Food Insecurity Essay

The 1996 World Food Summit defines food security as “when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious foods to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” Being food secure means being able to reliably access nutritious food at the community level (Huet et al.). Food insecurity has been a long-standing issue among Aboriginal communities in Canada— specifically in Inuit communities. The factors that have driven food insecurity in these communities differ from those that have driven food insecurity in other countries or other regions in Canada. It is important to determine the root causes of the issue within the specific context of Inuit communities, in order …show more content…
This is what the Government of Canada stated in regards to the issue of food insecurity in their 1998 report titled Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security. Due to the inequalities ad diminished quality of life that emerges from being food insecure, this is an important issue in Canadian politics— and governmental measures must be taken to address it. Food banks are the dominant response to the issue— but they do not address the fundamental cause of the food insecurity, and therefore cannot effectively address the issue on their own …show more content…
Catherine Huet and her research team set out to characterize some of the main components of the typical Inuit diet, and to figure out what their primary sources of energy and nutrients were. 36 communities across 3 Inuit regions were studied, and their dietary information was derived from the results of the Inuit Health Survey from 2007-2008. It was found that fruits were consumed by less than 25% of participants. An important finding from this study was that country foods (such as caribou, fish, and seal) represented a large proportion of their protein intake (Huet et