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running, I'd go to the food bank and get fresh vegetables twice a week, three times a week. But the way
it's going now, everything I get, I have to, if that can be frozen, I freeze it. So I have no excess.”
Newport News participant: “I live in, like, a little food desert. I work at Dollar General, so I don't try to shop
there 'cuz they don't sell fresh food. You gotta go to Mercury to the stores up there or to the Walmart in
Hampton. I tend not to buy food from downtown, I tend to go up towards Mercury, but I should shop at
Aldi or Lidl, or whatever the place is called. But I be crunching for time, so when I go grocery shopping, I
buy $300, $400 worth of food at one time and I try to buy healthy foods, but I'm not like the healthiest
eater, and I be crunching for time, so like I just try to grab as much food as I can.”
Norfolk participant: “And then a lot of time, you go into the grocery store, the shelves about halfway
empty, you don't know what to get no more.”
Theme: Affordability affects how people eat
Higher prices due to the pandemic has made it difficult for many participants to afford groceries and has made it
particularly difficult to choose healthy options.
Norfolk participant: “Um, sometimes it has an effect because, uh, any, anything that's healthy, usually
costs more, which I don't understand why, but it does.”
Chesapeake participant: “Well, it's, it leads my story. Um, 'cuz I live on a fixed income, so I have to make
every dollar stretch and I'm a mom, so it really has to stretch twice. So, um, it, it affects how I buy and
how I shop.”
Norfolk participant: “Everything have got so expensive now, it's...it don't even make good sense.”
Norfolk participant: “And I don't know if y'all notice now, you go into the stores, everything has been cut
down in size. You're not getting your money's worth.”
Norfolk participant: “I mean, the healthier foods, um, they're going up as well. Like, a lot of organic foods
are more expensive than the regular foods because of the way that they have to...the way that they're
growing them. You know, like grass-fed beef is almost twice as much as regular beef, or regular chicken
or whatever, because of the way that...the way that they're being grown, and the, the precautions that
they have to take to make sure that they're not putting any chemicals, or you know, that they're not using
any antibiotics. It costs more for them to raise them, so it costs more for them...it costs more in once the
finished product is taken to the supermarket.”
Norfolk participant: “Well, I used to go to the grocery store, but now everything's gone so high because
one of my favorites was oranges. And when I first started eating oranges morning and night, before I go to
bed, it was just, like, $3.49 for a bag of oranges. I went yesterday and it's $7.99. I don't wanna pay that
kinda money, but that keeps me healthy. So you have to let go somewhere else to get that in order for me
to get that.”
Theme: Food quality is a common topic of conspiracy theories
Some participants suggested that the quality of foods has decreased, mentioning that food is now
“re-engineered,” “fake,” “grown too fast,” “rots too quickly,” or that sugar is modified.
Norfolk participant: That's right. Well, look, I think about this sometimes, the way they growing food now,
the meats, it just, it doesn't taste good. Like the chicken, I never had no stringy chicken before, and like, a
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