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In today's episode, we'll talk about why our food justice movement including food banks should work in solidarity with the movement for migrant justice. I recently saw a meme that showed a picture of a man holding a sign that read, "Do you know what an accent is? It's a sign of bravery." Truly, the migrant story is one of bravery. You must be brave to leave family and the only homeland you've known, embrace potentially treacherous travel and come to a new country where you know that not all will welcome you. But you do it for the potential to work, you do it for the potential for safety, you do it for a better future. Migrants make up the backbone of our American food system. They work our fields and in our restaurant kitchens yet they are among our most vulnerable for food security. They pay taxes, but immigration status is a bar to important federal food assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The charitable food bank system is one resource, but it's not a sustainable one and also can be fraught with access issues. We're talking with Claudio Rodriguez and Robert Ojeda of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. Claudio is the environmental and social justice manager and Robert is the chief program officer. Interview Summary Christina - Claudio, before we look at migration in particular, you as the environmental and social justice manager, you have the privilege of facilitating change in communities at the intersections of food justice and community organizing. Could you tell us a little bit more please about what community organizing has to do with food and food banking?   Claudio - Yes, yes. I love this. Thank you for the question. I feel like community organizing is one of the key foundations that drives changes in our community because we've seen it throughout time through movements that change the condition of farm workers. That change policies and practices for the protection of workers, no matter where they find themselves. And when we bring community organizing into the space of food banking, what we are bringing is the building of relationships, using those relationships to accomplish together what we cannot accomplish on our own. In the case of food banking, it is to address the root causes of food insecurity. Christina - Claudio, could you please share an example for our listeners? Claudio - Our organizing work has actually helped change school menus to include local fresh produce. It has also created access to vacant land across our community to turn them into green spaces. Communities that often find themselves ignored, marginalized, or even just disinvested. And the purpose and mission of community organizing within food banking is to build power. To build power with our participants because without power we aren't able to change the conditions of our communities. And to break it down a little bit more for our listeners, is that when we talk about power, we're not talking about empowerment. Power is the ability to impact and affect the conditions of our own lives and the lives of others. And empowerment is more of a feel good about yourself and self-esteem. So our goal is to build power within the food banking movement so people can really change what the community looks like, feels like and their experiences. Christina - That is a really important distinction and I appreciate that so much. Because when you talk about building power, I also think about what that means for building leadership. And Robert, as the chief program officer, you develop programs that are building leadership opportunities for people from Latin America. In your anti-hunger work, what relationship have you identified between food insecurity and migration? Robert - Thank you, Christina, for the question. I think there are a few things that to me are really important. One is like a deep reflection and exploration around why we have folks coming to the US. One of the reasons from my persp

Our guest today is Joshua Lohnes, food policy research director at the West Virginia University Center for Resilient Communities. He's a scholar activist who writes and organizes alongside members of the West Virginia Food For All coalition. Josh will help us shed light on whether and how food charity can be seen as political, why that is a problem for us all, and what those working on the ground can do about it. Interview Summary I'm Charlie Spring, your host for today, I'm a researcher at the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. I've been researching the growth of charitable food networks, particularly in the UK, where one thing I've noticed is food banking organizations lobbying national government for funding or for favorable regulatory environments for the redistribution of surplus food as charity. Meanwhile, some UK food charities have become vocal critics of government policy that they see as driving food insecurity. It's clear that the link between charity and state is a complicated and shifting one. My first question is, most people working and volunteering in food charities wouldn't think of their work as political. What's hunger and food charity got to do with politics? Food charity work is absolutely political. Anytime we intervene to assist someone on the brink of food access failure, we're shaping and even reinforcing the everyday realities of the politics that structure our entire food system. While charities may not want to contend with this reality, they are, by default, acting within a set of policies that govern society's response to household food insecurity. Those working in food charity, they know that they're working within an extremely complex food system. They witness this complexity every day, more than most. Charitable food workers are also often aware that this system is driven by profit logics shaped by powerful actors in the food system, including the state and large corporations. Even if individual charities tend to operate on a logic of care over a logic of profit, the fact that they exist as a critical part of our contemporary food supply chains is a testament to the way in which specific interests in society have shaped the laws that govern food charity and the expansion of these food assistance networks over time. Free, volunteer or even low cost labor that charitable food work provides to this system is very much a part of a broader calculation. From that optic, anybody engaged in food charity is really, intimately engaged in a political project around what the future of our food system will be. Thanks for bringing in some of those questions around logics of care over logics of profits and the question of labor in food charity work. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this expansion of food charity happened? How did politics fit into that? I study emergency food networks in a US context from here in West Virginia, one of the places with the highest food and security rates in the country. I've observed this expansion unfold here over the past eight years. I've taken more and more of an interest in the global expansion of food charity. If we look at the US case, specifically, food charity and politics really began to intersect in the 1980s, shortly after the Reagan administration came into power. There was this concerted effort to trim down social services provided by the state like housing, cash and food assistance programs. They were all cut pretty drastically. As a result, people began lining up at churches and other organizations that had previously provided ad hoc intermittent food aid. Those cuts, they were part of a political project, one that's typically branded as trickledown economics. It left many people vulnerable to hunger. As feeding lines expanded and became a regular part of everyday food sourcing strategies for some people, a word got out that there was all of this excess cheese and other surplus food commodities in government storehouses all across

Multiculturalism is central to Canada's national identity. It is how Canadians like to distinguish themselves on the international stage. But this mythology obscures the realities of Black, Indigenous and people of color otherwise known as BIPOC who experienced ongoing colonialism and racism. These forces have led to fast social inequities, including the prevalence of food insecurity in one in every two first nations households, and nearly one in every three black households compared to one in 10 white Canadian households. In addition, migrant workers who produce food for Canadians, but who are not recognized as citizens or rights holders are among the groups that are most vulnerable to food insecurity and other social consequences of the pandemic. In today's episode, we examine patterns of dietary inequity and struggles for food justice that challenge Canada's multicultural facade. Welcome to Rights not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring everyone has enough food not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Audrey Tung, and I'm a PhD student at the University of Victoria. Our guest today's Jade Guthrie. She's an expert on issues of food justice and food sovereignty in both theory and practice. She's a community food programs lead at FoodShare Toronto and a community organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. Drawing from her background in social work, Jade applies an intersectional and anti-oppressive approach to advocacy for the right to food. Interview Summary So Jade in your most recent article in the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch report, you highlighted the distinction between structural and superficial responses to hunger. And you also demonstrated that the pandemic has exacerbated longstanding and long overlooked social inequities in Canada. Can you tell us a bit about why black and indigenous communities are disproportionately vulnerable to food insecurity? So I think first off, it's really important to recognize that Canada's food system as a whole is very much built on foundation of systems and structures of oppression. So things like settler colonialism and capitalism, systemic racism and structural poverty. So, it's no mistake then that certain communities, mainly BIPOC communities are bearing the brunt of the violence of our food system. I think we often hear kind of mainstream narratives that reinforce this idea that our system is failing or it's broken. But the fact of the matter is that it's not failing or broken, it's working exactly how it was built to. It was built on the backs of these folks. Canada's economic and social structures are low road, capitalists, colonial ones. So, our entire system as a country began on the backs of enslaved people, enslaved BIPOC folks. And today those systems continue to disproportionally impact these communities really violently. And then we see this play out in people's lives in terms of levels to access to food. Like you mentioned, black families are more than three and a half times more likely to experience food insecurity than white families here in Canada. So we see it playing out in the number of systemic barriers people face in trying to access the food they need to thrive. We might ask questions like why is it so hard to find affordable fresh produce in mainly black and indigenous and lower income neighborhoods? And it's not a coincidence, but it's a result of planning and policy processes that systematically under-resource certain communities. We also see this disproportionate impact playing out in terms of policing and food. So, why do certain grocery stores have police officers or security guards or metal detectors while others don't? Or why is baby food locked up in certain neighborhoods? So the question comes up of how many young, black and indigenous folks first encounter with the carceral system comes out of inequitable access to food. There's a lot of connections to be made here between policing and

Given the urgency of responding to climate change, food movements have featured prominently in urban planning, food policy, and sustainability initiatives, over the past decade. However, mainstream frameworks, such as the Local Food Movement, have typically catered to privilege, namely, a white middle class. They tend to overlook food networks that racialized communities have relied upon to survive social marginalization. Many of these communities have come together to support one another during COVID-19, a time when they've experienced profound social and dietary inequities. While the pandemic has presented a parallel crisis to climate change, it has also presented an opportunity to build food movements that are more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive to diverse communities. In this episode, we will understand how we can do so using the framework of food justice. Interview Summary Welcome to Rights Not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring that everyone has enough food, not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Audrey Tung, and I'm a PhD student at the University of Victoria. Jade Guthrie, our guest today, is an expert on issues of food justice and food sovereignty, in both theory and practice. She is a Community Food Programs Lead at FoodShare Toronto, and a Community Organizer with Justice for Migrant Workers. Drawing from her background in social work, she applies an intersectional and anti-oppressive approach to your advocacy for the right to food. So what is food justice and how does it come up in your work? So for me, I think that food justice is a way of looking at the food systems that we have, and exploring and dissecting them through a really critical lens. It's really about identifying where and how broader systems of oppression are shaping our experiences and our relationships with food. And then food justice is working to dismantle those systems, to transform our food system into a more just and equitable one. You know, when we talk about food justice, I think it's really about recognizing that things like settler colonialism, and capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, these are some of the organizing principles that are very much embedded within our current food system. And, we see, and we feel, this play out every day in people's lives. So we see it in the ways that black and indigenous folks, disabled folks, poor folks, other groups of marginalized people, these are the folks who are disproportionally facing more barriers to accessing food. These are the same people who are policed within the food system, and the same folks who are exploited as workers along the food chain. So when we talk about food justice, it's really kind of acknowledging that we can't talk about these food issues, things like food insecurity, without talking about all of these broader systems that it's rooted in. You know, going back to this notion of Rights Not Charity, I think when we talk about food justice, what becomes clear is that any meaningful so-called solution to the problem of food insecurity, has to take into account these sites of oppression that breed the conditions for food insecurity, right? So we can't just continue looking to temporary Band-Aid solutions, but we need to be thinking about sustainability and long-term transformation. So it's not just about putting food on the table, but it's about things like anti-oppression, anti-racism, asking questions like, "How can we decolonize the entire food system?" I think it is Karen Washington who I heard say this, but that "food justice is an action word." So you've got to talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to food justice. So it means that we need to be working to transform these systems, to create a food system that's really built for the people, right? Not one that's built on the backs of marginalized folks, which is what we currently have. Thanks for teasing out the complexities of food justice so

The food system does not serve everyone equally. Hunger is rooted in systems of inequity, including systemic and structural racism. Structural racism is at the root of hunger and the health disparities we see in the US today. In this episode, we'll talk to Suzanne Babb about the impacts of historical policies on the food security of communities of color. Suzanne is co-director of US programs at WhyHunger.org, New York. She is also an urban farmer and founding member of Black Urban Growers. Interview Summary   So Suzanne, could you start out by explaining to us the meaning of the term structural racism and how it impacts black indigenous in communities of color today?   - Sure. So I'm going to use a definition from Dr. Camara Jones, a public health researcher who talks about the impacts of racism on health. So she starts out by defining institutional racism, which is the systems of policies, practices, norms, and values that result in differential access to goods, services, and opportunities in society by race. So how that shows up is inherited disadvantage, in this case, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and inherited advantage, and in this case, in the US it is white people who have that advantage. And the way that this gets manifested is in terms of material conditions and access to power. So we're looking at access to housing, education, employment opportunities, income inequality, different access to medical facilities, access to a clean environment, access to power through information, resources, and voice like in the media. So laying that out when we're talking about structural racism, structural racism is about how these policies and institutions act together to lead and produce barriers to opportunity and lead to racial disparity. So for example, we could take the mass incarceration of Black men and women. That is a relationship between the education system, the whole quote to prison pipeline between the criminal justice system and between the media that often perpetuates the myths about black people and criminality.   Thank you so much for laying that out for us so clearly. It's important to remember for us that the structures we have today are the result of our multitude of historical insults. What are some key historical flash points to keep in mind when we think about the relationship between hunger and the right to food?   I think there are two big ones that I can give in as an example as historical insults. The first one would be the dispossession and murder of Indigenous people in populations of their natural resources beginning in the 15th century. And then also the transatlantic slave trade where millions of West Africans were kidnapped, enslaved and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, sold as chattel to do backbreaking labor from the middle of the 15th century to the end of the 19th century. And this is important because this is the beginning of where oppression and structural racism began for these groups of people, and that policies and practices have just been created and evolved to continue that oppression.   So over the last century there've been a number of policies or specific political acts that have shaped the US food system and negatively impacted the right to food for communities of color. I wonder if you can identify for us some of those key political actions.   Yes, so I'll identify three areas: the Social Security Act of 1935, several USDA farm policies with impact particularly on BIPOC farmers, and urban planning and neighborhoods; and the National Housing Act of 1934.   Let's now take each one of those policies one at a time, beginning with maybe the Social Security Act. Tell us a little bit about how that Social Security Act affected the food security of communities of color?   So the Social Security Act was created to protect Americans by providing folks in their old age, survivors and folks who have been disabled insurance; so payment in those times when the

Lack of food or too much of the wrong kind of food can create a wealth of physical and mental health problems. Making matters even worse, society often blames individuals for making the wrong choices. But data shows us that diet related ill health goes hand in hand with inequality and poverty and occurs at disproportionately higher rates for communities of color. In this episode, we talk with Dr. Ben Danielson, a pediatrician with the University of Washington, about the parallels between food banking and healthcare. And, how both systems manage social problems and could benefit from addressing food insecurity systemically at the root causes level.     Host: Christina Wong, Northwest Harvest   Guest: Ben Danielson, University of Washington   Producer: Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center   Interview Summary   We know the benefits of healthy food and we see ongoing impacts on child health outcomes as a result of food insecurity and family reliance on food charity. In your opinion, what are the key issues that health and food providers need to address?   Well, I think this is an opportunity for us to be a little bit reflective and to step back. I want to ask us all: what is the narrative that we've created around food and food charity? What is the story that we're telling ourselves? Is it a narrative or a story about heroes who are philanthropically giving of themselves to put food in front of folks and the poor destitute who are somehow just waiting for this kind of charity to show up? Are we disempowering some populations and creating super powers in others? What is the story that we're telling ourselves about food charity? And if we think about that, what is the environment of food and the food and health system that we're talking about in that narrative?   So I wonder about charity because sometimes in our society, we allow folks with great resource to make their choices about charity in order to help support other parts of our society. When in fact, sometimes those great resources are attained because of avoiding a need to pay taxes, avoiding other parts of supporting our society's infrastructure. And we sort of pulled away one set of resources and then allowed a certain number of people to provide a small amount of resource in a separate way. And I feel like maybe that is a narrative, a story of heroes doing something heroic instead of a story of a society that everybody cares about each other, everybody has strengths, everybody is making sure that everyone else around them is strong and healthy because that's the way we all get so much better. So I wonder about this idea about charitable deferral, the avoidance of supporting infrastructure by providing a trickle of resources to other spaces. I wonder about that infrastructure and the wealthiest of wealthy nations shouldn't we have some basic idea of the components that we should all be should all have a right to, should all be entitled to make sure that we don't have to worry about? Because I will tell you beyond the caloric issues of food, the worry about food, the preoccupation with wondering about food is just as detrimental to the mind and the body and the soul of folks who deal with food insecurity every day. I wonder about this as a symbolic representation of poverty by creating this space where food is delivered in sometimes undignifying ways to folks whose food security is weak. How we create a strong picture of folks perhaps BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), in different communities being subjugated, being marginalized. And that marginalization kind of being represented by this delivery of food in this way that we do it. I wonder about what we are accountable to, each of us.   I see in my role as a pediatrician, I watch these amazing kids every day. These incredible kids with just a look in their eye that tells you they can change the world for the better, they have all the skills and tools and hopes and dreams and pot

In this episode, we’ll explore the connection between hunger and health. Welcome to Rights Not Charity. This podcast series is about a big idea, ensuring everyone has enough food, not as a charitable gift, but as a fundamental human right. My name is Christina Wong and I'm the director of Public Policy and Advocacy at Northwest Harvest, a food justice organization and statewide food bank based in Seattle, Washington. Our guest today is Dr. Ben Danielson, a pediatrician with the University of Washington.   Host: Christina Wong, Northwest Harvest   Guest: Ben Danielson, University of Washington   Producer: Deborah Hill, Duke World Food Policy Center   Interview Summary   So my first question for you is we all know that access to good food is a vital component of physical and mental health. Can you help us understand the links between diet and food access and how it affects health?   Well, I guess we have to just start with the basics. Not having enough food, or the right kind of nutrition, at least, leads to serious and often deadly health consequences for so many people across this country and other countries as well. When you don't have enough calories that just means you don't have the kind of energy you need for work. It means that if you're trying to learn, you don't have the potential to be able to learn effectively. If you don't have enough calories, you can't play, and you don't have life fulfilling activities that are important to you. But it's not just about not having quite enough calories, it's also about issues of making sure you have access to the healthiest foods and the right micronutrients.   There are ways in which hunger can be all around you, and you might not realize it, because people might not look like they are underweight or starving. In fact, a lot of people who have nutritional deficits can be overweight and malnourished at the same time. This is the paradox and the painful reality of not having enough food for too many people in North America and Europe. These problems are really linked to the way we think of economic inequality. When a parent is low income, they might struggle to afford fruits and vegetables, and they might go for the higher calorie foods per dollar. But that higher calorie content per dollar may be lower on the nutritional scale. It may not be the right kind of micronutrients. It could lead to someone actually feeling full, but not having a fulfilling diet. This means that again, young people, old people, children are filling their bodies with calories, but not with healthy foods.   If we are part of a nation, part of a continent, part of a globe that cares about making sure that each person can fulfill their potential in the way that they're supposed to, it really needs to be time for us to rethink the way we talk about food, about the right to food, about access to food. Because it's more than just nutrients. It's not enough for a food company, say, to add a few fortifications to their cereal. It's not enough for a particular product to be enhanced with certain micronutrients. What we need to be doing is really talking about food differently, and talking about body size, and body shape, and body weight differently. We need to have new conversations about access to healthy food, the rights of all of us to get food, the chance for young people to grow and fulfill their biggest dreams because they have healthy diets. And, the obligation that we all have to each other to making sure that we can live our fullest lives.   I just love everything about your answer. I feel like I can really hear the care that you have for your patients in that answer. And speaking of which that paradox about caloric intake, when you're hungry, that leads me to my next question, which is when it comes to food insecurity and particularly the obesity pandemic, people tend to focus on individual responsibility. We often hear this framed as an issue about people making the wrong

Interview Summary So let's get started. As a seasoned food waste campaigner, what led you to this innovative, illustrated explainer video approach? What's important about this kind of visual messaging? What are you hoping to achieve by it? Well, we wanted to start telling a different story about how we can solve these problems, and the root causes of food waste and poverty. We show how inequalities of wealth and power in the industrial food system generate waste and hunger, more often than not. Waste and hunger will ultimately continue unless we fix these inequalities. Charities are only ‘sticking plaster’ or ‘band aid’ resolution to food insecurity. What we're really saying with this campaign is that the UK’s distribution of surplus food is also only a second class solution for food waste issues too. So to see what the more systemic solutions for food waste are, we need to look at the root causes. And to do this, we need to rewrite the dominant story of how our food system generates food waste. So, let's look back at the history of this. Food waste as an issue has taken off really over the last decade, in the UK and globally. A fairly standard story has begun to emerge: Food waste primarily happens at the retail and consumer level in rich, industrialized countries, and it's down to individual failings of consumers to be solved with educational campaigns to change that behavior. Now, on the other hand, we have food loss, which makes it sound unintentional. Like it's been sort of lost down the back of the sofa. But it's actually food wasted in supply chain problems, where lower income countries which lack infrastructure, like storage and refrigeration, and apparently, have inefficient supply chain. The problem with this narrative is, by accident or design, it falsely implies that industrialized food supply chains in rich countries are effectively efficient and low waste. And to solve food waste in these countries, it's enough to leave it to voluntary commitments by companies. In other words, market innovation will solve food waste, with some role for social enterprises and charities to hoover up the leftovers. So, in this system, we need to modernize the supply chain of countries in the Global South to make them more efficient and emulate these systems. This apparently de-political approach to food waste has become ascendant, and gone largely unchallenged. But it is, in fact, deeply neoliberal: the assumption that businesses in the free market are fundamentally efficient, and any problems are usually down to the personality failings of individual consumers or perhaps state intervention. With these films and other resources, we basically aim to rewrite this narrative by explaining how actually the inequalities of wealth and power that occur in the industrial food system generate waste. They generate overproduction, price crashes, inflexibility over seasonal variations, and rejecting food for being the wrong size and shape. But not only that, they also distribute wealth and foods extremely unequally. So generating mass hunger, despite there being no shortage of food or wealth to go round, and it creates underdevelopment. The lack of storage infrastructure in the Global South, is not a coincidence. It's the result of generations of colonial exploitation, which continues in a slightly different form today, with multinational corporations often extracting huge amounts of money and resources from the world's poorest countries. Understanding all this means, that we need more systemic solutions than just taking food waste and giving it to people in poverty or embracing voluntary commitments by businesses. We need to design food waste and poverty out of the system in the first place. Our videos sketch out some of these solutions. Now, all of this is a more complex story to tell then just spontaneously rescuing lots of food waste for people in need. What we've tried to do with these animations is make this new narrativ

Have you ever wondered why there are so many hungry people in wealthy nations like the US, Canada and the UK long before and especially during COVID -19? This is happening even though the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognized food as a fundamental human right These agreements hold nation states publicly accountable for the right to food. Human rights grew out of a recognition for basic human needs in the aftermath of World War II, just as the current “fight against COVID-19” has renewed their urgency. So what does the “right to food” mean and why does it matter? In this podcast, two guests define the right to food, and also how it differs from food charity such as food banks and food pantries. University of British Columbia Professor Graham Riches is the leading voice on the right to food in Canada. He’s joined by attorney and PhD candidate Laura Castrejon-Violante, who researches the constitutionalization of the right to food. Interview Summary So, let’s begin, Graham, you were the first to make the connection between food banks and welfare cutbacks in Canada. You’ve also written extensively about the Right to Food, including in your most recent book, ‘Food Bank Nations, Poverty, Corporate Charity and the Right to Food (Routledge, 2018) Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me, it’s a pleasure to be here. I think I’d first say that it’s crucial to understand that food is a basic human need which is essential to life itself, to nutrition and to health. Food, of course, is a marketplace commodity but at root it is a public good. It’s critical to social and economic well-being and in all cultures and all religions, it’s at the heart of family and community life. And yes, food is a fundamental human right, intrinsic to all human beings and to their human dignity. We also know, as you’ve said Audrey, the Right to Food is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It has been ratified by close to 90% of UN member states, but sadly not by the USA. The Right to Food is universally recognized under International Law as foundational to the Right to ‘an adequate standard of living, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions’. Significantly, in 1999, the UN clarified its meaning, declaring “the Right to Food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community, have physical and economic access at all times to adequate food, or the means for its procurement.” In other words, the Right to Food is about the right to feed oneself or one’s family with dignity, either through growing, gathering, or hunting for food, or in our market economy, having sufficient money in your pocket to purchase the food of your choice in normal and customary ways. Thank you, Graham for pointing out that choice and autonomy are key components of the right to a dignified life. Now, can you also describe the difference between food as a charitable gift and food as a human right? This is a key question. The Right to Food is not about charity, it’s not about feeding the need, nor about reliance on the happenstance of corporate food banking, redistributing leftover food, that is surplus or wasted food, to ‘left behind’ people. Of course, there’s a moral imperative to feed hungry people, but charity is not a right, it cannot be claimed, it’s highly stigmatizing requiring people to beg for food. The problem is, food banking has socially constructed hunger as a matter for charity. It thereby allows governments to neglect their public accountability, their obligations under international law, to realize food security for all. Consequently, food insecurity has grown and further been entrenched by COVID-19. Access to food is not only a food problem, but a matter for income security, addressing precarious work

Canada is among the world’s 10 wealthiest countries. Yet food insecurity has been rising. Around one in eight Canadian households experienced food insecurity in 2018. A figure that has likely grown, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Canada reported 4.4 million Canadians living in food insecure households in 2017 to 2018. The biggest number ever recorded. Like the U.S. and U.K., Canada has seen significant growth in food banks over the past 40 years, and many Canadians see food charity as a key solution to hunger. Interview Summary In this episode, we talked to Canadian food policy and food insecurity expert Valerie Tarasuk, of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of Toronto. She leads the PROOF Research program to identify effective policy approaches, to reduce household food insecurity in Canada. We asked Tarasuk how hunger and food insecurity are defined in Canada; who it affects, and solutions to address the problem. You have researched different aspects of food insecurity for many years, but let’s start with some basic definitions. Can you please explain for us the difference between the terms hunger and food insecurity? What do they mean in Canada, and why is this a problem we should care about? Well, I mean the meaning of those terms in Canada is probably very similar to the meaning anywhere else. That hunger is a physiologic sensation that signals the need for food. And food insecurity at least as we use that term in Canada, refers to inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial constraints. Where it plays out though in Canada, that I think is important is that the term hunger is often used in conjunction with food charity in Canada. So we see food banks for example, appealing to people to make donations to stop hunger in their community, or to make sure nobody goes hungry in their community. And so now we’re talking about a very short term sensation. Everybody can relate to being hungry, a simple idea. But that somehow has taken on a life of its own as a way to understand the problem with people not having enough money for food. And where it’s concerning for people like me. Is that going along with that understanding of hunger, is this idea that the way to fix it is to give food, make a donation. As opposed to food insecurity, where we’ve got a very tightly scripted definition and measurement of that problem in Canada and it’s routinely monitored. That’s really interesting. So if I’m understanding you correctly, if hunger inspires an emotional response and therefore feels the need for immediate action. While food insecurity is something that is measured. And you mentioned a little bit about how it’s measured. Could you go a little bit more into that for me? And talk about the extent of household food insecurity and who’s most impacted by it in Canada? We’ve been monitoring food insecurity systematically since 2005. And when I say we, it’s Statistics Canada that measures food insecurity. Where we’re using the 18 item module that was developed by USDA and is used in the United States to monitor food insecurity as well. It’s not perfect. There are only nationally representative samples with food insecurity measurements for some years since 2005. But we’ve collected a huge amount of data from these surveys. And so we know a lot about who’s got the problem and what’s driving it. The rate of food insecurity varies dramatically depending on where you live. In our most recent measurement which was over the period of 2017/18. The rate ranged from 11% in the province of Quebec to 57% in Nunavut. Nunavut is a very small population, but it’s our most Northern territory in Canada. And since monitoring began, Nunavut’s rate of food insecurity has steadily risen. So there’s dramatic differences across the country, but nowhere in Canada, do we even find a rate as low as one in 10 households being food insecure. In addition to geographic differences,

The United Kingdom has seen rising levels of hunger over the past 10 years. And despite being in the top five wealthiest countries in the world, demand for food aid was rising even before 2020, but it’s estimated that 15% of families with children have struggled to afford a decent diet since the pandemic began. Food charities have struggled to cope and have increasingly called for government intervention. But the problem is still poorly understood. To help us understand food insecurity and hunger in the UK. Who it affects, what’s causing it and what’s being done about it – we’ve invited policy and international relations researcher Hannah Lambie-Mumford from the University of Sheffield and the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute. Over the last decade, she has studied the rise of food charity and the right to food in the UK and other European countries. Interview Transcript Your book Hungry Britain charted the rapid rise of food charity in the UK. And the phenomenon of what’s often described as food poverty in Britain. But even just 10 years ago very few British people had even heard of food poverty or food insecurity. Can you please explain to us what these terms mean? Absolutely. So all these terms relate to the idea of limited insecure access to food due to financial resource constraints. Food poverty as a term probably has the longest history of describing this issue in the UK. Household food insecurity in comparison, has become more widely used by policy makers or policy focused researchers. But there is still a tendency particularly in the policy sphere for food security as an idea to still be seen as an issue of supply. So there’s still very much a range of ways in which we talk about this issue in the UK. One of the interesting things to note when we talk about food insecurity and food poverty in a European context is to be wary of the terms in relation to how they are translated. So in our recent book on food charity in Europe, we talk about how the term food insecurity doesn’t always translate in terms of financial resource constraints and insecure access to food but actually can translate as food safety. And so it doesn’t always travel that well compared to food poverty as a term. In the UK, the press and the public debate has also used the word hunger increasingly over the sort of last 10 years or so. And there have been powerful anti-hunger campaigns based on phrasing around hunger such as the “End Hunger” UK campaign, which has formed between 14 national charities and organizations and faith groups campaigning against hunger specifically framed in that way. Thanks Hannah, for laying out those basic definitions. Particularly interesting to hear that the term food insecurity might not translate very well in the European context, but having read out those definitions what do we know about the extent of the problem in the UK? Absolutely. So the issue of measurement of household food insecurity in the UK is a really interesting one. And for many years, we have not had any systematic measure. In fact, the first government measure of national household food insecurity statistics were not collected until 2019 and first reported just the other month. So for most of this time we have relied quite heavily on figures from food banks and other food charities to give us some kind of indication. The Trussell Trust is the only national network of food banks in the UK and their statistics have been relied on heavily over the last 10 years. And as we know, and your listeners will know that these are really poor proxy statistics for household food insecurity but they did draw significant attention particularly following the rise of Trussell Trust food provision in the years following 2011 and 2012 when their provision rose very sharply. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) who is England and Northern Ireland and Wales’ food safety regulator actually did introduce a household food insecurity measu

Did you know that 40 million people in the United States experience hunger. This is startling given the fact that the us is one of the richest countries in the world. Perhaps you’ve participated in a hunger drive at your school, have volunteered at a food pantry, or even experienced hunger yourself. So what is hunger and how do we manage this problem in the United States? In this episode, we talk to professor Janet Poppendieck of the Urban Food Policy Institute at the City University of New York, to explore some basic definitions of hunger and food insecurity, who it affects, and solutions to address the problem. Host: Rebecca De Souza, professor of communication at the University of Minnesota Duluth and author the book, “Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries.” Interview Summary So Jan, you’ve written three books on hunger in the United States, “Breadlines Knee-Deep in Wheat“, “Free for All: Fixing School Food in America“, and the widely read and critically acclaimed classic, “Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement“. Could you please start us out with some basic definitions? What do these terms, hunger and food insecurity actually mean in the United States? The term hunger has many meanings. It’s the signal that our brain send when we’re running low on fuel and it’s a welcome and necessary part of our biology, but when we can not meet that need, then it becomes a social problem, a problem for the society. In the US it has proven to be very difficult to agree on how to measure hunger, and so in fact, we have shifted in the last several decades to reliance on the term food insecurity to designate the situation that we’re concerned about as a society. There is an official definition of food insecurity, which is used by the United States Department of Agriculture in the measurement of hunger, and it’s simply that the excess to adequate food is limited by the lack of money and other resources. So a household is considered food insecure when they don’t have enough money and other resources to obtain sufficient food on a regular basis. And we do measure this problem annually, the Bureau of the Census conducts a episode of the current population survey in December, and generally releases the data on household food security and insecurity in the following, September, households are classified as food secure or as having low food security or very low food security. Thank you for clarifying those terms for us Jan, how both hunger and food insecurity are measured, and then for all that history as well. So you’ve been an anti-hunger advocate for decades now. So tell us, what do we know about the extent of hunger in the US and who is impacted by it? So, because of the annual household food security survey, we have pretty reliable numbers. And I wanna turn to the numbers from before the pandemic, because they were part of a long-term trend of an increase in household food security. So in 2019, before the pandemic, about 35 million Americans lived in food insecure households, and that was 10.9% of the population. And that was the lowest since the measurement began 25 years ago. And of course food insecurity is not randomly distributed, so the groups with the highest levels of food insecurity will not come as a surprise. Households with children were more likely to be food insecure, households with children under six were even more likely to be food insecure, and households with children headed by a single woman were very likely to be food insecure, 28.7%, as opposed to the 10.5% for all households. Women living alone and men living alone, both had rates higher than the average. And it was not as it never is in the United States distributed evenly by race and ethnicity, households with a black non-Hispanic respondent were twice as likely, nearly one in five Hispanic households had a high rate of food insecurity, 15.6%, as opposed to the overall