Is food sharing a better measure of social capital in some contexts?

The role of social capital in mediating health is increasingly well recognized (Eriksson, 2011; Ferlander, 2007; Hawe & Shiell, 2000; Kawachi & Berkman, 2023; Lomas, 1998). Social capital refers to the resources and benefits individuals gain through their social interactions and networks (Bourdieu, 1986), such as “horizontal associations” between people (“networks of civic engagement”) (Putnam, 1993) and institutional relationships (Bourdieu, 1986; Grootaert, 1998; World Bank, 1998). Social capital affects food and diet intake by influencing resources for food procurement, enhancing knowledge on food and nutrition (health literacy) (Chen et al., 2019), alleviating psychosocial distress (Mieziene et al., 2022), buffering against shocks and extreme weather events (Chriest & Niles, 2018), increasing food access and availability (Martin et al., 2004; Nosratabadi et al., 2020), and promoting access to both formal and informal institutional support (King, 2017). With mounting evidence on the importance of social capital, food and diet researchers are now tasked with integrating social capital questions into their studies of diet quality and food choice. In this viewpoint, I share my experience attempting to integrate social capital questions into a household and diet quality survey as part of my doctoral research on Indigenous food environment transitions in Northern Thailand. By sharing my survey design and implementation experience, I hope to raise unresolved issues surrounding the assumptions made by large institutions in their questionnaires. I argue for caution in adopting ready-made survey questions and advocate for tailoring culturally-appropriate, context-specific and scale-sensitive survey questions.