This article arises from an interest in African urbanization and in the food, farming and nutritional transitions that some scholars present as integral to urban life. The paper investigates personal urban food environments, food sources and access strategies in two secondary Ugandan cities, Mbale and Mbarara, drawing on in-depth interviews and applying an intersectional lens. Food sources were similar across dimensions of difference but food access strategies varied. My findings indicate that socioeconomic circumstance (class) was the most salient influence shaping differences in daily food access strategies. Socioeconomic status, in turn, interacted with other identity aspects, an individual’s asset base and broader structural inequalities in influencing urban food environments. Rural land and rural connections, or multispatiality, were also important for food-secure urban lives. The work illuminates geometries of advantage and disadvantage within secondary cities, and highlights similarities and differences between food environments in these cities and Uganda’s capital, Kampala.

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This article contributes to a feminist geographic analysis of how urban food and health environments and noncommunicable disease experience may be being constructed, and contested, by healthcare professionals (local elites) in two secondary Ugandan cities (Mbale and Mbarara). I use thematic and group interaction analysis of focus group data to explore material and discursive representations. Findings make explicit how healthcare professionals had a tendency to prescribe highly classed and gendered assumptions of bodies and behaviours in places and in daily practices. The work supports the discomfort some have felt concerning claims of an African nutrition transition, and is relevant to debates regarding double burden malnutrition. I argue that a feministic analysis, and an intersectional appreciation of people in places, is advantageous to food and health-related research and policy-making. Results uncover and deconstruct a dominant patriarchal tendency towards blaming women for obesity. Yet findings also exemplify the co-constructed and malleable nature of knowledge and understandings, and this offers encouragement.

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This research focuses on the food, farming and health experiences of two secondary cities of Uganda (Mbale and Mbarara), comparing findings with studies of primary African cities. We draw from survey data, focus groups with healthcare professionals, and in-depth interviews with varied residents. A feminist geographic perspective explored intersections of food, farming and health with varied aspects of identity, and with place (city itself, but also with rural areas). By comparing our secondary city findings to findings from primary African cities this paper sheds light on whether and how food systems in secondary African cities are transforming, and how urban life at this scale is being experienced. Our analysis suggests a good deal of similarity of food insecurity, dietary diversity, and of non-communicable disease experiences and understandings. The main difference was around the food access strategies, the access to land, and the engagement with agriculture and interaction with the rural. How this might change as these secondary cities grow further is not clear but there should not be an assumption that primary city experiences will inevitably be followed. Our findings offer important insights for future research and for those planning for Ugandan and potentially other African secondary city futures. In comparison to primary SSA cities our findings suggest less advance along theorised nutritional transitions (greater hybridity), a higher relevance of the rural for viable urban lives, yet comparable experience of non-communicable disease. This is intriguing, has implications for theory, and warrants further research.