Canada’s revamp of the national food guide is long on feel-good phrases but woefully short on practical advice for the thousands of Canadians who don’t have the financial resources to adequately feed their families daily – a hardship known as food insecurity.
Be mindful of your eating habits, the guide helpfully suggests. Cook more often, eat in groups and take the time to enjoy your food.
While that is good advice for some, enjoyment is far from the minds of many other Canadians when they think about feeding their families. Instead, the experience of eating goes hand-in-hand with stress and anxiety. A 2015 Statistics Canada report on food insecurity in Canada notes household food insecurity rates fluctuated between 7.6 per cent and 8.5 per cent every year from 2007 to 2012. By 2012, approximately 1.1 million Canadian households experienced food insecurity.
That number has undoubtedly increased since then, especially in provinces like Alberta where the past few years have been economically difficult.
Food insecurity is unfortunately expected to get worse this year as the prices of some food groups climb. In late 2018, Dalhousie University and the University of Guelph released their 2019 version of Canada’s Food Price Report, which forecasts the total price of food to rise by between 1.5 and 3.5 per cent this year.
The forecast means the annual food expense for an average Canadian family is expected to rise by $411 this year alone.
That hits hardest with fruits (rising by one to three per cent) and vegetables (rising by four to six per cent) – the two foods the Food Guide especially recommends you consume. Those two foods are now, according to the Food Guide, supposed to comprise fully half of your diet.
It is worth pointing out many of those fresh foods are particularly difficult for people who live in remote areas to access, and for those low-income households living in cities, a price increase could mean the difference between putting fresh vegetables on the table or opting for the cheaper dry, packaged (and often much less nutritional) meals.
While the food guide is still tone-deaf to many of the food-related struggles facing many Canadians, some aspects of the guide’s rewrite deserve recognition. After 12 years, the government document was sorely overdue for an update, and in at least one way, the government got it profoundly right this time.
For example, dairy and meat are no longer their own food groups, but instead are lumped in with other proteins, signalling that industry lobbyists were kept at arm’s length from the formation of the guide. Ultimately, that has led to a more balanced, evidence-based and credible guide than the previous iteration, and that’s overall a good thing for the health of Canadians.
But the work of healthy living doesn’t stop with a food guide. Now that the federal government has started a more honest conversation about healthy eating, it is time to turn that conversation into one about healthy communities as a whole – and that starts with addressing food insecurity.
Editorials are the consensus view of the St. Albert Gazette's editorial board.
