A Scoping Review of Food Literacy Interventions

Food literacy (FL) is a rapidly emerging area of research that provides a framework to explain the interplay of food-related skills, beliefs, knowledge and practises that contribute to nutritional health and wellbeing. This review is the first to scope the current literature for FL interventions, assess their characteristics against the components provided in the most widely cited definition of FL. and describe their characteristics to identify gaps in the literature.

This review scopes original articles describing FL interventions in the Medline, CINAHL, ProQuest Education, Web of Science and AMED databases up to August 2023.

Despite the heterogeneity between all seven included studies, they all demonstrated some improvements in their FL outcome measures alongside dietary intake (DI), with the greatest improvements seen in studies that employed a FL theoretical framework in intervention design. Populations at high risk of food insecurity, such as university students and people living in disadvantaged areas, were the main targets of FL interventions.

The minimal inclusion of FL theory amongst interventions led to an overall poor coverage of essential FL components, indicating researchers should aim to design future FL interventions with a FL theoretical framework.