Cuisine Canada Scene

Fresh Vegetables at the Farmers' Market

In a recent speech by Dr. Harvey Anderson, Director of the Program in Food Safety, Nutrition and Regulatory Affairs at the University of Toronto, he suggested that in Canada, “We have no national nutrition policy.” Hearing speakers from around the world at the opening of University of Guelph’s Human Nutraceutical Research Unit, it was easy to see that Canada is nutritionally “all right” as a nation, and that our state of public health was not as bad as many other industrialized countries.  But we could be doing more, and in a more proactive way with a national nutrition policy.  The direction to go, however, is not so clear.

Take the recent Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Report Cards on Health:

The Report Cards on Health identified a high level of price disparity and accessibility for eight basic food items.  As expected, communities in isolation experienced significantly higher food costs, and many isolated communities did not even have all of the basic foods.  The state of food security in Canada is worrisome.

Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security, written in 1998, gives the following definition:

“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”

While the Heart and Stroke Report Card was a brief snapshot of food accessibility, healthy food is not always accessible or affordable.  The study found that 23% of Canadians occasionally could not afford lean meat, and 20% could occasionally not afford fresh fruit or vegetables.  This mirrors the findings that approximately 20% of Canadians have only sporadic access to fresh fruit and vegetables.

The survey found that Canadians want the government to do the following to improve food security and nutrition:

• Regulate the price of nutritious foods to ensure they are equally affordable in all regions of Canada
• Make public education about nutrition an important part of governments’ health programs and efforts
• Raise the income of poor Canadians so they can afford more nutritious foods

It’s an interesting case.  Price regulation is a problematic situation.  Usually subsidized food systems not only subsidize consumer products, but rather the subsidies support the agricultural commodities that form the basis of the consumer product.  In Canada, much of our fresh fruit and vegetable supply is imported, making subsidies more complex.  Our agricultural economy has minimal subsidy compared to most other industrial countries.  In particular, the US, with complex subsidies, and several tiers of federal food security programing (eg SNAP Food Stamps, and WIC), has a worse nutrition situation than we do.  Canada’s Food Mail Program helps, but can not mitigate the entire transportation cost for food.

The government is already engaged in nutrition education through Canada’s Food Guide.  That said, how well does Canada’s Food Guide translate to the real world?  Raising income levels usually comes along with general price inflation.  There is no easy answer.

What would you do to improve food accessibility in Canada? Tell us of your programs that have made a strong and broad impact on health and food accessibility.

Photo © Mark_Smith. Published under a Creative Cmmons License.