Growing Your Own Food and Dietary Quality: Results from a Survey

Summary Community and home gardens offer citizens the opportunity to grow their own food. Growing your own food has many benefits for personal, community, and environmental health. Our study tests whether the common assumption that improved access to food and nutrition through growing one's own food is in fact linked to better diets. Our study tests how growing food at home, at community gardens or in both locations changes growers’ dietary quality applying different indexes. The Healthy Food Diversity Index and the Berry‐Index are used as proxies to measure dietary quality, while a consumption of produce indicator is used as a straightforward measure of a healthy diet. We find that growing your own food at home and at community gardens is associated with the highest fruit and vegetable consumption while not growing any food is associated with the lowest amount of produce consumption. Overall, results show that growing food is associated with higher dietary quality values which could indicate that home and community gardens would be beneficial for individuals’ health. The identified negative association between not growing any food and diet quality might highlight the need to foster food‐growing programmes at community gardens, at home gardens, or even at both locations.