What Peru’s Household Food Baskets Reveal About Unequal Access to Fruits, Vegetables

The study used Peru’s 2025 National Household Survey, known as ENAHO, covering urban and rural communities. Its weighted estimates indicated that 20.4% of households lived in poverty and 30.4% participated in food-assistance programs.

A household can still bring home fruit and vegetables and have far less of them to share, making a shrinking food supply difficult to spot from a shopping list alone. Research published in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems explores this problem in "Food insecurity severity, household food acquisition patterns, and food basket contraction in Peru: a national analysis of ENAHO 2025."

Author Jacksaint Saintila examined nationally representative data from 32,053 Peruvian households, finding that greater difficulty accessing food was linked to smaller quantities of fruit and vegetables entering the home. The pattern extended across several food groups, including reductions in processed meats and carbonated soft drinks, showing how food insecurity can squeeze different parts of a household's food basket.

What the Research Measured Beyond the Shopping Bill

The study used Peru's 2025 National Household Survey, known as ENAHO, covering urban and rural communities. Its weighted estimates indicated that 20.4% of households lived in poverty and 30.4% participated in food-assistance programs.

Food insecurity was measured using the eight-question Food Insecurity Experience Scale, which captures experiences ranging from concerns about food access to more serious shortages. Scores ran from zero to eight, with higher scores representing greater difficulty. The researcher grouped scores into four bands for some comparisons; these were study groupings, not official international food-insecurity categories.

Food entering a home can come from purchases, household production, gifts, payments in food or assistance programs, and the analysis included these different sources. Quantities were expressed as kilograms per person per year.

For each food group, Saintila examined whether households obtained any of it and how much they obtained among those reporting a positive quantity. This distinction makes room for a problem that a simple yes-or-no question can miss: a food may remain available in a household in increasingly smaller amounts.

The statistical models accounted for household composition, poverty, location, interview month and characteristics of the household head, including age and education.

Fruit and Vegetables Remained Present in Smaller Amounts

Fruit showed the clearest decline across increasing food-insecurity scores. Among households obtaining fruit, the median annual quantity was 82.5 kilograms per person in the zero-score group and 57.5 kilograms in the highest-score group, a difference of 25 kilograms. Vegetable quantities followed a similar pattern, falling from a median of 66.5 to 51 kilograms per person per year between those groups.

After accounting for the other measured household characteristics, each additional food-insecurity point was associated with 2.6% less fruit and 1.3% fewer vegetables among households obtaining those foods. The adjusted comparison between the highest-score and zero-score groups showed roughly 17% less fruit and 12% fewer vegetables.

The likelihood of obtaining any fruit barely changed in the adjusted analysis, and vegetable acquisition showed a very small positive association with the score. Their continued presence could conceal substantial differences in the amounts available to share. Affordability offers one possible explanation, since fruit and vegetables can cost more for the energy they provide than cereal-based staples. The study did not establish which pressures drove household decisions.

Staples Held Steady, and Some Processed Foods Declined

Most households continued to obtain staples such as grains and grain-based foods, with no clear evidence that these increasingly replaced other foods as food insecurity worsened. Households facing greater food insecurity were less likely to obtain fish, seafood, processed meats and soft drinks. Those obtaining processed meats and soft drinks generally brought home slightly smaller amounts, though the pattern varied across food-insecurity levels. Fish and seafood quantities showed no clear link. The findings suggest that food insecurity can reduce several kinds of food in the home, including less healthy products, without showing that diets improved.

Fruit reductions were stronger in urban and non-poor households, and vegetable reductions were greater in rural and poor households. Rural families obtained fewer legumes as food insecurity increased. Some patterns differed among families receiving food assistance, but the study could not show whether the programs caused or prevented those changes.

What Smaller Food Baskets Mean for Support Programs

The study covered a large number of households across Peru and included food they bought, grew themselves or received from others. It looked at both the types of food families obtained and the amounts they brought home. Removing unusually high reported amounts barely changed the main findings.

The survey captured one point in time, so it cannot prove that food insecurity caused the differences or explain how families' food supplies changed over time. Knowing what entered a home does not tell us how much each person ate, how the food was shared or how balanced their meals were.

Families may not have remembered every quantity accurately, and other household circumstances could have affected the results. Ingredients in ready-made meals were not counted separately, meaning some food amounts may have been underestimated. Grouping all food sources made it impossible to tell whether the patterns came from purchases, homegrown food, gifts or assistance.

Food-support programs could learn more by checking how much food families have, rather than simply recording which foods are present. A family might still have fruit and vegetables at home, with much smaller amounts available for everyone. Assistance needs to help families obtain enough food and maintain a varied supply, with support suited to the different circumstances of rural and urban communities.