Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. Coming up in this episode, Dr. Jennifer Black talks with Lauren Chisholm about the need to change the conversation around food insecurity in Canada.
Speaker: In 2024, food insecurity in Canada worsened for the third year in a row. More than 25% of the population were living in households with inadequate access to food due to financial constraints.
Speaker: So, how we talk about food insecurity matters. The Hungry Stories Project is a team of scholars, dieticians, and artists who are fighting for the elimination of food insecurity by sharing what it takes to collectively care for each other's food needs.
Speaker: They're producing resources to understand food insecurity, and they say, we need to look at root causes. Dr. Jennifer Black is a member of the Hungry Stories Project and an associate professor in food, nutrition, and health at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. And she joins me now. Hello, Jennifer.
Speaker: Hi, thanks for having me. Oh, it's great to be talking with you. What are some of the root causes that get overlooked in our day-to-day notions of food insecurity?
Speaker: Well, I think the most important thing to consider when thinking about this topic is that food insecurity, while we think of it as an issue of not having enough food, really is very tightly wound up with issues of not having enough money to afford food. In addition to often being stretched to be able to afford many of the other basic needs of daily living, like housing and childcare. really, we know food insecurity is really tightly connected.
Speaker: with just general material deprivation and not having enough to make ends meet generally. Now, many people look to food banks and and secondarily soup kitchens as a way to address a lack of access to food. Why aren't they the solution that we need?
Speaker: So we've gotten really used to thinking of food banks as the go-to place to address food insecurity in Canada. But when food banks started really growing widely around the nineteen eighty s in Canada, they were never meant to be a long-term solution. They were thought of as ah a short-term patchwork to get through a really bad financial time. But in the years since, we've seen them grow, but they haven't adequately addressed the underlying issues that drive food insecurity, which is insufficient income. There's lots of reasons we know that the vast majority of people who experience food insecurity don't go to food banks in the first place. So we know that for much of the
Speaker: communities we we want to address these issues for, they don't get there in the in the first place. For those who do end up accessing food banks, we know they're often in the most dire straits, but food banks were just never set up or equipped to meet the giant gaps.
Speaker: So at best, they sometimes can provide a little bit of emergency food support, but they're just not up to the the huge task of meeting the quantity of need or the types of food needs that people have, and nor do they are they able to provide the support people need with dignity and fairness and justice.
Speaker: Absolutely. Now, it seems to me we're exposed to a lot of narratives that tell us as individuals, we need to make good food choices, we need to exercise more and so on. And i don't think anyone's going to deny that's good advice. But how does this framing fall short for addressing food insecurity as a community and as a country? Absolutely.
Speaker: You know we we often hear these stories about how it is our own responsibility to to do things better, to make our weights perfect, to parent better. But we've sort of lost the narrative of what it actually takes at the structural level, at the policy level. to make sure people don't become food insecure in the first place. And, you know, what started our Hungry Stories Collective was we were originally, you know, a group of moms whose own kids had started school and food banks and food drives have been used as a tool in schools to help think about you know, being a good citizen and being ah a generous giver, but kids weren't being exposed to the underlying research evidence that we have from decades worth of evidence in Canada about what was really the underlying causes and the root causes of food insecurity. So we really wanted to think about how do we get the real stories of why people are food insecure in the first place more widely understood And to really think about how insufficient our current responses are and how much more we need to be doing if we actually want to meaningfully address the problem instead of continuing to watch it get worse and worse, which we have over the last 20 years of careful monitoring of food insecurity. We know that the data is going absolutely in the wrong direction.
Speaker: Now, Jennifer, the the Hungry Stories Project has published a book, Shy Cat and Stuff the Bus Challenge. Tell us about it and and how you hope it will contribute to ah a different framing and understanding of food insecurity.
Speaker: So this really has been an exciting and meaningful project. The book officially comes out on March the 3rd from Second Story Press. But this was really a response to our look around and asking what kinds of books and materials can we use for our own kids to talk about these really difficult conversations about why kids are still hungry in Canada.
Speaker: and what we can be and should be doing about it. The project has taken years to to to get to this point. We've been slowly working together with this team of artists and scholars, finding Amanda White and Diane Day, who are the author and illustrator of the Shy Cat book. So this book is finally coming out and we hope it will be a ah new opportunity to engage kids in stories that really resonate with them. And we'll give adults and caregivers and teachers a way to look into the world of of you know, real kids and real stories and open up these hard questions and hard conversations that we just haven't found other, you know, comparable stories to to get into these topics ah with.
Speaker: Well, without giving it away, can you give us a peek into how it takes a different approach? Sure. i mean, we've we've we looked at a lot of other books that existed. Diane Day, who was a PhD student at the time, did this really careful analysis looking at any book she could get through public libraries that had um stories of protagonists who are food insecure. And the narratives that were found in those books just didn't align with what we know from research evidence and years of experience around food insecurity.
Speaker: They largely framed poverty and hunger as individual problems, you know the result of poor parenting or bad life decisions. And the solutions they offered often looked at you know like you know a lucky break or a kind stranger or some individual change, some miraculous action of ah of a young child solving their own food insecurity, none of them really addressed the kinds of societal, policy-level, structural changes that would be needing to address food insecurity. So ah before we found Diane and Amanda, the the the research scholars on the team tried to write a book and we ended up writing this tremendously boring script that was highly educational. You know, we have years of experience writing research reports and scholarly studies and our attempt to to do that in language that kids would like was really, you know, terrible and and sort of unreadable book. So we realized then what we need is the voice of artists who can really take that important scholarly material And turn it into sort of emotional and engaging stories for kids. So what they did was they really just told the story of two friends, one of whom was really living in a household experiencing acute food insecurity.
Speaker: But in ah in a classroom, in a school context where they were having a stuff the bus challenge, which is actually a not that uncommon Canadian activity where classrooms kind of face off trying to see who can most quickly fill a bus full of canned canned goods for canned food drives.
Speaker: And this book really gets at a childhood friendship and the act of sort of curious kids trying to understand, like, why is my friend still insecure? where' We're bringing all these canned goods. where We're raising we're raising i funds. We're raising cans. And yet my friend's still hungry. So it's, you know, and they they do this through this quirky ability to, they you know, they had a tough time having these conversations with each other, but they're kids and they They go back and forth drawing these comics with cats in them. you know, it's actually hard to explain the story without reading it, but it's, it's really a story of friends and kids and the curiosity of being young and trying to ask like, why are we still doing it like this? If some of the kids in our own communities still aren't able to get the food and care they need. And there's no simple answers presented in the book, but yeah,
Speaker: there's some opportunities to start these conversations about what else could be done. and at the same time, we're still developing um resources for teachers and parents and educators that has some of that more, you know, scholarly detailed work about sort of language and evidence and ideas that can go with the book. But, it ah you know, in its essence, we just want to get kids reading and thinking and talking. And we think stories are going to do a better job of that.
Speaker: than a research report, quite frankly. Well, it it sounds just brilliant. Now, Jennifer, Canada remains one of the few affluent countries with no nationally funded school lunch program. Why are school lunch programs such an important tool?
Speaker: You know, so I want to be clear that, you know, I don't think school lunch programs on their own either are going to be any kind of magic solution for the kinds of deeply entrenched food insecurity. But what they are is an important step in asking about ways that we can collectively work together to support all children. And we know there's lots of things that are really important in the experience of children that food programs have a way to connect with. Some of the top of that list include the suboptimal dietary quality of kids, regardless of food insecurity status. We know there's a lot of Canadian kids who would benefit from better dietary intake and a more nutritious lunch. We know there are lots of constraints on families, you know particularly for those who have food insecurity challenges, but for many parents, Getting food on the table, but getting food in lunch bags is particularly complex and demanding and stressful, ah more so for some than others, but that's a pretty large daily challenges for many families. And we know food is just a tremendous way to connect kids together with community, with healthy food, with important issues around equity and sustainability. And there's evidence from around the world that school lunch programs are one way, not the only way, not enough of a way, but a way to start threading some of these important pieces together and collectively investing In the quality of life ah of kids and communities. And so, you know, many see them now as an important tool that Canada has has missed out on.
Speaker: in making progress in some core challenges we have to public health and otherwise. so it is a, you know, it's an important time for Canada because we have now made some national commitments. The first ever national school food policy came out last year that has some really useful ideas and language about what a national approach to school food could be. And the current government has made some ongoing commitments with language talking about making the emerging programs and policies permanent. They still are really at the beginning phases, um just rolling out in some but not all places. They're not yet funded well enough to serve all Canadian kids, but we're sort of at a turning point moment to be asking how could school food programs be used to reduce inequities instead of reproducing them. um So it's an important time to ask these questions.
Speaker: And Jennifer, in your own research, you talk about three principles that should guide school lunch programs. You say that it should center children, health, and justice. What it would it mean to have that kind of approach?
Speaker: You know, this really came out of work we had done in some BC school districts. And then I worked with my late colleague, Seneca Elliott, and Rachel Engler-Stringer, who's um a national school food leader at the University of Saskatchewan. So we work with school food practitioners and really try to think about what are the the big concepts that we need to make sure are centered before we start negotiating these also important details about menu and space and access.
Speaker: And what we realized from that work was, you know, we really need to have kids in mind. i know that sounds straightforward. And of course, school food food programs are for kids, but often they're designed by adults who don't actually recognize that kids really know a lot about each other. They know a lot about their food cultures, what they eat and how they eat is deeply rooted in their own identities and their own understandings of home and belonging. So the first idea was really to recognize that children are competent social actors. They have their own worlds and their own ideas and that we should take that seriously when we design school food programs, because if we ignore them and design programs, that kids don't like with food they don't want to eat. That won't take us very far either.
Speaker: The second was really to think carefully about what we mean when we talk about healthy school food programs. Everyone thinks they know what they mean when they talk about health, but depending on how those ideas are defined, you can get really different outcomes. so You know, you can think about health from a ah nutrient perspective, narrowly defining ideas based on nutrient standards, and that is important. Nutritional adequacy and balance and comprehensiveness will be important to getting good quality food that meets nutrition guidelines. But, you know, this is a chance to think of health in in lots of ways. Health for individual dietary health, health of the planet, health of communities, you know health for the food service workers who and who are involved. So we need to involve kids.
Speaker: We need to think about what healthy food programs would mean. But also we have to think about who we want to serve and how. So really thinking about what do just and fair programs look like? Who's going to get access to these programs? Who's going to pay? How do we make sure those who participate aren't stigmatized or excluded for participating or not participating? How are we going to make sure people aren't left out?
Speaker: um Some schools don't get far better quality outcomes than others. So it's really taking a look at all of these sort of big ideas at the forefront. I do think the national school food policy is starting to incorporate some of the these ideas. But, you know, we're going to have to think carefully about how this looks today. in different contexts, because we have a ah vast geography, vast cultural differences. We want to really be respecting and listening to Indigenous partners to make sure we honour the Indigenous ways of knowing and in communities that are are serving Indigenous kids and knowing that they already have some pretty impressive school food approaches that we can learn from. So you know it's a lot. It sometimes seems like a daunting task, but we've seen other countries do it. We've seen progress in our own local communities.
Speaker: But i'm ah you know I'm glad we're having these conversations and people are thinking about these questions. Well, it's been wonderful to speak with you today, Jennifer. Thanks so much, Lorraine.
Speaker: I've been speaking with Dr. Jennifer Black. Jennifer is an associate professor in food, nutrition, and health at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems. And she is a member of the Hungry Stories Project. And you can find them at hungrystories.ca.
Speaker: dot c a You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
