Competing Approaches to Household Food Insecurity in Canada

Household food insecurity (HFI) impacts over 1.1 million households, adversely impact the health and well-being of individuals and families. Despite the recognition of the right to food by several international covenants, indicating that Canadian governments are obliged to reduce HFI, little has been done by the Canadian government to defend this right. The Canadian Government’s failure to address HFI has resulted in the creation of a number of non-governmental means of managing the problem, which have not been successful in redressing HFI. Furthermore, non-governmental responses may have served to depoliticize the issue of HFI, allowing governments to obfuscate their responsibility in addressing HFI. Four competing approaches of HFI in Canada, nutrition and dietetics, community traditionalism, social determinants of health and political economy complicate solutions by differently conceptualizing and framing the causes and appropriate responses to HFI. I argue that the political economy framework–which views the rise in HFI as precipitating from the skewed distribution of economic and social resources as a result of imbalances in power and influence–best explains the causes of food insecurity and presents the most effective means of responding to its presence in Canada by acknowledging the larger political and economic structures that shape and precipitate HFI.