Food Consumption Pattern and Dietary Diversity in Rural-urban Interface of Bangalore

The paper has examined the pattern of food consumption, dietary diversity and factors influencing dietary diversity across rural-urban interface of Bangalore. The study is based on the primary data of 510 households comprising of 189 rural, 211 transition and 110 urban households. Simpson Index of Dietary Diversity (SIDD) was employed to estimate the diversity in the consumption basket and to determine the factors influencing dietary diversity, the fractional probit model was used. The results showed that, higher cereal consumption was observed in rural area than in transition and urban areas and cereals were the prominent source of energy across all the gradients. The total calorie intake to the recommended calorie intake in urban, transition and rural area indicated that, the calorie intake in urban area was higher than the recommended intake (2100 Cal/CU/day) while, the scenario was opposite in transition and rural areas. This necessitates interventions to educate households to modify the existing purchasing behavior to reduce the gap between recommended and actual calorie intake. Further, the dietary diversity was analysed using SIDD, among the gradients, highest dietary diversity score was observed in urban (0.82) followed by transition (0.79) and rural gradients (0.77). Factors such as per capita income, access to irrigation and urban area had positive influence on dietary diversity. While, family size had negative influence on dietary diversity. Furthermore, among the different food items, cereals took major share in quantity consumption, calorie consumption and food consumption expenditure. On the other hand, diversity in consumption basket was marginally high in urban area.