Working with communities is serious work. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know how to have fun.
One of our newest colleagues shares his love of food-related projects and his love of games. Both have led him to be in communities.
From basketball and board games to food as medicine, Aiden Fox knows how serious – and fun – community-based research can be.
Get to know Aiden in this Q&A.
Tell us about your role at CHER. What’s your position and focus?
I’m a research assistant on the NC CEAL Food is Medicine project.
We are working together with community partners to use Food is Medicine strategies to improve health outcomes and limit chronic diseases.
I’m also helping the community partner with sustainably developing a medically tailored meal kitchen.
Medically tailored meals are the most intensive of the many different types of interventions under the umbrella of Food Is Medicine.
Food is Medicine interventions aim to reduce two of the main causes of chronic disease: food insecurity and lack of proper nutrition. Medically tailored meals often focus on a specific ailment. So if you have kidney problems, you wouldn’t have a meal with high salt, and that’d be tailored to your medical condition.
The intervention we are working on would provide meals that would generally be healthy for most adults.
Regarding my role, it depends on the needs of the project at the time. For example, I often help the community partner establish their kitchen by gathering recipes and potential farms for sourcing. I also work on general research tasks.
What was your path to CHER?
I always have been passionate about food-related projects.
In college, I worked in a gut microbiome lab, an agroecology weed science lab and then the World Food Policy Center at Duke.
At that point, I knew I wanted to spend my life solving food-related problems because they’re complex, relevant to everyday people’s lives and I just generally love food.
Since I had such a passion for food, I designed my own major at Duke, which examined our food system from a technological, political and cultural lens.
What are your goals while at CHER?
My goals are more project-oriented.
As a project that works with the community partners and the community, I want to approach every potential topic or issue by first listening to them as they’re the experts of their own community, and then hopefully, having a productive dialogue together. Therefore, I aim to learn from them and be a very good listener.
Secondly, I hope to see the project be beneficial to the research participants. I hope they can benefit health-wise from the medically tailored meals.
I’d also love for our community partners to develop a kitchen that is sustainable and beneficial for their organization and local economy.
Lastly, I’d like to learn from my teammates and co-workers working on my projects and others at CHER.
What are some challenges you’ve faced in your field of work?
The main one, which I’m sure many other fields deal with, is tradeoffs. It’s hard to make food something accessible, affordable, locally sourced, pays people well and also healthy.
Although it’s hard, I think it forces us to be creative with different solutions to try to do the best we can.
What’s a fun fact about you?
I really like basketball and board games.
I played basketball with friends, and at my time at Duke I was part of this organization called Coach2Inspire.
We filled coaching spots that were vacant for the Duke Parks and Recreation Youth Basketball League. If no community members filled that spot, we would fill it so there would be enough coaches for all the kids. It was a great experience.
Something I recently discovered about myself is that I also love to play board games. Since I’m just getting into it, I’ve started learning about different board games to see which one I want to try with my friends next.
This past week we played Codenames and Sequence.