Beyond individual responsibility towards healthy food choices: A qualitative study among pakistani women in Hong Kong

While biomedical understandings of food and diet coupled with discourses on individual responsibility towards healthy food choices are nowadays prominent, other social and cultural meanings attached to food and diet are largely devalued. The limits of such reductionist approach are more evident when related to the experiences of migrant and ethnic populations, whose alternative knowledge(s) and practices about food and health are especially neglected. A multicultural city with a public healthcare system inherited from the British colonial times and largely shaped by biomedical ideas of health, Hong Kong offers a lens into the limits of such reductionist approach. Due to their vulnerability in the context of Hong Kong as shaped by intersecting social identities, 72 women from Pakistan were recruited to be our research-partners in a community-based participatory action research project to investigate their health needs and concerns. 12 focus group discussions were conducted, exploring their experiences of “healthy” food and overweight especially related to their encounters with Hong Kong public healthcare system, as these issues emerged as key health concerns within the community. Four major themes emerged: unmet expectations of care, health is beyond the individual, constraints to a healthy diet in the context of migration, beyond health: food as care for diasporic women. This study highlights the limit of a reductionist approach to healthy food as merely based on nutrition and individual responsibility. It stresses the need of a counter-discourse in the field of public health, emphasizing not only alternative cultural ideas of health and food, but also enlarging the field of health in biomedical terms to embrace “care” and acknowledging the structural constraints shaping migrant and ethnic population's vulnerability in making “healthy” food choices.