Portraying a dynamic food environment of Toronto before and during the COVID-19 pandemic using Yelp reviews

Keywords: Food environment, Social media, Yelp, Public health, Covid-19
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 2/25/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/25/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 44

Abstract

The urban food environment, within which we make our daily food choices, is essential in influencing eating behaviours and health outcomes, through factors such as food availability, ease of accessibility, and sociodemographic variations. Understanding environmental influences on the population’s food choices is crucial to ensure equitable access to healthy food and improve diet-related health outcomes. Currently, with the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity (i.e. lack of access to nutritional food) is causing higher health risks, such as heart diseases and mental health challenges, which is signaling a change in the food environment.

Location-based social media (LBSM) data have been a capable resource in supplementing our understanding of the food environment at an individual level. Although LBSM have been used to investigate the spatial configurations of food environments, few have considered the dynamic (i.e. changing) landscape by including temporal variations which could unlock important knowledge on the changing food availability throughout the day, week, months and year. As a result, researchers have been exploring individual-based analyses using location-based social networks (LBSN) to examine environmental exposures.

This research aims to bridge gaps in the food environment literature by understanding the impacts of the pandemic in portraying a perceived food environment landscape by 1) utilizing social media data to support our understanding of the changing food environment landscape before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, and 2) investigating how a temporal analysis of the food environment can improve our understanding of the perceived food behaviours in the City of Toronto.