variety to their meal routine while meeting family food preferences; (2) to engage in a creative activity involving food (e.g., baking cookies or learning how to make tamales); (3) to find new ways to use up surplus ingredients or leftovers (e.g., leftover chicken or garden vegetables); (4) to prepare foods for special occasions such as birthdays or holidays; and, (5) to prepare foods for a special diet such as gluten-free, vegetarian, low sugar or vegan (Figure 2). Discussing common reasons why families might seek out a new recipe for creative cooking, one participant said: “Every so often [we’ll use a new recipe], like my daughter and one of her friends, just this weekend, wanted to make sugar cookies. They just looked it up online, just pulled it up and put in ‘sugar cookies.’”
- Methods of Adapting Recipes. As previously described, participants typically reported adapting new recipes by substituting ingredients family members preferred, healthier ingredients, and/or ingredients they had available. In describing how she commonly adapted recipes, one mother commented, “Just that I can put my own flavor and spin on it, like if I don’t stick to a recipe and kind of can change it up and do different things with it to suit the taste of the people that I’m feeding it to.” Others echoed this sentiment across groups: “There’s a lot of meat [in these recipes] but a lot of that I’d just change. I’d make it different. I’d probably use tofu. We use a lot of tofu.” “I have something in a recipe that I never heard of before and I couldn’t find it anywhere. So I just eliminated it and didn’t use it and it seemed fine. You can substitute concentrated apple juice [for] oil, which is a cheaper, healthier way to do a lot of things.”
3.3. Theme 3: Desirable Characteristics of Recipe Websites
- Simple and Visually Interesting. This was the top characteristic of preferred recipe websites. Participants stressed the importance of balancing a simply formatted recipe website with visually interesting content: “The whole process is telling you whatever you’re looking at, straight and to the point—click and you go to the next one, reading a little bit, no more than five lines—three, four or five lines.” Bright, colorful, eye-catching pictures were also an important feature for participants and their children. One participant described a website she used often: “When you get on it, it’s very bright and visual and you’re interested in looking at the pictures and seeing what they’re doing.” In contrast, reasons not to revisit a website included overly complex recipe instructions and cooking tips or the perception they were not the intended audience. For example, one woman gave this evaluation of a popular website: “Chef.com isn’t one of my favorites. It really was written for high-level home cooks, like the ones that have every kind of tool. Foo-foo. I think that just doesn’t work for a family.”
- Efficient Search Mechanism. Participants generally searched for recipes from search engines like Google using a specific key word(s) or ingredient(s) versus by recipe name, yet both methods were used. As one participant elaborated, “Say I have got a bushel of broccoli or something. I could click on broccoli and I’d see something with broccoli.” Another explained, “I like to garden and I have this big garden. It’s like, ‘okay, I’ve got all this squash. What am I going to do?’” Being able to search by recipe name was also mentioned: “If I do a 7-UP cake, I put in ‘7-UP’ and it will give you the different recipes. I’ll go through them and try to find the simplest.” Some reported using multiple key words to increase the number of recipes in the search results: “If you type in, ‘ways to make quinoa,’ then you have five or six websites that will pop up.” Still others reported narrowing the search field by making the query more specific; “I put ‘simple’ or ‘easy’ so they give you the most simple thing that comes up first.”
- Engages Children. Participants preferred recipe websites with child-centered content and a design that allowed adults to use recipes side-by-side with their children. One mother, in explaining her idea of a child-centered website, said, “A database that has the fruits and vegetables or that would match colors or have things that would be appropriate for kids as well as adults.” However, participants reported that they did not typically find this characteristic in the recipe websites they viewed/used. Participants often stressed the importance of having content that could appeal to a range of children’s ages and abilities. As one participant explained, “I have [a child] who is ready to cut the tomatoes herself and then one that has no idea what he’s doing, so something simpler that is for younger kids and then something as they get older in stages—kind of like in school.” Child-friendly ideas mentioned across groups included the use of bright, eye-catching content and interactive animated characters to guide children step-by-step through recipe preparation.
- User Ratings and Reviewer Comments. Favorite recipe websites also included a user-rating system. Participants reported looking for a rating system—either star-ratings or text-based reviewer comments—before making a recipe. They relied on these systems to decide whether a recipe had high user approval or if users had given tips or provided ideas for substitutions to adapt or improve a recipe. For example, explaining why she liked using Allrecipes.com, a popular website among FG participants, one woman said: “They’ve got the top comments. I looked up jerked chicken and they said, ‘Well, this recipe is good but all you need to do is just subtract this or this...’” The majority of participants talked about reading online recipe comments but not choosing to post comments themselves: “But I don’t want to post it, because I guess the constructive criticism, like if somebody was like, ‘Ugh, that looks nasty’…well, my son liked it, so it’s okay.” “I would probably read them but I wouldn’t post them.”
4. Discussion
4.1. Study Strengths
4.2. Limitations
4.3. Implications for Research and Practice
Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
References
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FG | Date | Start Time (90-min Sessions) | Participants (n) | Mean Age (y) | Households with 3–4 People (%) | Households with 1–2 Children (%) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 02/11/11 | 11:00 AM | 6 | 36.7 | 65 | 76 |
2 | 09/17/13 | 11:00 AM | 9 | 36.8 | 53 | 53 |
3 | 09/17/13 | 1:00 PM | 6 | |||
4 | 09/18/13 | 11:00 AM | 8 | 39.3 | 36 | 43 |
5 | 09/18/13 | 1:00 PM | 6 | |||
6 | 09/29/14 | 10:00 AM | 4 | 38.3* | 54 | 71 |
7 | 09/29/14 | 12:30 PM | 4 | |||
8 | 12/17/15 | 5:30 PM | 5 | 35.3* | 58 | 83 |
9 | 12/17/15 | 7:30 PM | 7 | |||
Totals | N = 55 | ~ STD = 8.75 y | 53% | 65% |
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Tobey, L.N.; Mouzong, C.; Angulo, J.S.; Bowman, S.; Manore, M.M. How Low-Income Mothers Select and Adapt Recipes and Implications for Promoting Healthy Recipes Online. Nutrients 2019, 11, 339. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11020339
Tobey LN, Mouzong C, Angulo JS, Bowman S, Manore MM. How Low-Income Mothers Select and Adapt Recipes and Implications for Promoting Healthy Recipes Online. Nutrients. 2019; 11(2):339. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11020339
Chicago/Turabian StyleTobey, Lauren N., Christine Mouzong, Joyce Senior Angulo, Sally Bowman, and Melinda M. Manore. 2019. "How Low-Income Mothers Select and Adapt Recipes and Implications for Promoting Healthy Recipes Online" Nutrients 11, no. 2: 339. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11020339