Implicating municipalities in addressing household food insecurity in Canada: A pan-Canadian analysis of news print media coverage.

Objectives: Household food insecurity (HFI) affects approximately 13% of Canadian households and is especially prevalent among low-income households. Actions to address HFI have been occurring primarily at the local level, despite calls for greater income supports from senior governments to reduce poverty. News media may be reinforcing this trend, by emphasizing food-based solutions to HFI and the municipal level as the site where action needs to take place.

Should Canadian health promoters support a food stamp-style program to address food insecurity?

Food insecurity is an urgent public health problem in Canada, affecting 4 million Canadians in 2012, including 1.15 million children, and associated with significant health concerns. With little political will to address this significant policy issue, it has been suggested that perhaps it is time for Canada to try a food stamp-style program.

Municipal-level responses to household food insecurity in Canada: a call for critical, evaluative research.

Household food insecurity (HFI) is a persistent public health problem affecting 3.8 million Canadians. While the causes of HFI are rooted in income insecurity, solutions to HFI have been primarily food-based, with the bulk of activity occurring at the municipal level across Canada.

Conceptualizing food security or aboriginal people in Canada.

Food insecurity is an urgent public health issue for Aboriginal people in Canada because of high rates of poverty; the effects of global climate change and environmental pollution on traditional food systems; and high rates of diet-related diseases. However, to date, public health has operated with conceptualizations of food security that were developed in non-Aboriginal contexts; they do not take full account of the traditional food practices of Aboriginal people or Aboriginal conceptualizations of food security. In this paper, I argue that there are unique food security considerations for Aboriginal people related to the harvesting, sharing and consumption of country or traditional foods, which impact the four pillars of food security: access, availability, supply and utilization.

Economic abuse and intra-household inequities in food security.

Food insecurity affected over 2.3 million Canadians in 2004. To date, the food security literature has not considered the potential impact of economic abuse on food security, but there are three ways in which these two important public health issues may be related: 1) victims of economic abuse are at risk of food insecurity when they are denied access to adequate financial resources; 2) the conditions that give rise to food insecurity may also precipitate intimate partner violence in all its forms; 3) women who leave economically abusive intimate heterosexual relationships are more likely to live in poverty and thus are at risk of food insecurity.

Determinants of healthy eating among low-income Canadians.

This paper draws on four bodies of literature to consider the determinants of healthy eating for low-income Canadians: a) the social determinants of health; b) socio-economic gradients in diet; c) food security; and d) the sociology of food. Though there is a paucity of data for Canada, it is very likely that, as in other industrialized countries, there are socio-economic gradients in diet such that those who are better off consume healthier diets than those less well-to-do. The available evidence suggests that income affects food intake both directly and indirectly through the dispositions associated with particular social class locations.

Toward understanding in postmodern interview analysis: interpreting the contradictory remarks of a research participant.

How is the qualitative research analyst to understand apparently contradictory remarks made by a research participant? Although social scientists in the positivist tradition rely on methods such as triangulation to find "truth," interpretive social scientists listen beyond, between, and underneath participants' words to understand the social conditions that produce apparent contradictions in their accounts. In this article, the author presents a case study of making sense of a research participant's contradictory comments, using a theoretical framework to understand the participant's "logic of practice." Through interpretive listening and reflexivity during the data analysis, she came to understand the participant's contradictory remarks in a way that illuminated the contradictions, as well as a significant process in the participant's life at the time: the transformation from carefree daughter to responsible mother.