Week 10: Traditional foods, food security, and Indigenous food sovereignty

Traditional Foods

• “Plants and animals harvested from the local environment” are central to health and culture for Indigenous peoples worldwide

• What do you personally consider as “traditional foods” in your family? (are there certain foods that make up traditions in your family?

Traditional Food Systems

• All food within a particular culture, available from local resources and is culturally accepted

• Includes the sociopolitical meanings, acquisition/ processing techniques, use, composition and nutritional consequences for people using the food

TFS are health enhancing

• TF are highly nutritious

• Practicing TFS are physically and mentally demanding

• Encourages social roles and responsibilities

• Maintains/ promotes cultural and intergenerational knowledge

• Encourages local, traditional economy

• Locally acquired and offset market food cost

• Supports care for land and water

Food Security

-access to healthy or traditional foods

-diverse diet

-proximity/ geographic access to foods

-know how to use/cook the foods available to you

• “When all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to the food they need for a healthy, active life“

• “Ensuring that everyone has physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that aligns with their food preferences and dietary requirements for a healthy lifestyle”

Four key factors of food security

1. Availability of adequate food supplies

2. Access to sufficient food

3. Stability of supplies

4. Cultural acceptability

*5th key factor: stability of all of these 4 factors

1. Availability of Adequate Food Supplies

There must be enough food to ensure that each person's daily energy and nutrient needs can be met

• Minimum caloric intake (e.g., quantity)

• Quality of food also important

2. Access to Sufficient Food

Even in a country/community with adequate food supplies, food security does not occur when some citizens cannot afford to buy enough food and/or grow or harvest their own

3. Stability of Supplies

Fluctuations in food availability or accessibility can leave people vulnerable

• Droughts, floods, sharp price increases, seasonal unemployment, changes to weather patterns/climate change

• living in specific isolated places means you are completely dependant of transport of imported food

4. Cultural Acceptability

• Access to food must align with the cultural norms, preferences, and dietary practices of a specific population.

• Food is not just about sustenance; it is deeply intertwined with cultural identity, traditions, and social practices.

How do processes of environmental dispossession uniquely impact Indigenous food security?

• Availability of food supplies

  • transportation chains

  • displacement

  • plantations

• Access to sufficient food

  • healthy, nutritious food

• Stabilities of supplies

  • natural variations

  • climate change

  • reservation limitations

• Cultural acceptability

  • traditional food

  • environmental dispossession

  • governmental policies

Nutrition Transition

• The shift in dietary consumption and energy expenditure that coincides with economic, environmental, demographic, and epidemiological (disease) changes

  • Change from traditional diets towards foods higher in fats, meats and sugar

  • Rise in sedentary lifestyles

Dietary Change

• Access to TFS are changing over time

• These changes are neither planned nor self-initiated

• These relate to consequences of other events in the environment (physical, social, political, cultural, historical) and include:

  • Health education programs/ interventions

  • Reduction in food supplies

  • How does environmental change fit in here?

Food Insecurity

• The inability to acquire or consume an adequate diet quality or sufficient quantity of food in socially acceptable ways, or the uncertainty that one will be able to so

  • Poverty is the leading factor underlying food insecurity

  • Associated with various chronic conditions, mental health problems, and other diseases and infections, including increased hospitalization & premature mortality

chronic food insecurity vs transitory food insecurity

Food-insecure households in Canada

• In 2017-18, 1 in 8 households in Canada was food insecure, amounting to 4.4 million people, including more than 1.2 million children living in food-insecure households

Food insecurity and the urban context

• Addressing Indigenous food insecurity will require both economic and cultural solutions

  • Income is a great challenge

  • Place / Geography also figures heavily

  • Lacking access to cultural knowledge and Land

Indigenous Food Sovereignty

The right and ability of Indigenous Peoples and communities to know, consume and share traditional foods in a generative way that draws from and cares for local knowledge, resources, relationships, and Lands

• Remembering, sharing and practicing cultural knowledge about foods and medicines