managing the measurement of food security
Or, why food security is a money problem
As we hit the first panniversary of COVID-19, I’ve been reflecting back on the panic and uncertainty we faced this time last year, and how what our food behaviours at the time were saying. On March 13, 2020, I stepped into a Farm Boy grocery store in Mimico, mask-less and with my daughter, drowning in the chaotic energy of hoarding shoppers. I was hoping to find some rice at a grocery store that tended to be more expensive, thinking that maybe less people would rush to this place. When I stepped away from my cart for a moment to pick up my daughter’s favourite granola bars, I turned around to find a lady poaching the three avocados I had in there, her face akin to a chipmunk caught stealing nuts. Like most around me, I started grappling with how many basic food staples I didn’t have fully stocked in my kitchen, and questioned if I would ever know consistent food supply again.
For a lot of people – or, for a lot of wealthier people – this marked perhaps the first time the short-term food chain supply became visible and apparent to them. There were real fears of food running out, and opportunistic pop ups raising the prices on essentials like hand sanitizer and paper towels. I had just finished teaching what would be my last in-person lecture on food anthropology the day prior, and my mind was buzzing with how bizarre this moment was. Ever the optimist, I hoped that this would spark a more holistic or localized approach to food production, and more importantly, that more people might start to appreciate how quickly you can go from food secure to food insecure.
I’ve interacted a lot with the concept of food security in the anthropology of health. And the more I think about it, the less I think we critically look at how it’s measured, or the impact it has on our understanding of social and health inequities. Food security has been well-documented globally, though increasingly it feels like a by-proxy measurement for wellbeing. While measurements are certainly helpful in providing baseline statistics to capture the experiences and concerns of a group of people, they should just be the starting point to long-term work. Yet somehow, its use as a foundation for long-term collaborative community work was eclipsed by academics viewing food security as a means to their own publishing ends.
Measuring food security
Food security has amassed many definitions over the years. The United Nations, an institution who really pushes policy based on the human right to food, has one of the most common definitions used by researchers: food security is understood as when all people (within a community, culture, nation, or otherwise) have “stable physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs for a productive and healthy life.”
It is normally assessed by having a primary respondent for a household answer a series of 18, 12, or (if they’re very pressed for time and space), 6 questions about their experiences accessing food. I’ve included one of those 6-item questionnaires here, for anyone that might be interested in taking a look at the sorts of questions that are asked.
These scales are easy to analyze statistically. You can look at how each response fits within the whole questionnaire for each respondent – that way you can see if they are consistent, or if certain questions provoke deeper struggles or challenges. You can then rank them into a total score out of 6 (in this instance), and that score is already conveniently broken down into a rating system: those who score 0-1 are not facing any troubles and are mostly food secure. Those in 2-4 may experience some challenges, and so are deemed moderately food insecure. And then, those with a score of 5-6 are consistently having difficulty accessing food, so they are definitely food insecure.
The 18-item food security questionnaire is also validated for use in different environments: you can look at food insecurity in southern Ontario households, or university campuses, or amongst LGTBQ2S+ groups within a city, and compare within the communities of interest. You can also compare between communities, so if you were looking at household food security, you could compare a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Toronto with a predominantly white neighbourhood, and ostensibly compare the experiences of food insecurity to see if there are any trends.
In theory, this sounds like a quick, reliable way to get a snapshot of the food concerns and challenges within and between neighbourhoods and communities. In reality, I’m not always convinced the data is meaningful for program or policy development, or for community interests.
Food Security in Canada
In Canada, a 2019 study through PROOF and FoodShareTO found that Black people are 3.56 times more likely to be food insecure than white people, and 36% of Black children live in food-insecure households, compared to 12% of white children. To no surprise, white households that were food insecure also received more social assistance to supplement their incomes than Black households.
Since food security is mostly measuring accessibility, Paul Taylor of FoodShareTO argues that this “allows poverty to be reframed as hunger,” which distances from the more insidious issues in the food system. Food has been made to be inaccessible by colonial systems that see food and land as commodities, and our food supply operates in such a complicated manner that lends itself to a lot of food waste.
The limits of our rigid food system were made clear last March, when American farmers suddenly couldn’t find buyers for their monocrops and were forced to dispose of mountains of onions, gallons of milk, and fields of cabbages. A 2020 New York Times piece by David Yaffe-Bellany and Michael Corkery demonstrated the near-dystopian impacts that our current food system exposes us to:
The quarantines have shown just how many more vegetables Americans eat when meals are prepared for them in restaurants than when they have to cook for themselves. ‘People don’t make onion rings at home,’ said Shay Myers, a third-generation onion farmer whose fields straddle the border of Oregon and Idaho. Mr. Myers said there were no good solutions to the fresh food glut. After his largest customer — the restaurant industry — shut down in California and New York, his farm started redistributing onions from 50-pound sacks into smaller bags that could be sold in grocery stores. He also started freezing some onions, but he has limited cold-storage capacity. With few other options, Mr. Myers has begun burying tens of thousands of pounds of onions and leaving them to decompose in trenches. ‘There is no way to redistribute the quantities that we are talking about,’ he said.
Yet despite these damning exposures this fragile and complicated monocrop food system, we’re told that we as individuals should be choosing more sustainable foods, eating expensive tech-meat, or reaching for oat milk so that we can do our part to reduce the water and energy being used by industrial agriculture for meat production. It situates the food system so that farmer produces, the public consumes, and never the two shall meet. In doing so, it maintains that the onus to accessing healthy foods (as defined by Western morality) is on the individual.
Managing what you don’t measure
It’s easy to write these issues off as being purely industry problems, but academic research structures and approaches play a huge role in perpetuating this cycle, albeit more discreetly.
Earlier this week, I was reading about economics (I know - an anthropologist, reading about economics!). An article by Justin Fox for the Harvard Business Review weighed the usefulness of Gross National Happiness as an alternative approach to assessing wellbeing in the economy, the author emphasized that these shifts from GDP to GNH weren’t entirely unrealistic, since “you manage what you measure.”
That’s a clean, tidy statement. It’s sure of itself, and undoubtedly applies to all existing measurements of success or lack thereof.
We see food security being measured repeatedly, and therefore, somewhat managed. Usually by a team of helicopter researchers that will swoop into a community to measure it, and manage the data, and manage to get a few articles out on the findings, and maybe manage to suggest ways that the community they measured may become more resilient. They’ll also definitely manage a couple “but that is beyond the scope of this paper” statements about potential interventions and solutions.
But what about what is not be measured? Will that ever be managed?
If we keep just measuring food security, then the system will continue like an ouroboros under capitalism. Perhaps, if we dare to finally believe that there is a correlation between being low income and being food insecure, we could start to imagine a world where we measure poverty. Or, we accept that poverty is a more useful indicator of health risks, food insecurity, living in poor housing, increased stress and mental health loads. Or better still, we acknowledge that poverty itself is what contributes to such poor health and stress.
I’ve used food security scales in my surveys, and when I work through the questions on the scale, I would usually fall within the category of moderately food insecure. As a grad student, I make a very low income, and it’s usually off short term job contracts. This means I sometimes have enough money to buy foods without sticking to a strict weekly budget, but other times I have a single trip to the grocery store to last my daughter and I two weeks of meticulously calculated meals. And I assure you, none of my own stresses are around accessing food. If things get extraordinarily tight, I can do a fridge-cleaner meal: a can of lentils, some potatoes, carrots, half a jar of tomato sauce, and maybe some dill that was shoved to the back and starting to look a bit questionable. It can fill our stomachs, and I can add in all the spices and heat that I need to make it a nice, full meal experience.
What I do worry about is rent, hydro, gas, phone bills, car insurance, and any other bills that might accumulate in these low-income times. I know I’m not alone in this – it’s well-documented that when money is tight, the focus is usually on paying the bills and not on the food that hits the dinner table. In the PROOF household food security study from 2019, only 2% of Canadians reported not “knowing where to start when it comes to cooking,” regardless of their food insecurity status. There were also no significant relationships between food insecurity status and the level of cooking skills an individual had. This makes me think about how many line cooks and restaurant workers working minimum wage positions would qualify as low income, and likely experience bouts of food insecurity.
Yet these important details on the differences between cooking knowledge and food security can get lost in academic writing on food security. Often, even with the best of intentions, there is a stigma around being food insecure that remains, because the focus is on the access to food, not the knowledge and comfort in the kitchen. This approach maintains that when you are poor, you do not have access to the same all-powerful leafy green vegetables or exotic whole grains that the middle class does. It suggests being poor must mean that you still go to McDonald’s for dinner, even if you grew up with the post-Supersize Me and Food, Inc anxieties about the food system. It creates a narrative of food insecurity also meaning food illiteracy, that we don’t know what’s best for us, and so those in the ivory tower can recommend some meals that could help us out.
But they never once ask us how we’re sleeping at night, or if we stress about making rent. Or conversely, if we know the best ways to clean cast iron pans, or what delicious fried rice recipes we’ve concocted over the years to reduce our waste and save money. They never once ask how it feels to be poor, because poor is a dirty word. As the late Jim Dunsworth (Jim Lahey from Trailer Park Boys) once said, “it’s incredibly expensive to be poor.” So why are we still surprised that after decades of food security research, people who do not have enough money to pay all of their bills will not be prioritizing food access – nutritious or otherwise?
Maybe the better investigations at this point are around what role universities play in the public arena during an era marked by COVID, climate change, increased anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Asian racism, alt-right violence, and increased mental health struggles? What good is research highlighting the measured food insecurity of a population that faces a myriad of other issues? Sure, there may be a few more people with a $25 honorarium or gift card in their back pocket, but that won’t cover even a week’s worth of groceries. Perhaps the funding and energy can go towards co-creation and the development of social assistance policies and programs.
I think we need to have a deep reckoning within the academy about what we are prioritizing within our work, especially in the social sciences. If we continue to value prestigious journal articles and book deals, then of course, we will continue to measure problems and distance ourselves from the realities of poverty and racism that are maintained in our current social structures. But maybe, if we start to honour research and work that engages with communities, builds in co-created ways, and focus on community-suggested concerns rather than researcher-guided speculation about the problems a community faces, then perhaps we will start to see some more changes.