Food insecurity and the promise of basic income

By Elaine Power

I’ve been studying the issue of food insecurity for over 20 years. Food insecurity refers to the state in which people can’t afford to buy healthy, culturally appropriate and personally acceptable food to feed themselves or their families.

It is a serious public health concern, affecting over 4 million Canadians including about 1.15 million children. It is clearly a symptom of poverty.

In low-income households, a lot of work (usually invisible) goes into managing the household budget. When it looks like there won’t be enough money for food, the person primarily responsible for food provisioning, usually a woman, intensifies the management process, first decreasing the quality of the food, substituting cheaper, more filling foods, to the detriment of fresh produce and dairy products.

If the management strategies are still inadequate, then the family food provisioner will reduce the quantities of food until, in the most severe situations, people skip meals, sometimes for a whole day. To the extent possible, mothers will protect their children from hunger with multiple strategies, including sending them to relatives’ for meals, going hungry themselves, going to food banks, or even stealing food.

It is not hard to imagine that food insecurity has a detrimental effect on nutritional status and health. It is also not hard to imagine that the stress of this management process takes a tremendous toll on physical health. Social health also suffers when it becomes difficult or impossible for people to participate in social, cultural or religious activities that involve sharing food with others.



Analysis of food insecurity measurements on the Canadian Community Health Survey shows that the vast majority of Canadian households on social assistance are food insecure, reflecting the low levels of benefits in almost all provinces and territories. However, the majority of food insecure households report their primary income from earnings, suggesting the inadequacy of wages in keeping people out of poverty.

