Food Security

Community Engagement

Community Partnership

Culinaria Research Centre; Feeding City Lab

Social Innovation

U of T Scarborough

Subheadline

The Centre for Immigrant and Community Services has been working with the Culinaria Research Centre to examine how the pandemic impacted food systems

In addition to the usual canned and dry goods available at their food bank, Scarborough's Centre for Immigrant and Community Services (CICS) also grows 26 different kinds of vegetables, served weekly to more than 200 families who visit the centre.

The CICS greenhouse and gardens produce about 1,700 pounds of food per year – all donated as part of the Sustainable and Accessible for Empowering Communities (SAFE) project.

Bush beans and Oregon sugar pod green peas are among the culturally relevant plants growing in the CICS greenhouse (photo by Christopher Katsarov Luna)

“We've seen more and more people that might have been just above the poverty line are now finding themselves below that line,” says Brian Joyce, director of community services and operations at CICS.

“We could see the needs of the populations we were observing – they needed access to food. And over the last year that's just amplified with high inflation and cost of food.”

In 2020, CICS opened a pop-up food bank, teaming up with the Feeding City Lab, a research network of the Culinaria Research Centre at U of Toronto Scarborough that investigates how the pandemic impacted food systems.

The lab surveyed community members and found many were lacking vegetables to make their own cultural dishes. That data helped CICS secure funding for its greenhouse, and identified which vegetables were most needed.

“It's not just about food security, but it's about food sovereignty. People are taking charge of how they want their food systems to work. They are bringing their ethnocultural lens to it as well,” says Jo Sharma, an associate professor of historical and cultural studies at the Culinaria Research Centre and director of the Feeding City Lab who is cross-appointed to the department for the study of religion and the Asian Institute.

The greenhouse and raised garden beds at CICS (photo by Christopher Katsarov Luna)

Siobhan Bonisteel, a PhD candidate in environmental science at U of T Scarborough and community partnership representative with the Feeding City Lab, is one of several researchers supporting CICS. She’s using her expertise on community food systems to help the CICS team gather data on the SAFE project’s impact on the food bank and wider community.

“Feeding City and CICS are understanding the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in real time,” Bonisteel says. “Both inform each other and work together to broaden our collective understanding of community food issues, including resiliency to threats such as pandemics.”

Joyce says the data will not only help entice funders, but will help illustrate the project as a model for other organizations. It will also guide which new plants the centre tries to grow, as families accessing the food bank represent a range of cultural backgrounds.

“We're serving a wide variety of different people and we're introducing them to all these other services at CICS – like settlement services, early years programming and fitness programming that they might not have known about,” Joyce says.

The SAFE project also encompasses the centre’s industrial-sized community kitchen, which is used for cooking courses and as a place to share knowledge and build community.

The gardens are similarly a place for connection, and Joyce wants to bring in many other local organizations to collaborate. For example, the South Asian Cultural and Health Association for Youth and Seniors is planting ethno-culturally significant plants for diasporic Asian community members in CICS's raised garden beds.

Austin Boyne, a facilitator at the CICS urban farm, tends to the plants in the greenhouse
(photo by Christopher Katsarov Luna)

Shathvahi Ramesh, a fourth-year undergraduate student studying environmental ethics and religion in the Faculty of Arts and Science and a former intern with Sharma’s team, worked with the Feeding City Lab to connect CICS with the Malvern Urban Farm, which grows culturally significant plants in one of Scarborough’s hydro fields. Community farmers are growing seeds in the greenhouse to later transfer them to their gardens.

Ramesh says community organizations are often in an ideal position to help one another – but just might not know it. U of T Scarborough alumna Amanda Wedge has recently taken over as the co-ordinator for the Scarborough Food Network, which aims to bring a range of local organizations and stakeholders (including the Feeding City Lab) together, with monthly meetings dedicated to updates.

“It helps folks feel like they're not one lone entity just fighting their own fight or alone in their work. Together is always better,” Ramesh says. "It also helps build institutional memory.”

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U of T report shows food insecurity persists across Canada, varies by province

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 14:22:38 +0000

U of T report shows food insecurity persists across Canada, varies by province

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 08/16/2022 - 10:22

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A report led by U of T's Valerie Tarasuk found that 15.9 per cent of households in 10 provinces experienced some degree of food insecurity between the fall of 2020 and the fall of 2021 (photo by Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Jim Oldfield

Topic

Breaking Research

Temerty Faculty of Medicine

Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition

Nutritional Sciences

The latest national data from researchers at the ��Ƶ show that food insecurity in Canada has remained largely unchanged over the last three years, with stark differences among the provinces.

The report, “Household Food Insecurity in Canada 2021,” shows that 15.9 per cent of households across 10 provinces experienced some degree of food insecurity in the year before fall 2021, with little change since 2019. Researchers define food insecurity as inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial constraint.

Professor Valerie Tarasuk

“We’ve seen no palpable improvement in food insecurity for low-income households in Canada,” said Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutritional sciences in U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, whose research group PROOF led the study with data from Statistics Canada.

During the same period, Quebec had the lowest rate of household food insecurity at 13.1 per cent, while Alberta was highest among the provinces at 20.3 per cent.

“Quebec has emerged with consistently lower food insecurity than other provinces, which I think speaks to the power of provincial policy,” Tarasuk said.

Policy structures and payments for low-income households in Quebec differ from other provinces in several areas, including income support, workplace benefits and child care.

“Social programs in Quebec are targeted to the vulnerable in ways we don’t always see in other provinces,” said Tarasuk, who is also affiliated with U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health and the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition. “Some focus on families with children, and all are indexed to inflation, which matters hugely at a time like this.”

Quebec has done especially well addressing severe food insecurity, the new report shows. People living in Quebec were less than half as likely (2.8 per cent versus 6.3 per cent) as those in Alberta to experience severe food insecurity, which includes hunger and is most strongly associated with increased health-care spending, poor health outcomes and premature death.

“It’s not like Quebec is off the charts, and we saw hints of this difference before 2019,” said Tarasuk. “But their low rates warrant more study, so we can continue to build on findings by our group and others that show the importance of higher minimum wage and more generous social programs for reducing food insecurity.”

Ontario was middle-of-the-pack for both severe and overall food insecurity, at 4.6 per cent and 16.1 per cent, respectively. That equates to well over two million people living with food insecurity in Ontario, the province with the largest population. Across all provinces, 5.8 million people now live in food-insecure households, including almost 1.4 million children.

The survey does not include people living on Indigenous reserves, but the rate of food insecurity among off-reserve Indigenous Peoples was 30.7 per cent. Other studies have also shown high vulnerability among on-reserve communities.

New data on food insecurity in the territories is not yet available, but the most recent numbers from Statistics Canada in 2020 – which only include moderate and severe food insecurity – are grim: 46.1 per cent in Nunavut, 23.1 per cent in the Northwest Territories and 15.3 per cent in Yukon.

The PROOF report drew on data from 54,000 households in Statistics Canada’s Canadian Income Survey. This is a change for Tarasuk’s team, which had tracked food insecurity since 2011 through the Canadian Community Health Survey. Both surveys employ the Household Food Security Survey Module, but Tarasuk says the income survey has a better response rate and is likely more representative of the Canadian population.

The change has allowed Tarasuk’s group to access data on food insecurity shortly after collection, and to compare numbers annually across all provinces. “Historically, some provinces including Ontario opted out of the survey module in some years, which left holes in the data,” Tarasuk said. “We now get consistent data in almost real time.”

The new data has also enabled soon-to-be-published studies from Tarasuk’s lab on the Canada Child Benefit and Employment Insurance relative to food insecurity. The research will add to the large body of evidence on how federal and provincial policies can reduce food insecurity by improving incomes of low-income households.

Data based on the Canadian Income Survey show higher rates of food insecurity than those collected in the Canadian Community Health Survey. But Tarasuk cautioned against comparing the two data sets and drawing the conclusion that food insecurity has worsened between 2018 and 2021.

Tarasuk said it was surprising that food insecurity did not appear to worsen during the pandemic, and that quick action by governments to introduce income supports may have prevented more widespread food insecurity.

But she is quick to stress that the problem hasn’t gotten better – and could soon get a lot worse. “The situation now is that inflation and prices are skyrocketing,” Tarasuk said. “People with severe food insecurity will suffer more deprivation, and more often turn to acts of desperation in the face of hunger. That’s the urgent challenge for policymakers.”

The research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

U of T researchers help design blueprint for Black food sovereignty in Toronto

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:18:35 +0000

U of T researchers help design blueprint for Black food sovereignty in Toronto

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 01/05/2022 - 13:18

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The Afri-Can FoodBasket, a community non-profit, has partnered with the City of Toronto to address food insecurity among Black Torontonians (photo courtesy of Afri-Can FoodBasket)

Heidi Singer

Topic

COVID-19

Researchers at the ��Ƶ's Dalla Lana School of Public Health helped launch North America’s first Black food sovereignty program – an effort to address food insecurity by creating a Black-run food pipeline from field to table.

The Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan is the result of a partnership between the City of Toronto’s Confronting Anti-Black Racism Unit (CABR) and the Afri-Can FoodBasket, a community-based non-profit that advocates for food justice and food sovereignty. Toronto City Council unanimously approved the plan last fall.

“It’s well established that there’s a chronic issue with food insecurity among Black communities in Toronto, and we think the standard approach in dealing with it won’t take us far,” says Winston Husbands, an associate professor at Dalla Lana who was part of the working group behind the plan. “We want to step outside the normal way we think about food insecurity and talk about food sovereignty, which means Black communities have some degree of control that ensures much more access to food.”

Winston Husbands

More than a quarter of Black households in Toronto are food insecure, including about 300,000 children. Research shows that Black families are three-and-a-half times more likely than white households to be food insecure – a statistics that calls for community-led solutions, Husbands says.

The plan calls for access to growing space and infrastructure, Black-led food hubs, and culturally rooted community health and nutrition programs. City agencies will provide resources such as land and water for urban gardens and education in creating sustainable food systems and minimizing waste.

The origins of the plan date to the mid-90s, when the Afri-Can FoodBasket began building capacity among individuals and neighbourhoods across the city to grow their own food. The group’s efforts led to more than 100 new gardens; a composting program; food animation workshops; seed saving; the Ujamaa Urban Farm, with sites in Toronto and Brampton; the Black farmers incubator training program; and Cultivating Youth Leadership, a youth community food security program.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity worsened in the city’s Black communities. The FoodBasket responded with Black Food Toronto, a traditional food bank that helped to meet immediate needs for access to culturally appropriate food. But Husbands and others, including Imara Rolston, an assistant professor at Dalla Lana, were already thinking about longer-term solutions.

“There’s the idea of recognizing that access to food is a human right,” says Husbands, a former research director of the Daily Bread Food Bank. “But then we need programs and policies to make it really effective.”

The plan also differs from traditional food security efforts because it addresses racism as a major cause of food insecurity in Black communities. Without this understanding, traditional efforts privilege certain groups and undermine the health and wellbeing of others, Husbands says. He draws an analogy from his work in HIV research: “You might say everyone should get tested for HIV without understanding why different segments of the population are not getting tested. Then some will lag behind, and you end up thinking that people work against their own interest.”

Considering anti-Black racism as part of a food sovereignty plan means asking questions like why there are so few Black farmers in Ontario, or why many food stores in Black neighborhoods are not owned by community members, Husbands says – and investing resources to address these gaps.

The food sovereignty plan came together under the leadership of a long-time Black food activist Anan Lololi, executive director of the FoodBasket, who spearheaded the plan with CABR’s Melana Roberts.

Anan Lololi

“We want to work with nature, value urban farmers and nutritionists. We want to make sure we realize the sacredness of food,” Lololi says. “Food is a business but really it’s a human right. We want to look at it appropriately.”

Lololi says he was surprised at how quickly the plan was adopted by council – a nod, perhaps, to the increased need to create community resiliency in the face of disruptions like COVID-19. During the pandemic, Black Food Toronto says it has distributed one million pounds of food with support from CABR, Community Food Centres Canada, Network for the Advancement of Black Communities and the public. Vegetables have also come from Ujamaa Farm and the Backyard Urban Farm Company, but without the kind of infrastructure that such a complex operation requires.

“We’re doing this with blood, sweat and tears because we don’t have the resources to do it, not even a warehouse,” Lololi says. “The next steps from the Working Group are to mobilize our knowledge base. Bring food policy folks, those who know about farming and gardening, the activists, academics, nutritionists and food businesses to collectively determine the future of food sovereignty in Canada.”

Adults with disabilities face barriers accessing food, leading to food insecurity: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 19:34:56 +0000

Adults with disabilities face barriers accessing food, leading to food insecurity: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 08/19/2021 - 15:34

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(Photo by Reinhard Krull/EyeEm/Getty Images)

Kristy Strauss

Topic

Breaking Research

U of T Mississauga

During an ice storm, Cynthia, a woman in her 50s who lives in downtown Toronto and uses a walker, didn't know where she would get her next meal. If she couldn't afford food delivery, her plan was to drink a glass of water and wait to eat the following day.

This is just one of the troubling personal stories that Naomi Schwartz heard while researching food accessibility for people with disabilities living in Canada's largest city.

Schwartz, a PhD graduate of the ��Ƶ Mississauga's geography program, along with professors Ron Buliung and Kathi Wilson from U of T Mississauga's department of geography, geomatics and environment, co-authored the study recently published in the journal Disability & Society.

The researchers found that people with disabilities were at considerably greater risk of food insecurity than others – an outcome partially explained by often interconnected physical and economic barriers.

Schwartz interviewed 23 adults with disabilities who use mobility aids or experience physical barriers to their mobility between 2017 and 2018. To get a better understanding of their everyday routines, she accompanied study participants on a “typical food access journey,” usually to the groccery store.

Narrow aisles in stores are one of many barriers to access researchers observed. Photo by Naomi Schwartz

She was surprised by how many small barriers arose throughout the trip – such as garbage cans blocking pathways, inadequate curb cuts and narrow aisles within stores.

“As a non-disabled researcher, it was so important for me to understand the small-level barriers that we don’t necessarily think of,” Schwartz says.

Buliung adds that the study also provides unique insight into the barriers within people’s homes.

“We really wanted to dig into what’s happening in the home,” says Buliung. “When we think about food access we often think about accessibility in the city. We’re often looking outward at destinations… but it seemed a bit rare to look at what’s happening at the home site.”

Within the home, some participants on a limited income or living in subsidized housing lived in spaces that were too small to allow them to move comfortably with their mobility device. Many had inaccessible kitchens, and those in apartments or condos faced potential mechanical breakdowns of important services such as elevators and exterior points of entry.

Among those who used Wheel-Trans – Toronto’s paratransit service which provides door-to-door service at the cost of standard TTC transit fares – people with disabilities sometimes waited for the bus for half-an-hour in freezing weather. Some also said the Wheel-Trans monthly pass, which then cost $146.25, ate up a big part of their income.

Schwartz says she was able to access one food bank with a participant during mobile interviews, but that another participant had indicated some food banks were inaccessible.

“There’s a lot of food banks that might not have a lot of funding themselves, so they’re not running necessarily accessible operations,” Schwartz says.

There are potential solutions to the issues outlined in the study, Schwartz says. More financial support could be given through the Assistive Devices Program for people with long-term disabilities. There could also be greater enforcement and improvement of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), legislation that aims to make the province fully accessible by 2025. There could also be a greater emphasis on designing the built environment, including inside and around a person's residence, with people with disabilities in mind.

“Disability needs to be considered further up in the design process, as part of how things are designed from the beginning,” Schwartz says. “We need accessible spaces, and [to] not consider disability as an afterthought.”

Buliung says that, while AODA is supposed to help produce greater accessibility in new builds, processes and access to resources to support retrofit are messy and unclear.

"There is a long way to go before the 'accessible' Ontario vision becomes a reality," he says. "What I really see happening by 2025 is a sort of accessible Ontario, in some places, for some people, some of the time. The presence of AODA does not mean that someone is going to come into your residence and make it suddenly work for you – many of the barriers identified in Dr. Schwartz's work are not simply going to magically disappear in the coming years."

Schwartz adds that offering a basic income supplement or increasing payments through the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) could also be part of the solution.

Produce bags hang out of reach for some.
Photo by Naomi Schwartz

“Higher income levels would support so many things in terms of adequate food, but also housing. Or when there’s an emergency, to be able to afford an alternative, like a taxi,” she says. “Flexible income is needed, and right now the levels of income and things like the ODSP are just not adequate to allow that leeway at all. The basic income supplement is hugely important as well. It would just allow so much more flexibility in people’s incomes.”

Ultimately, she hopes that their study can make an impact on people’s lives.

“I hope it can be used to advocate for increases to disability incomes and act as evidence as a need for a basic income program,” she says, adding that she hopes the team’s research can also be used by the food industry to improve accessibility within their services.

Buliung, whose daughter Asha was born with spinal muscular atrophy type 2 and uses a wheelchair, says the issue is deeply personal to him.

“I want a future for my daughter where she doesn’t have to struggle with the issues that we have described in this paper,” he says. “I don’t want her to have to experience food insecurity.”

The researchers have also co-authored two other studies that focus on food insecurity across Canada, including “Disability and food access and insecurity: A scoping review of the literature and Mobility impairments and geographic variation in vulnerability to household food insecurity,” published in Health & Place in 2019.

Food insecurity in Nunavut increased despite federal subsidy program: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 21 May 2019 18:55:26 +0000

Food insecurity in Nunavut increased despite federal subsidy program: U of T study

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 05/21/2019 - 14:55

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A study by U of T researchers found that 46 per cent of Nunavut households suffered from food insecurity in 2014, up from 33 per cent in 2010 (photo by Pierre Dunnigan/500px via Getty Images)

Jim Oldfield

Topic

Breaking Research

Researchers at the ��Ƶ have charted a spike in food insecurity since the introduction of Nutrition North Canada in 2011, calling into question the federal program’s approach and claims that it has been successful.

Food insecurity is the insecure or inadequate access to food due to a lack of money. In 2010, it affected 33 per cent of households in Nunavut – almost three times the national average. But the U of T study showed that by 2014, when Nutrition North was fully implemented, food insecurity had increased to 46 per cent of households.

The increase in food insecurity remained even after the researchers accounted for macroeconomic trends and changes in household characteristics over time. The findings were published today in Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“These results are shockingly bad,” says Valerie Tarasuk, the paper’s senior author and a professor in U of T’s department of nutritional sciences.

“They really call out for a re-think of this program based on the daily experience of people in the North, rather than on metrics such as the price of food and shipments of goods.”

Nutrition North provides subsidies to retailers and suppliers, which are expected to pass on lower prices to consumers in remote areas. The program offered $69 million in subsidies in 2017 and last year the federal government announced an additional $62 million in funding over five years.

The program emphasizes perishables such as fruits and vegetables, and provides funding for education on healthy eating. The Nutrition North website claims the program has lowered the cost of the Revised Northern Food Basket (typical food consumption for a family of four) by almost $100 a month, and that the average volume of eligible items shipped to the North has increased by about 25 per cent.

“Price and volume of shipments are distant measures of whether people can afford and access food,” says Andrée-Anne Fafard St-Germain, lead author on the study and a doctoral student who works with Tarasuk.

“Our results suggest that a lot of people aren’t able to afford the foods in the stores despite the presence of Nutrition North. We think the federal government should be concerned by the disconnect between our findings and their reports.”

The researchers used data from over 3,200 households, based on 18 questions about different food access problems caused by financial constraints in the annual Canadian Community Health Survey. These metrics provide a picture of food insecurity over time, say the researchers.

Food insecurity in Nunavut breached 50 per cent in 2016, the researchers also found. They added that the figures are likely conservative because they are based only on data from the 10 largest communities in Nunavut.

The study results do not provide an explanation for why food insecurity has grown in Nunavut. But the researchers hypothesize that perhaps wealthier households that were already more food-secure benefited the most from the reduced prices.

“We can’t validate whether this is true, but it might help explain how food insecurity has grown while more food is being shipped since this program began,” says Fafard St-Germain.

The researchers acknowledge that their data does not include all aspects of food security that affect the Inuit, including access to traditional foods. But they note that broader measurement could show even more food insecurity, and that the survey data they used is well-suited to measuring the impact of Nutrition North’s retail and subsidy components.

“The bottom line is that this program was never really evaluated against the lived experience of food access,” says Tarasuk, who is also a scientist in the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition and U of T’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

“We can see that food insecurity has worsened, and think that any solution should come with more meaningful input from the people of Nunavut.”

The study was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

U of T-led study finds global crop diversity on the decline

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 07 Feb 2019 15:18:15 +0000

U of T-led study finds global crop diversity on the decline

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 02/07/2019 - 10:18

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The study, led by U of T Scarborough's Adam Martin, tracked crops on large-scale farmlands around the world between 1961 and 2014 (photo by Christian Ender via Getty Images)

Topic

U of T Scarborough

A new ��Ƶ study suggests we’re growing more of the same kinds of crops around the world, presenting a major challenge to agricultural sustainability.

The study, undertaken by an international team of researchers led by U of T Scarborough’s Adam Martin, used data from the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization to look at which crops were grown where on large-scale industrial farmlands from 1961 to 2014.

While they found crop diversity within specific regions has increased – in North America for example, 93 different crops are now grown compared to 80 back in the 1960s – Martin says that, globally, we’re now seeing more of the same kinds of crops grown on much larger scales.

In other words, large industrial farms in Asia, Europe, North America and South America are all beginning to look the same.

“What we’re seeing is large monocultures of crops that are commercially valuable being grown in greater numbers around the world,” says Martin, who is an assistant professor in U of T Scarborough’s department of physical and environmental sciences.

“So large industrial farms are often growing one crop species, which are usually just a single genotype, across thousands of hectares of land.”

Soybeans, wheat, rice and corn are prime examples. These four crops alone occupy just shy of 50 per cent of the world’s entire agricultural lands, while the remaining 152 crops cover the rest.

It’s widely assumed that the biggest change in global agricultural diversity took part during the so-called Columbia exchange of the 15^th and 16^th centuries – when commercially important plant species were transported to different parts of the world.

But the study’s authors found that in the 1980s there was a massive increase in global crop diversity as different types of crops were grown in new regions on an industrial scale for the first time. By the 1990s, however, the growth in diversity flattened out and has since declined.

The lack of genetic diversity within individual crops is pretty obvious, says Martin. For example, in North America, six individual genotypes comprise about 50 per cent of all maize (corn) crops.

The decline in global crop diversity is an issue for a number of reasons. For one, it affects regional food sovereignty. “If regional crop diversity is threatened, it really cuts into people’s ability to eat or afford food that is culturally significant to them,” says Martin.

In addition, Martin says if there’s increasing dominance by a few genetic lineages of crops, then the global agricultural system becomes increasingly susceptible to pests or diseases. He points to a deadly fungus that continues to devastate banana plantations around the world as an example.

Martin hopes to apply the same global-scale analysis to look at national patterns of crop diversity as a next step for the research. He adds that there’s a policy angle to consider, too, since government decisions that favour growing certain kinds of crops may contribute to a lack of diversity.

“It will be important to look at what governments are doing to promote more different types of crops being grown or, at a policy-level, are they favouring farms to grow certain types of cash crops,” he says.

The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, received funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, among others.

Risk factors for food insecurity include income supports, location and Indigenous status: U of T study

noreen.rasbach — Tue, 05 Feb 2019 20:45:23 +0000

Risk factors for food insecurity include income supports, location and Indigenous status: U of T study

noreen.rasbach Tue, 02/05/2019 - 15:45

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Jim Oldfield

Topic

Faculty of Medicine

Nutritional Sciences

Canadian households that rely on publicly funded income supports are much more likely to face food insecurity than those reliant on employment income, according to new research from the ��Ƶ.

The study is one of the most comprehensive to elucidate the socio-demographics of food insecurity in Canada, and it shows wide disparities in risk by province and territory, age and Indigeneity, among other factors.

Food insecurity is the inadequate or uncertain access to food due to financial constraint, and a growing body of evidence shows it has major effects on physical and mental health, and health-care costs.

Income supports associated with a high risk of food insecurity included social assistance, employment insurance and workers’ compensation, the researchers found – even after controlling for education, household composition and many other factors. Households reliant on social assistance were almost three times more likely to be food-insecure, and 16 times more likely when the researchers did not control for other factors.

“This study shows loud and clear that if you happen to be unfortunate enough to require income support, your probability of food insecurity is quite high, unless you’re a senior,” said Valerie Tarasuk, a professor of nutritional sciences in the Faculty of Medicine and principal investigator on the study. “It really calls into question the adequacy of the income supports provided by Canada’s hallmark social programs, while highlighting the protective effect of public pensions for seniors.”

The research was published in the journal BMC Public Health, and included data from 2011-12 on 120,000 households.

The study is the first to examine food insecurity by location of residence while accounting for a wide range of demographics, and it offers new insights on comparative risk among provinces and territories. Living in Nova Scotia or Alberta was associated with higher odds of marginal, moderate and severe food insecurity compared to Ontario, for example. And in Nunavut, the risk for severe food insecurity was more than six times higher than in Ontario.

Another novel finding was that households in Quebec had a lower risk of food insecurity than those in Ontario, despite a higher prevalence of the problem.

“We only see the protection associated with Quebec when we take into account socio-demographic differences of households in Quebec versus Ontario,” said Tarasuk, who is also a member of the Joannah & Brian Lawson Centre for Child Nutrition and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at U of T. “If Quebec didn’t confer such protection on its residents, its prevalence would be way higher, given the population demographics.”

Tarasuk said the evidence does not show why living in Quebec limits risk for food insecurity, but that it raises questions about the province’s lower cost of living and household debt-to-asset ratio, its child-care program and other social and family supports, and higher rates of unionization, which all warrant more study. Quebecers’ risk for severe food insecurity in particular was much lower – 41 per cent less than for Ontarians.

Households with Indigenous respondents were more likely to be food insecure than non-Indigenous Canadians, as other studies have found. But the researchers showed that even after controlling for other demographics, households with Indigenous respondents still had a 54 per cent higher risk.

“Our study excludes people living on reserve, and so by design it doesn’t capture the worst of this problem,” said Tarasuk. “Yet these numbers are still picking up a bad story.”

The study was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

U of T study finds food insecurity more than doubles the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 23 May 2018 19:08:08 +0000

U of T study finds food insecurity more than doubles the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes

noreen.rasbach Wed, 05/23/2018 - 15:08

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"To date there have been no policy actions in Ontario with the explicit goal of reducing food insecurity, despite many poverty reduction strategies,” said Christopher Tait, the study’s lead author.

Deborah Creatura

Nicole Bodnar

Topic

Diabetes

Graduate Students