Forested regions of the Global South are undergoing significant rural transformations driven by global environmental change, natural resource extraction, and deepening rural–urban linkages. Motivated by concerns about the food security implications of these intertwined processes, this dissertation adopts an integrated food systems approach to examine how the food security of forest-proximate people can be strengthened. Focusing on Thuamul Rampur—a remote, forested region in Odisha, India, predominantly inhabited by indigenous and other marginalized social groups living in economic poverty—this research investigates the dietary diversity pathways of women, a subgroup often vulnerable to food insecurity and malnutrition, yet central to food provisioning. Drawing on over a year of fieldwork conducted in 2021–22, the study combines three rounds of individual- and market-level surveys with qualitative methods, guided by a participatory ethos and implemented by a locally embedded research team. The food systems analysis pursued here integrates all locally relevant food sources, situated within the area’s socio-ecological and institutional contexts, to reveal how these pathways jointly shape women’s dietary diversity across seasons.The dissertation consists of three interlinked papers. The first explores how forests, compared to other food sources, contribute to women’s diets during the rainy season through provision of items for consumption and sale. The paper highlights forests’ positive role in enhancing diets and suggests that forest-food security linkages could be strengthened through better market access and implementation of community forest rights. The second paper examines the relative importance of five distinct food access pathways across three seasons, demonstrating how forests, other commons, and community gifting complement agriculture and market purchases in sustaining dietary diversity. The third develops a typology of local food markets and examines how different dimensions of market access shape dietary diversity. The paper shows that markets’ contributions to diets are shaped not only by proximity but by a complex set of mechanisms of market access and by women’s simultaneous access to non-market sources. Together, this dissertation advances food systems scholarship by applying an integrated, interdisciplinary, and contextually grounded food systems analysis—using mixed methods—in a marginalized, forest-proximate setting that remains under-examined in existing literature.