Who Eats, Where, What, and How? COVID-19, Food Security, and Canadian Foodscapes

In April 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we four participated in a panel discussing Canada’s paradoxical foodscapes.1 Our ideas about what constitutes food security and the populations with which it is concerned varied considerably. However, by presenting our ideas parallel to one another, we felt we were perhaps able to garner a deeper, somewhat more complex picture about what constitutes food security. We discussed how food security and justice are ideas and practices that stretch beyond “having enough food” but also entail considering how such food is produced and accessed. Each of us has slightly different orientations and commitments to food security and justice. In this article we hope to present those orientations as concerns that must be considered in conversation with each other. Underlying our thinking are questions related to who gets to eat, what is eaten, and where and how it is eaten. By presenting our respective commitments in this way, we hope to make visible some of the vulnerabilities and injustices embedded within Canadian foodscapes.COVID-19 rendered many of the structural injustices of food security in Canada more visible; thus in this article each of us presents our own positionings to food justice through case studies that differently consider food security in relation to COVID-19. Megan Herod writes about the role of emergency food provisioning and the responsiveness of food banks to the needs of vulnerable populations, focusing particularly on her work with Neighbourhood Houses in Vancouver to address the food needs of older adults. Kiera E. B. McMaster discusses the importance of food literacy to food security by concentrating on food programming at Queen’s University, the focus of her master’s research. Kimberly Hill-Tout discusses how tensions between global and local food production shape food security and also create pockets of localized, often privileged food access by looking at Knuckle Down Farm—a community-supported agriculture venue (CSA) at which she worked in the summer of 2020. Finally, Claudia Hirtenfelder draws attention to how food security and justice take on different meanings when the hidden lives of animals within Canadian food systems are made more apparent. Our work here is emblematic of our larger interests in food security, and we believe our reflections as they relate to COVID-19 are especially important now as Canadians get a hint of a “return to normal.”We hope that our case studies provide a glimpse into how different organizations responded to emerging food security needs made visible by the pandemic while also providing an interesting launch pad for thinking about how to mitigate issues of unequal access in the future. Our existing neoliberal, capitalist food system (re)produces inequalities that need to be countered through tangible political, economic, and cultural action; we outline some of these calls to action for building just food systems in our conclusion.According to a report by Feed Ontario (2020), COVID-19 heightened food insecurity across the country with a surge in first-time food bank recipients relying on emergency food aid. For example, the Mississauga Food Bank (2020) reported a 120 percent increase in the number of people accessing food banks for the first time, and the Ottawa Food Bank (2020) reported a 400 percent increase in inquiries from people looking for food support. The establishment of the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), a program initiated by the federal government early in the pandemic to provide unemployed or precariously unemployed Canadians with wage support, was instrumental in reducing the overall need for food support (and highlights the importance of income supports in reducing food insecurity). However, the eligibility requirements did not enable everyone access to support, and as more Canadians lost their jobs due to business closures, reliance on emergency food supports increased and food insecurity was felt by individuals across a wider socioeconomic spectrum. In response to these concerns, food banks, charitable and nonprofit organizations, and institutions pivoted to provide novel means of servicing communities in need. As such, I (Megan Herod) think that any consideration of food security and justice must necessarily consider the work of locally based organizations and the creative ways in which they address the needs of the communities they serve.As a planner who worked in Vancouver during the first wave of the pandemic, I am interested in how community-based organizations responded to the needs of their unique communities through adaptive and flexible food programming. I worked directly with Neighbourhood House to provide support during the pandemic and in particular worked to facilitate a meal and food hamper delivery program. Since the beginning of the pandemic, older adults have been most susceptible to the virus and the most vulnerable to its impacts (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2020). This has brought unique and challenging considerations to food access. A recent study by Feed Ontario (2020) attributes “fear” as an additional barrier for older adults to achieve food security. Going out in public, taking transit, or even getting help from a friend or caregiver became a concern and potential health risk. This poses a particularly acute geographical problem for older adults, as well as individuals with mobility concerns whose transportation options limited access to grocery stores and food banks. Due to the warehousing needs of food banks, the locations can often be in industrial zones located away from residential areas and are therefore inaccessible to individuals who do not possess a means of transportation. This problem is further compounded for individuals with physical or cognitive disabilities who rely on prepared or ready-made meals, meaning that even food available through grocery deliveries or emergency food hampers could be inaccessible. Beyond the intensified financial constraints to accessing food, the complexity of accessing food thus became a contributing factor to food insecurity.In response to the emergent food security crisis, many charitable food providers found creative ways to continue their operations. In Ontario, 81 percent of food banks developed a new program to respond to the emergent needs that COVID-19 created, such as food hamper delivery programs and curbside pick-up options (Feed Ontario 2020). Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House in Vancouver (figure 1) was one such organization that pivoted to address the emerging needs of their community. The Neighbourhood House runs programs and events with a mission to support and build community. Prior to the pandemic, they ran an adult day program that provided daily meals to frail seniors living in the Cedar Cottage neighborhood of Vancouver. COVID-19 forced the program to close, leaving a void in both food and mental health supports. Cognizant of the growing challenges facing older adults in the community, the Neighbourhood House partnered with a local transportation company, HandyDART, to provide shared-ride services often accessed by seniors in the community (pre-COVID-19) and deliver prepared meals to the seniors enrolled in the Neighbourhood House program. Two prepared meals were dropped off to local seniors twice a week, providing a sense of stability, emotional support, and nourishment. The program has now been running for over a year.2This example demonstrates community resiliency and the strength of community service providers to respond to the seismic shifts to our food system that COVID-19 created. Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House was one of many community service providers across the country that faced program closures. Reduced social support brought the challenges of food access for older adults to the forefront of community responses. Additionally, the pandemic highlighted the importance of adaptable and responsive food systems to meet the needs of our unique communities. The pandemic has challenged and highlighted the problems inherent in our food system, such as the need to plan cities that promote decentralized food systems to ensure food is accessible in every neighborhood and the importance of creating adaptive and flexible transportation systems. Without question, there is a need to invest in the income supports that ensure financial access to food, the community programming that supports our most vulnerable community members, and the civic infrastructure that creates more just and responsive food systems. Further, while physical and geographic access to food was certainly an issue for many populations, issues of food literacy run parallel to issues of access and are embedded within these concerns of food insecurity.I (Kiera E. B. McMaster) started my campus food advocacy as an undergrad student, launching a take-what-you-need, leave-what-you-can food bank at my satellite campus. I remain a strong advocate of campus food security and became involved with the Cooking with Grandmas/Chaplains programming at Queen’s University as the focus of my master’s thesis research. I chose to highlight this case study because of its unique approach to student food security: food literacy is an often-overlooked component of campus food programming. Though it is not a silver bullet solution to food insecurity, food literacy can help young people feel more empowered with their food decisions both inside and outside the kitchen (see the section on CSAs that follows). As we see increasing pressures on the global food chain due to climate change and other economic and environmental factors, it is important for young people to have the tools to be critical about where their food comes from, as well as how they might prepare and preserve their food, and the social (and political) benefits of sharing a meal together.Further to that idea, the Cooking with Grandmas and Cooking with Chaplains programming brings together students from across Queen’s to cook and eat a meal together. Since September 2020, Cooking with Grandmas has met once monthly and was open only to graduate and professional students. Its sister program, Cooking with Chaplains, met weekly and was open to both undergraduate and graduate students (the Cooking with Chaplains program has since ended). A small but committed group joined the program weekly, cooking meals such as Italian wedding soup, veggie burgers, and carrot cake pancakes. Through the fifteen interviews I conducted, participants emphasized the sense of community they felt with their fellow Cooking with Grandmas/Chaplains participants and leaders, as well as their increased confidence in the kitchen after attending the sessions. Recent studies on student food insecurity have found that on campuses across Canada, anywhere from 35 to 39 percent of students are moderately to severely food insecure (Entz, Slater, and Desmarais 2017; Silverthorn 2016). However, food insecurity is not always caused by a lack of money: for some students, it could be a matter of not having the knowledge they need (Entz et al. 2017). Numerous factors, including the increase in dual-income households in the 1970s (Moncrieff 2018), the removal in home economics programs from schools (Locally Driven Collaborative Project 2017), the ability to offload care duties, such as food preparation, to other people (Tronto 2013), and the proliferation of premade convenience foods (Wang et al. 2021), have contributed to an intergenerational food literacy deficit. Consequently, many postsecondary students lack the requisite food literacy to adequately shop for, store, and/or prepare food. While online sources such as YouTube and Instagram provide opportunities to learn some food skills, what is often missing is the opportunity for students to receive the mental, physical, and emotional benefits of eating with others (Dietitian Services at HealthLinkBC n.d.). To address rising concerns of food illiteracy among university students, and to connect an increasingly isolated group of people (Walsh 2021), the Office of Faith and Spiritual Life at Queen’s University migrated their Cooking with Grandmas and Cooking with Chaplains programming online (figure 2).However, these virtual spaces pose some questions of accessibility: participants can access these cooking classes only if they have the time, internet bandwidth, and technological literacy to do so (Stewart 2020; Andrey et al. 2021). While the programming itself was free, the cost of ingredients could be prohibitive for home chefs to join. The Cooking with Grandmas/Chaplains programming was able to support students with a grocery bursary, but some participants still accessed the on-campus food bank to obtain all the ingredients they needed to participate. This points to the interconnectedness of access and literacy: having access to fresh ingredients, and knowing how to transform them into meals, are not the same thing.Access takes many forms, and COVID-19 has highlighted the areas that require additional focus to combat food insecurity and illiteracy. Government support, designed for the unique needs of numerous populations such as older adults and students, must include levers for access: Canadians need access to financial programs, as well as food literacy programs, to become truly food secure. However, how to access food and prepare it is only part of the picture.Thus far we have highlighted how different populations experience food (in)security and how this is shaped by both material and epistemic issues of access. At this juncture we switch from considering how COVID-19 highlighted cracks in access to food to instead thinking about the paradoxes it flagged in the production of food.I (Kimberly Hill-Tout) am a food geographer and study environmental “interventions” in the food system. Over the summer of 2020, I worked at Knuckle Down Farm (figure 3), a CSA located in Stirling, Ontario. My work and research at a CSA during the summer of 2020 is important to understanding food paradoxes during the COVID-19 pandemic because it reflects the relationship between context-specific job opportunities and the democratic attempts to break from a fractured global food system. Moreover, my case work gave me firsthand insight into “alternative” food systems that are not only possible but are also being revisited. Food security work, in this case, situates the “local” as an agent for change and reveals that food security is geographically sensitive.In fear of zoonotic diseases, and in contrast to seeking foods from emergency and charitable food providers, COVID-19 saw a shift toward consumers prioritizing local—even hyperlocal—food movements in contrast to the first few months of the pandemic when there were food shortages, food dumping, and price gauging (Tong 2020; Proctor 2020; Mull 2020). Food supply chains are currently quite globalized and complex. 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A this of animals an and that any conversation about food security necessarily a conversation about the of having these is being made increasingly more because of are to increase security but also to or from accessing and on and has a to the of existing in Ontario and et al. 2021), but these are being out the The not only make it to report on how animals are in the but also the of those with them and taking them of Canada’s food system on the of et al. who are within of as they work that physical, and were during COVID-19. 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B. McMaster is by a

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