Competing Discourses of Household Food Insecurity in Canada

Abstract

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.

The Curated Food System: A Limiting Aspirational Vision of What Constitutes “Good” Food

“…Overall, this discourse analysis lends credibility to the idea that rhetoric, words, and ideas might be taken to constitute not only reality, but actively constitute systems of power that dictate the selective preservation of knowledge that is then taken as “truth” [ 17 , 31 , 91 , 92 ]. In the future, it is important to explore further how these aspirational visions contradict—and may even harm—the low-wealth rural communities they aim to serve because they are rooted in normative ideas about a definition of “good” that professes to be universal, but in many cases reflects differences in groups based on social status arranged along a gradient from top to bottom where those in the middle and at the top get to determine what is acceptable [ 93 , 94 , 95 ].…”

“…This discourse pits the food system of plenty against the problem of hunger, framing the battle as an issue of equity and economic justice for poor people [ 17 , 31 , 62 , 63 ]. The narrative adopts a critical analytical approach to contravene hunger relief discourses that fail to engage around action to solve the issue of poverty which is asserted as the ultimate cause of hunger [ 17 , 63 , 64 ].…”

“…Other hunger discourses that mask poverty relief narratives include sustainability, health, food waste, charitable food assistance, agricultural subsidies, and community–corporate relations. The hunger relief discourse asserts that these narratives only serve to mask ideas concerning economic policies, societal responsibility for the poor, and poverty [ 30 , 31 , 63 ]. For example, one narrative questions the positive value of the use of food waste and food charities to address hungers [ 62 , 65 ].…”

“…Findings from this study on the aspirational discourses on food systems curated by food experts and advocates revealed that of eight discourses, only three encompassed the lived experiences of low-wealth rural residents. This aspirational food system, if not tempered, may result in: (1) suppression of the needs and preferences of low-wealth rural groups, (2) a perpetuation of inequality between groups who can and cannot attain the aspirational food vision, (3) the silencing of discourses that might question the political and economic power of corporate and business sectors that play a role in the inequitable distribution of income while sanctioning discourses that focus on personal or community solutions; and (4) the absence of other policy-based solutions that might address issues located within the food system as opposed to those with people and their diets and personal characteristics [ 17 , 31 ]. To close the gap between low-wealth rural communities and the “experts” who seek to serve them, experts should strive to draw attention to less dominant discourses that represent the needs and preferences of low-wealth rural populations if they aim to tailor policies to address poor diets caused by food insecurity.…”

“…Our thick descriptions of the discourses included passages from the qualitative data along with narrative profiles. To aide in the development of narrative profiles, we created a set of screening questions adapted from frameworks of previously published examinations of discourses on the social determinants of health, obesity, and food security ( Table 2 ) [ 16 , 29 , 30 , 31 ].…”