Household food insecurity (HFI) impacts over 1.7 million households in Canada with adverse effects upon health. As a signatory to numerous international covenants asserting that access to food is a human right, Canadian governments are obliged to reduce HFI, yet Canadian governments have done remarkably little to assure that Canadians are food secure. In the absence of government action, HFI has spawned numerous non-governmental means of managing the problem such as food banks, feeding programs, and community gardens and kitchens. These efforts have depoliticized the problem of HFI, making its solution more difficult. Solving HFI is also complicated by the presence of five competing discourses of HFI in Canada: nutrition and dietetics, charitable food distribution, community development, social determinants of health, and political economy which offer differing causes and means of responding to HFI. We argue that the least considered discourse – the critical materialist political economy discourse – best accounts for the presence of HFI in a liberal welfare state such as Canada and provides the most effective means of responding to its presence.

No abstract

Animal-derived and plant-derived dairy products will soon be joined by dairy produced using fermentation-derived cellular agriculture. Most cellular agriculture literature focuses on "cultured meats," but fermentation-derived dairy products are likely to reach consumer markets earlier as the technological barriers are much lower. An analysis of literature on dairy and on broader cellular agriculture literature suggests several barriers to adoption, including acceptance of technology, cultural capital associated with animal-based products, and policies that define parameters for producing and marketing dairy alternatives. This paper positions fermentation-derived dairy products within the dialogs on dairy alternatives and on cellular agriculture, identifying key areas that scholars, policymakers, and industry need to address before Dairy 3.0 reaches grocery shelves.

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).