Building Equity Through Data: UB’s Food Lab Welcomes Dr. Jane Dai

As a post-doctoral scholar, Dai brings expertise in understanding food systems, population health, and mixed-methods research to help drive this work forward.

Dai began her academic journey as a pre-med student at Williams College, but she eventually realized that medicine wasn’t her calling. “I found that I’m not the person who thrives in clinical settings,” she explained. “I like connecting with people and seeing how they can come together around shared interests, values, histories, and visions for the future.”

Growing up in a community of immigrants in New Jersey, Dai identified food as the primary language of care. For her, the universal practice of gathering people around food has been a constant point-of-view that influences her worldview. “In anything I do, whether it’s research or just living life as a human, I want to center human dignity—and food helps a lot with that.”

For Dai, food equity means having both the ability and the legal right to grow, procure, consume, and afford the kinds of food that you want. That may include healthy foods, culturally appropriate foods, or whatever else is in alignment with a person’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Food equity as a concept is both a process and goal, holistic in its approach to evaluating the policies, systems, and environments that influence people’s lives. 

One main reason that food equity is difficult to achieve is the prevalence of data inequity. Institutional leaders—often policymakers and other stakeholders—can be privy to key information that is not shared with the public. This leads to information asymmetry: even if someone in the community (e.g., residents, farmers, advocates) were to build momentum for change in their neighborhoods, not being “in the know” about resources, logistics, and relational connections is a huge barrier. “If food equity is the goal, then there also needs to be data equity,” Dai explained. “If you build a world that is community driven and governed and iterated, then that’s a much better way of understanding exactly how food systems can be transformed to better serve the people who work in them and are served by them.”

The Food Lab, led by SUNY Distinguished Professor Dr. Samina Raja, is dedicated to research that critically examines the role of local government policy in facilitating equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities. At the onset, the group initiated this project with intentional and authentic community engagement, the findings of which will build a foundation for sustained decision making. Through this process, they’ve gathered valuable insights on what types of data are most impactful and how existing dashboards and technology platforms can be improved.

A key player in this process is the Community Data Advisory Group (CDAG), which is made up of local leaders from likeminded community organizations. As community researchers, their insights are shaping the project’s direction and helping to reimagine what’s possible. Together, the team has been developing an evaluation framework to gauge how community food systems dashboards are doing—and where they could be going—in service of data equity for food equity.

In the next year, the Food Lab will focus on conducting case studies based on this framework to determine the most sustainable path forward.

“We need to determine whether these dashboards are effectively pursuing data equity or unintentionally feeding negative stereotypes that only perpetuates stigma and reinforces harm against communities,” Dai explained. “A lot of data that gets put in is about health disparities, which is helpful because we do want to know the results of structural racism and food apartheid (the intentional diverting of food and economic resources), but that’s also a very deficit-focused way of thinking. We’re trying to learn how the dashboard can best represent reality across the entire spectrum—especially how communities build and maintain their own assets—and facilitate transformative action across all food systems infrastructure.”

Dai’s research perspective goes beyond traditional metrics like statistics and percentages. Before and throughout her doctoral training, she learned to examine more person-centered data to learn about what, where, and why people eat what they eat. Some examples include: noting the recent shift away from sugar-sweetened beverages and towards diet and low-calorie beverages, recognizing that sociocultural norms around eating can be more impactful for healthy eating than nutrition education alone, highlighting the importance of steady food assistance to help families stay food secure during turbulent times, calling attention to food procurement as an important part of the food system in improving healthy food access at workplaces and in community settings, and finding how grocery stores increase marketing of unhealthy beverages during times that consumers are likely to redeem food stamps.

“I like that kind of data because it’s much more nuanced. It gives you a glimpse into what people’s real experiences are."

In her first month on the job, Dai has helped to move the project forward and is excited to contribute to building the final tool for evaluating community food systems dashboards, while documenting best practices for community-led food justice action research from a public health perspective. She’s passionate about sharing these important insights with others.

In today's world, Dai says, “It's more important than ever to prioritize new ways to be creative about what research looks like and how to make room for others at the table." She's using this opportunity to explore ways to turn the project’s evaluation framework and criteria into practical tools for communities to create or evaluate their own dashboards. 

For Dai, joining the Food Lab feels like a perfect fit. She became aware of their work years ago, and when this opportunity was brought to her attention by her doctoral advisor, it felt serendipitous. “It matches my alignment with thinking critically about data and food systems—how to plan food environments as someone who cares about that as a public health outcome. There’s so much integrity in the way they approach research and practice.”

With her background in public health, Dai is bringing a unique perspective to this project. While much of her previous work has felt limited by a focus on measurable health outcomes, she’s embracing this opportunity to be imaginative about the future.

“It will be helpful to also learn about how to think about health from a different perspective, now that I’m in an urban planning department. How do planners dream about thriving neighborhoods, good places, and how to make it easy for people to live their best lives? I hope I can merge those two ways of thinking in a way that is more transformative than just one alone,” she reflected. “I have a unique perspective about that, which I really look forward to exploring over the next two years.”