Each woman's plate is assembled from local foods, not from universal rules. For three and a half years, scientists asked women in The Gambia, Kenya and Mozambique what they had eaten the day before, and sorted the food onto ten shelves: grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, meat, fish, dairy, eggs, nuts and oils. The norm is considered met if a woman has sampled at least five shelves in a day. But only every second woman eats that way.
The most interesting part is that in the poorest country, The Gambia, 65 women out of 100 eat a varied diet, while in wealthier Kenya and Mozambique only 45 and 39 do. So money and education are not the main thing. In The Gambia, traditional dishes made from millet, peanuts and leafy vegetables already provide many different foods on their own, even when money is tight.
This work was the first to compare women from three different parts of Africa using the same questionnaire. Previously, dietary diversity was thought to depend mainly on income and education. Now it is clear that local culinary habits matter no less, and sometimes more. That is why aid programs should learn from local cuisines instead of imposing the same recipe on everyone. Then every woman will have a chance to assemble her own complete plate.
In The Gambia, 63% of women had no formal schooling and the probability of poverty was the highest of the three countries, yet it was there that the share of women with sufficient dietary diversity was the greatest: 65.1%.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.