Introduction
As Riches and Silvasti (Reference Riches and Silvasti2014) instruct in their second edition of case studies of ‘First World Hunger’, when the residents of nationally food-secure societies experience hunger, it represents an institutional and political failure. As of 2022 in Canada, 17.8 per cent of households in the ten provinces reported being food insecure, the highest prevalence in the nation’s monitoring history (Li et al., Reference Li, Fafard-St and Tarasuk2023). Of these, 4.5 per cent or close to 1.5 million individuals residing in those households, were severely food insecure. In Canada, severe food insecurity is a level of material deprivation that typically includes deficiencies in the quantity of food consumed, is strongly tied to traditional low-income thresholds (Li et al., Reference Li, Fafard-St and Tarasuk2023) and is consistently linked to the greatest evidence of health harms. Growing research shows a social gradient in health outcomes associated with marginal, moderate, and severe levels of food insecurity in Canada; severe food insecurity predicts the poorest mental health (e.g., Jessiman-Perreault & McIntyre, Reference Jessiman-Perreault and McIntyre2017), severe chronic pain resulting in use of prescription opioids (Men et al., Reference Men, Fischer, Urquia and Tarasuk2021), and excess all-cause mortality (Men et al., Reference Men, Gundersen, Urquia and Tarasuk2020). For cause-specific premature mortality, for those who have experienced severe food insecurity, hazard ratios estimated for unintentional injuries and suicide are more than double those of their food secure counterparts, even accounting for other sociodemographic factors (Men et al., Reference Men, Fischer, Urquia and Tarasuk2021). Indeed, the health findings with severe food insecurity in Canadian adults increasingly reflect the forms of self-harm that led to Case and Deaton’s (Reference Case and Deaton2015; Reference Case and Deaton2020) coinage of the term ‘deaths of despair’ tied to the policy challenge of economic and social conditions of poorly educated Americans with declining labour force and other institutional attachments.
Canada has monitored household food insecurity nationally since 2005 using the Household Food Security Survey Module (HFSSM) as a social deprivation indicator, derived from its counterpart instrument in the United States (Health Canada, 2007). The definition of food insecurity in this post-industrial country, based on the measure, is the subjective experience of precarious or uncertain food acquisition due to household financial constraints (Anderson, Reference Anderson1990). Absent this definition are constraints on food availability. Indeed, poverty economics and its cognate fields have conclusively demonstrated that in modern times, hunger is not the consequence of a lack of food availability. Drèze and Sen (Reference Drèze and Sen1989), p.9, denote: ‘what we can eat depends on what food we are able to acquire’ – in virtually all economic contexts. This includes decidedly ‘non-natural’ cases of famine (all of them), where the incidence of hunger depends on how a society is organised to respond to ‘natural’ events (e.g., flood, drought). In other words, the experience of food insecurity does not reflect a gap in availability of local food resources, such as those measured traditionally by national per capita caloric distributions.
What then is at the core of food acquisition precarity? Drèze and Sen (Reference Drèze and Sen1989), p.175, suggest: ‘We have to look at the nature of labour markets, the access of women and men to employment opportunities, the gender features in land ownership, and the social traditions in the intrafamily division of consumption and work’ – within and well outside of the ‘food system’. At issue are human relations to food, and to each other; namely, entitlements (Sen, Reference Sen1981).
Over a decade ago, we put forward the notion that food insecurity policy is not the ‘flip side’ of food security policy in Canada (McIntyre, Reference McIntyre2011). This paper takes stock of the subsequent policy developments and extends its argument. At the centre of the critique published in 2011 were three issues. First, we asserted that household food insecurity was itself a legitimate policy concern, that it is related to poverty, and has measurable adverse effects on well-being and health, deserving of social policy attention. Second, the paper explained that the known determinants of food insecurity in Canada had not changed in more than a decade of study – persistent economic insufficiency among individuals and families, and the social construction of poverty. Third, the paper observed that a proliferating range of government- and civil-society-led food assistance programming had emerged ‘in the name of’ food security’, from established forms of food charity such as food banks, to common kitchens and gardens geared towards establishing alternative and (re)localised food systems. McIntyre (Reference McIntyre2011) went on to levy the challenge that the community food security movement had yet to offer those experiencing household food insecurity reprieve from the entitlements they lacked.
In the current paper we underline the arguments above but extend them by introducing a diagnostic on how the lack of a substantive policy response to household food insecurity remains – while a range of food security-oriented policies and publicly financed community programming in Canada has grown. We do not attempt to encroach on what food sovereignty scholars have in parallel concluded, on examining the unfair distributions of power in the food, fisheries, and agricultural systems: that certain hegemonic formulations vis-à-vis the right to food are harmful to territorial, socio-spatial, and relational aspects of food production and distribution, ownership, and livelihoods (MacRae and Winfield, Reference MacRae and Winfield2016; Levkoe and Sheedy, Reference Levkoe and Sheedy2019). Rather, we focus specifically on the implications for hunger elimination (measured as severe food insecurity) and social policy. We contend that a co-constructed, implied model of causality has emerged from implementation of the right to food in Canada in the form of ‘food systems solutions’ thinking, positioning food access as the pre-eminent factor in achieving food security, despite ample literature that material access to food does not reduce food insecurity. We conclude that to continue to refer to ‘food insecurity and food systems’ in the same breath – especially in referring to food systems that are ‘joined-up’ ones (Lang et al., Reference Lang, Barling and Caraher2009) – is a distraction for governments who more than ever need to turn their attention to food insecurity policy as an individual entitlement of societal concern.
We proceed as follows. In the next section, we outline the operational definitions in United Nations (UN) food security policy since the post-war period, which displaced the right to food as an economic and social entitlement with material food access, or henceforth called, ‘right to be fed’ concerns. To complement this section, we briefly describe measurement literature on the food insecurity experience, which is central to monitoring UN and nation-level food security policy outcomes and show how food access is core to surveillance measures.
In the third section, we present the main evidentiary claim of the paper, on the social construction of food’s material effects on those experiencing severe food insecurity, in the policy response to food insecurity in the Canadian case. In previous pioneering analyses of the right to food in Canada, the absence of a right to food entitlement in law and public policy was attributed in part to a lack of sufficient politicisation of the hunger issue (e.g., Riches, Reference Riches1997; Reference Riches1999; Reference Riches2002; Rideout et al., Reference Rideout, Riches, Ostry, Buckingham and MacRae2007; Riches and Silvasti, Reference Riches and Silvasti2014). We point to recent in-depth legislative evidence from empirical studies of two decades of food insecurity policy and politics nationally and in three provinces in Canada (e.g., Mah et al., Reference Mah, Hamill and Rondeau2014; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson, Anderson and Mah2017; Patterson et al., Reference Patterson, McIntyre, Anderson and Mah2017; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2018; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2019; Mah et al., Reference Mah, Knox, Lynch and McIntyre2022) suggesting important qualifications are needed to Riches’s perspective, which we summarise here. In the continuing absence of dedicated state action on food insecurity, there arose a growing significance of, and public awareness of, ‘food access’ across a range of civil society spheres which often referred to material food itself as an entitlement stemming from normative solidarity between givers and recipients. Together, these developments have refabricated the social problem of food need, embedding it within a narrow UN purview of a ‘food systems’ problem. We contend that this refabrication has enclosed knowledge creation and policy debate on food security within a trap of food access as an object of socio-material forces, underpinned by the tacit acceptance of a globalised food system as the institutional pre-condition – food security being the goal, not the right to food. The public policy consequence? Attempted reformation of Canada’s food systems, and (re)distribution of foodstuffs, have been initiated since that time through several substantive national policies.
Finally, we examine the path that this form of food access has cast for us in relational terms. Specifically, we critique how material food access has become the relevant object of policies to encourage societal ‘redistribution’ – versus income, resources, and power which would address the structural conditions that perpetuate food insecurity in general, and severe food insecurity in particular. Regarding the elimination of severe food insecurity, we argue that material food access is inconsistent with human rights approaches based on individual entitlements, enshrined in law and policy. Throughout the paper, drawing from Riches’s prior approaches (e.g., Reference Riches1997; Reference Riches2002; Reference Riches and Silvasti2014), we refer to empirical examples only from Canada, while making theoretical arguments that we hope to be relevant to UN international system actors and other nation-state contexts. We conclude with the caution that the political priority of a positive concept of food security as an exchange outcome of a global food system is an entanglement that gestures for food insecurity public policy to remain in the ‘food policy’ domain, as opposed to alleviation of severe food insecurity through dedicated instruments of social and economic policy. We call for social policy that seeks to substantially reduce food insecurity to ‘consciously uncouple’ from food responses altogether.
The evolution of the right to food as a UN construct
The following section of the paper briefly introduces UN policy definitions since the post-war period, to introduce the central tensions in the right to food that we will subsequently apply to the Canadian case. The UN formulation of the right to food is a normative standard by which nation-states are intended to consider practical implementation issues in the right to food vis-à-vis specific national policy goals, further reinforced by domestic and international monitoring and adjudication systems (e.g., voluntary and mandatory self-reporting; the Rapporteur function). Thus, we preface this section with earlier legal scholarship by Mechlem (Reference Mechlem2004) on the right to food, regarding the real risks in implementation of conflating the right to food with the achievement of food security as a policy goal. We then explore the counterfactual of how reducing/eliminating hunger has been dealt with through the UN right to food definitions and associated monitoring measures. Consistent with the conflation with ‘food security’ that Mechlem identified, the explicit goal of ‘eliminating hunger’ can be traced in UN policy to have been disassociated from poverty reduction and pairing it instead with a policy positive of ‘increasing food access’.
The original concept of a right to food presented a specific liberal universalist vision at a time when new institutions were being designed to advance social progress in postwar industrial societies (Béland et al., Reference Béland, Marchildon, Mioni and Petersen2022; McKay and Rowlingson, Reference McKay and Rowlingson2022). Food is a basic need, and to exceed the basics in the right to food as first formulated, meant that an individual had climbed the ladder of personhood, achieving a dignified standard of living within their relevant collectivity – of prime interest, the territorial and jurisdictional designation known as a nation-state. Accordingly, the right to food was first and foremost about social and economic self-realisation within the new global economic order. This is how the right to food was outlined in Article 25 in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN General Assembly, 1948), and further enshrined in Article 11 of the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (UN General Assembly, 1966).
Mechlem’s (Reference Mechlem2004) legal analysis of the right to food is instructive in warning that the right can be too readily supplanted in practical terms by the World Food Summit definition of ‘food security’, a younger concept. Mechlem’s analysis has been cited an example of evidence on how international policy norms had coalesced in the postwar period, ‘paving the way for the human right to food to re-emerge in later years’ (Anthes and DeSchutter, Reference Anthes, de Schutter, BM and LO2018, p. 263). But revisiting Mechlem (Reference Mechlem2004, p. 640), it is clear that her analysis rather paints a deeply critical picture of how UN actors may increasingly conflate the individual right to food entitlement with an individual ‘right to be fed’ – i.e., a right to ‘be food secure’, to receive food without agency, and yet still fulfil their claim to a healthy, safe, active, and productive life, etc.:
Hence, are ‘achieving food security’ and ‘fully realizing the right to food’ two terms implying essentially the same objective? More to the point: Is the current promotion of the right to food a mere relabelling of policy attempts to achieve food security or, as the World Food Summit Plan of Action seems to suggest, only a means of achieving food security? Or, is realising the right to food an objective in itself that has more dimensions than the objective to achieve food security? … This paper will argue that the full realisation of the right to food cannot be reduced to a means to achieve food security, but that it is a distinct encompassing objective in itself.
Drawing from Sen’s scholarship, Mechlem (ibid., p. 643) argues that a right to food approach must necessarily take the right as a set of a priori value commitments consistent with individual dignity. All other considerations are secondary, since it is the human right that ‘fully acknowledges the individual’s dignity, his or her role as a subject, agent of change and as a rights-holder’ (ibid., p. 644). Moreover, Mechlem warns that food security could very well be provided for in the form of ‘sufficient, safe, and nutritious food’ while the right to food is simultaneously violated (ibid., p. 644) if that food is provided for through discriminatory means, including socially differentiated ones:
Prisoners who receive sufficient, safe, and nutritious food but are discriminated on the basis of their colour, with regard to quality and variety of supplies, are all food secure, yet the right to food of some is violated. Another characteristic of a right-to-food approach is its focus on the most vulnerable and, on human dignity. While people living off garbage dumps in slums can be food secure when they manage to find sufficient food on a regular basis, their right to food is still not fulfilled, as picking rubbish is incompatible with their human dignity.
In 1974 at the Rome World Food Conference, against a backdrop of famine in Bangladesh and energy commodity crisis, the elimination of hunger was adopted as a universal declaration. Three policy observations near the time of the UN conference bear mention as context (Hawkes, Reference Hawkes1974; Weiss and Jordan, Reference Weiss and Jordan1976). First, the conference reinforced that policymaking on food was a hypostasis of world politics and global relations. Second, nation-states generally agreed that practical reforms of the global food administrative bureaucracy were necessary – a common policy goal vis-à-vis food systems that would only become more enmeshed in coming years. Third, consensus was reached that elimination of hunger would be a solid step towards achievement of global standards of human welfare – ignominy of United States Secretary Henry Kissinger’s report on population growth as a security stress aside (United States National Security Council, 1974) – however, food aid would continue to be accepted as a policy instrument for mitigating hunger and saving lives.
By 1999, the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR) had produced General Comment 12 on the right to adequate food (CESCR, 1999), which noted, ‘The right to food ought not to be considered narrowly or as a “minimum package” to meet outcomes of nutritional need.’ Established in 1985 as the monitoring unit for the 1966 human rights covenant, CESCR was the administrative apparatus for comparative assessment of nation-state progress. In progress towards the right to food, the Committee held with elimination of hunger as the goal, but ultimately reinforced how it might be necessary to alleviate hunger through feeding programmes, particularly in urgent circumstances, as the ‘principal obligation’. Per Article 14 of the General Comment 12:
The principal obligation is to take steps to achieve progressively the full realisation of the right to adequate food …. Every State is obliged to ensure for everyone under its jurisdiction access to the minimum essential food which is sufficient, nutritionally adequate and safe, to ensure their freedom from hunger.
As the associated UN Special Rapporteur programme evolved (Subedi et al., Reference Subedi, Wheatley, Mukherjee and Ngane2011), the right to food was defined in the mandate provided to the Special Rapporteur of that name (UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), 2025):
For the Special Rapporteur, the right to food is the right to have regular, permanent and unrestricted access – either directly or by means of financial purchases – to quantitatively and qualitatively adequate and sufficient food corresponding to the cultural traditions of the people to which the consumer belongs, and which ensure a physical and mental, individual and collective, fulfilling and dignified life free of fear.
General Comment 12’s discussion of the principal obligation being realised through ‘access to …food’ and the Special Rapporteur’s use of terms ‘either directly or by means of purchases’, gave permission to limit the response to food insecurity to food access. This is evident in subsequent policy discussion where, by the 1990s, the Rapporteur’s notion of the policy positive of an ‘unrestricted access’ was purposefully selected as the central construct in interpreting the right to food in international policy norms: at the 1996 World Food Summit (Mah et al., Reference Mah, Hamill and Rondeau2014), within the Rome Declaration on Nutrition, and, as we describe below, core to the shift from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals. The well-known definition of food security was elaborated at the 1996 World Food Summit (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), 1996): when all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life. This vision of food security is unquestionably upbeat: it suggests an entire reversal from the negative dimensions of a condition of need (i.e., hunger), even beyond an absence of want.
The final reversal in development of the contemporary UN articulations of the right to food was the substitution of poverty elimination as a substantive goal, with the adoption of a food systems analysis as underpinning the realisation of food security. The Millennium Project was commissioned by the UN Secretary-General in 2002 to develop an action plan to reverse poverty, hunger, and disease, proposing a dedicated investment in economic development. This was underscored by the framing of Millennium Development Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, with the ending of hunger as Goal 1c. Thus, prior to 2016 and the shift to the Sustainable Development Goals, the issue of ‘hunger’ had continuously been tied to socioeconomic status. The new era of the Sustainable Development Goals ushered in forms of economic development policy that tied the reduction of poverty to a broader array of economic and environmental standards (Sachs, Reference Sachs2012). In the transition, dimensions of ‘access’ were added to the goal of eliminating hunger, with food security linked to improving nutrition and sustainable agriculture, while the role of social equity in relation to hunger was severed. In the Sustainable Development Goals, Goal 1 is ‘No Poverty’ and Goal 2 is ‘Zero Hunger’; the latter goes further to suggest that food systems are what ties hunger and food security together: ‘End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.’
Consequently, the expression of the Sustainable Development Goals effectively enmeshed the achievement of an unrestricted, material food access as the medium through which ending hunger ought to be achieved. Actions to achieve food security – as comprehensively understood by the Sustainable Development Goal ambit – would neither be contingent on whether the right to food was accomplished, nor whether food insecurity as a consequence of poverty might be eliminated in the process.
Empirical literature on the assessment of food insecurity has simultaneously developed in nation-states over those four decades. As of the late 2010s, a global monitoring consensus was reached as part of action on the Sustainable Development Goals, which merged an approach to an indicator of food insecurity across low-, middle-, and high-income country contexts (Cafiero et al., Reference Cafiero, Viviani and Nord2018). The resulting Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) is an eight-item module to assess a state of undernourishment in a population. FIES broadly conceptualises food insecurity as the condition of not being able to freely access the food one needs to conduct a healthy, active and dignified life. The measure was informed by the United States approach, itself related to and informing several other countries’ approaches to national monitoring, through the HFSSM, a quantitative metric built on sociological and qualitative research to identify core components of the experience of food insecurity as a latent biopsychosocial construct (Bickel et al., Reference Bickel, Nord, Price, Hamilton and Cook2000; Health Canada, 2007; Nord, Reference Nord2012). The HFSSM does not measure food access directly but rather is a negative indicator of a complex state of household material deprivation resulting in a subjective experience of lack of access. Importantly, questions in the module are posed in a contextualised way, according to whether the lack of access to food was because of financial constraint. Being ‘food secure’ according to the FIES or HFSSM scales is not having a score on the scale – not the equivalent of the aspirational World Summit definition of the food secure state. Similarly, FIES is a measure of social welfare and was committed to by statistical authorities of the UN and the FAO in 2017 as an ‘alternative’, meaning non-food, indicator of prevalence of undernourishment within a food production measurement context. The FIES describes the negative condition of an ‘absence of access/lack of access’ and as such UN guidance cautions repeatedly in its documentation around the FIES that it captures an ‘unobservable trait’ (Cafiero et al., Reference Cafiero, Gheri, Kepple, d’Ortigue, Moncayo and Viviani2023).
Iversen and colleagues (2023) have described in critical historical detail how indicator selections for world hunger comprise a socio-political process that renders policy outcomes and ambitions of member states and particularly of UN agencies ‘legible’. They discuss the decline of a Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) indicator that focused on caloric undernourishment, which was virtually replaced in 2017 by the experience-based indicator, FIES. So while global estimates of the number and proportion of ‘food secure or marginally insecure’ or ‘severely food insecure’ are reported in the State of Food Security reports, they have now become disassociated from previous PoU measures use of the coefficient of variability in food consumption attributed to differences in income, (CV|y). The prior indicator was technically difficult to understand, hence the FIES being more ‘legible’ (Iversen et al., Reference Iversen, Westengen and Jerven2023). Nevertheless, FIES estimates were challenged during the COVID-19 pandemic and severe food insecurity rates are about 9 to 12 per cent higher than undernourishment rates using the old measure (FAO et al., 2022). FAO’s two leading methodologies for measuring food insecurity levels comparatively among nation-states – with each capturing a distinct aspect of the policy problem – are thus becoming increasingly desegregated, and the access experience scale is now dominating.
The PoU has itself previously been criticised for framing food insecurity as an issue of supply and production, marginalising socio-economic factors in human development and rights priorities (Fukuda-Parr and Orr, Reference Fukuda-Parr, Orr, Fukuda-Parr and Yamin2015). It was also criticised for not considering the important dimension of micronutrient deficiencies when using the PoU to assess caloric malnutrition (Pogge, Reference Pogge2016). Certainly, the narrow focus on caloric undernourishment required a ‘bracketing’ that keeps many variables in food production out of sight. Yet, the over-estimate of populations at risk for severe undernourishment according to FIES, an experience scale with no nutritional measurement component, seems to have had the paradoxical effect of disappearing the social, contributing to complacency amid intractability and lack of attention to socioeconomic inequalities in who has borne the brunt of population nutrition declines.
Having moved away from a caloric deprivation concept of food insecurity to one of food access inadequacy, it appears that the global narrative of hunger in our day is that there is enough food overall. At the food systems level, does this mean that there is a natural steady state of excess commodities that can readily be redirected into other mouths? Rather, food access in economic terms is unequally distributed and socially patterned. Access is of course limited in the food system. However, this is real and manufactured material scarcity, rooted in socioeconomic relations. It is real because acts of human intervention in natural relations are limiting planetary carrying capacity; it is manufactured and relational because some of those human interventions are modes of power and economic organisation where resource scarcity has been repeatedly commodified for profit, violence, or social control. Since Sen (Reference Sen1981), it has been apparent that food insecurity may be a lived experience of people not having enough food, but that is not the equivalent of a causal relation to not having access to food. Others have noted that ‘access’ is at its core a consumption construct (Lambek, Reference Lambek2024, p. 110). Placing ‘unrestricted food access’ within the achievement of the food security policy positive suggests the problem is one of distributional scarcity, that there is ‘enough for everybody’, but the means to share evenly in ‘the consumer commons’ are unfair; leading to the ‘natural’ and commonsense prescription that improving the quality of food and food distribution – within and adjacent to that commons – has come to be seen as the holistic (and hence appropriate) way to alleviate food insecurity. To suggest that ‘some people do not have enough food access’ is a call for a food response to food insecurity, underpinned by a sociology of objects absent their relations. Conceiving of the social problem of ‘ending hunger’ as one providing ‘food access’ rather than resolving unfair social relations is at best an instrumental approach, only possible, as we will articulate below, through the carriage of the object of food access to its logical conclusion.
The materiality of food access thinking in Canada as a response to food insecurity
During his mission visit to Canada in 2012, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food (at the time, DeSchutter) drew attention to an apparent paradox (DeSchutter, Reference DeSchutter2012a, Reference DeSchutter2012b). He pointed out Canada’s well-known and positive international record on civil and political rights, its varied implementation of economic and social rights, and its adoption of a monitoring system for food security including HFSSM measures. He singled out and praised an extensive civil society mobilisation on poverty, food security and Indigenous rights. Yet on the right to food specifically, he examined Canada’s record of Indigenous relations (the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this paper) and the growing prevalence of household food insecurity and found the country’s implementation of the right to be wanting. His prescription for strengthening of the right was a national policy framework reconciling Canada’s ‘overarching interdepartmental view’ in the form of a national food policy or strategy (DeSchutter, Reference DeSchutter2012a).
National food strategies and policies tend to be normatively encouraged as a right to food mechanism (FAO, 2005; 2006), but in practice these operationalisations of the right have been found to be lacking. Lambek and colleagues, examining the evolution of the right to food as a legal tool since its inception (e.g., Lambek and Claeys, Reference Lambek and Claeys2015; Lambek, Reference Lambek2015) have argued that adopted legal and policy frameworks in nation-states have tended to focus on obligations of states regarding its ‘right to fulfil’ dimensions, and also to ensure normatively that third parties do not engage in activities that interfere with the ability of people to meet their food needs, but have tended to leave unaddressed most other structural issues that impact policy success. To the latter point, Lambek and Claeys (Reference Lambek and Claeys2015) point to noted examples of successful and decentralised (participatory) national policy on the right to food such as Brazil but highlight its weaknesses in its focus on direct provision of food, or ‘facilitation of access’ to food, in contrast to dedicated reforms to resolve structural causes of hunger and poverty.
Since the Special Rapporteur’s visit, Canada has developed a national poverty reduction strategy (2018) as well as a national Food Policy for Canada (2019), both informed by commitments to UN priorities for economic and social rights, academic research, and extensive civil society advocacy. Since 2019, in addition to its earlier monitoring of the prevalence of household food insecurity in health surveys, Statistics Canada added the HFSSM to its standard national population-representative social survey on consumer income, a panel subset of the Labour Force Survey, as part of its poverty reduction dashboard.
The country has also invested in research on social inequities associated with food insecurity and their policy remedies, through strategic federal government funding for a range of food insecurity scholarship and programme evaluations (Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Institute of Population and Public Health, 2016; Health Canada, 2023; Nutrition North Canada, 2023; AAFC, 2024a; 2024b; 2024c; 2025). One grant awarded led to the founding of the PROOF research programme (proof.utoronto.ca). As part of this research, an empirical legislative study was undertaken of two decades of food insecurity policy (1995–2012) (e.g., Mah et al., Reference Mah, Hamill and Rondeau2014; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson, Anderson and Mah2017; Patterson et al., Reference Patterson, McIntyre, Anderson and Mah2017; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2018; McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2019; Mah et al., Reference Mah, Knox, Lynch and McIntyre2022). This research suggested that an important amendment was necessary to Riches’s (Reference Riches1997; Reference Riches1999; Reference Riches2002) and colleagues’ (e.g., Rideout et al., Reference Rideout, Riches, Ostry, Buckingham and MacRae2007; Riches and Silvasti, Reference Riches and Silvasti2014) formulation that hunger has suffered from a lack of politicisation in Canada. Study of legislative debate indicated that there can be little doubt that food insecurity was indeed well ‘politicised’ in that it was found to be of significant political concern (McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2019), with hunger as an experience of their constituents frequently invoked by legislators to discuss substantive policies and policy targeting (Mah et al., Reference Mah, Knox, Lynch and McIntyre2022). Food insecurity has moreover been a rhetorically consistent subject matter in electoral politics particularly Canadian opposition politics (Patterson et al., Reference Patterson, McIntyre, Anderson and Mah2017); and across the political spectrum there was little disagreement that its root cause is a lack of adequate income/poverty (McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson and Mah2018). Further, some proposed remedies were offered for this situation. However, the proposed policy solutions often co-constructed debates in opposition politics (i.e., electoral and normative debate) as opposed to substantive policy reform (i.e., governing instruments, whether on social progress, inequalities, economic development, agricultural policy or any of these substantive areas) (McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson, Anderson and Mah2017). The growing significance of and public awareness of ‘food access’ occurred at the same time across a range of civil society and the ‘food movement’, which referred frequently to material food itself as an entitlement. It was argued that such an entitlement stemmed from normative forms of community solidarity in the absence of the state, which existed within a hostile political climate and historic transformations in the industrial state (Kneen, Reference Kneen2012).
With macroeconomic conditions distancing individuals from accessing a dignified standard of living, material access to food has become a stopgap – in perpetuity. Food access thinking has informed how previously socially unacceptable means of acquiring food have become socio-politically sanctioned. For instance, the 1980s and 1990s marked the rapid expansion of a privately financed charitable food bank industry in Canada, a phenomenon that has since expanded to many other high-income countries (Riches and Silvasti, Reference Riches and Silvasti2014; Dowler and Lambie-Mumford, 2015). Some authors have referred to, for instance, the corporatisation and ‘institutionalisation’ of food banks (Mendly-Zambo et al., Reference Mendly-Zambo, Raphael and Taman2023) but the critic Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant2022) suggested an alternative concept that is salient in the case of Canada for understanding the power of the idea of ‘food access’ in establishing societal norms for public action: affective infrastructure. This is a useful concept aligned with literature examining emotional expression in public policy deliberation (Fischer, Reference Fischer2010; Durnova, Reference Durnová, Fischer, Torgerson, Durnova and Orsini2015). For instance, a study of civil servants in the federal government development agency in Canada found that emotions were important in the co-construction of solidarity between these workers and their development partners (Boutilier, Reference Boutilier2022).
Being a ‘food access’ organisation provides an affective infrastructure for ‘doing something’ to respond to food insecurity – usually delivering food through food assistance programming, which itself is argued to change social relations through the establishment of community solidarities. This is an attractive proposition for policy actors in government seeking to cultivate evidence of intersectoral buy-in for their work. We caution: what if, in fact what is being done is a change in the position of social ‘things’ – food and other material goods and services are distributed as relational objects within systems presenting vast, structural barriers to individuals – while the relations remain the same?
There exists an extensive literature on food bank developments in Canada including references that discuss the Canadian case relative to other post-industrial/ising states (Riches and Silvasti, Reference Riches and Silvasti2014), which we do not attempt to reproduce here. However, we suggest amending this literature to note that the socio-political orientation of a wide range of food provisioning interventions as modalities of food access does not reflect a lack of ‘politicisation’ in this realm. Rather, we suggest that a widening usage of ‘food access’ to respond to food insecurity in policy is a problematic, and politicised development. Yet in part due to its centrality in the UN concept of food security (the de facto right to food), food access has reached a level of ubiquity so as to institutionalise it as a symbolic form of solidarity and as affective infrastructure.
To ‘increase food access’ as a policy goal is a framing that offers social license to conceive of food charity as a valid social response to food insecurity, because it is an easy tie to ‘implementation’ of the right to food in the UN formulation. While the co-construction of a policy idea/problem is well-described (Vaillancourt, Reference Vaillancourt2009), the co-construction of a solution is less so. Admittedly ‘increasing food access’ is far more rhetorically appealing than to ‘reduce food insecurity’, which seems a narrow technical project, especially in the face of critique that some experts on ‘First World Hunger’ have levied against the construct of ‘food insecurity’ for omitting the sensory (affective) element (Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1998; Beacom et al., Reference Beacom, Furey, Hollywood and Humphreys2022). Policy actors providing for food access can stake a legitimate carework claim to a community-building, and an affectively public provider role, in domains where other actors – including the nation-state – have abrogated their own claim and legitimacy.
To cultivate infrastructures is to achieve moral value, power, and even, perhaps, a fiefdom of cast-off ‘things’. For instance, a food charity might frame itself as a market correction (Levkoe and Wakefield, Reference Levkoe and Wakefield2011), where entrepreneurial providers can resolve distributional issues in access. This creates a relevant example for legislators to cite thrift where the existing food supply has created unequal ‘access’ to perfectly good (wasted) consumer goods amid scarcity (McIntyre et al., Reference McIntyre, Patterson, Anderson and Mah2017). Food charity is sometimes proffered as an ‘emergency’ response (Poppendieck, Reference Poppendieck1998), with civil society rallying to offer care to mitigate crisis in dual failures of state and market. Yet even the carework claim of food charity cannot share food without embedding meaning and may perpetuate or widen social differences in power. A century after Mauss, it is worth reinforcing that charitable food giving constructs a relationship between the giver and the recipient that establishes an enclosure through an intentional gift relation (Silvasti, Reference Silvasti2015), whether or not mutually agreeable relations supercede the gift (Derrida, Reference Derrida1992). The giver sanctions the gift: the form of food, the form of access, the means for its bestowal – and hence its accreditable delivery. A recipient’s capabilities in setting the terms for the gift can only be activated should it be offered. To have the food become ‘accessible’, the recipient has only the discretion to accept food, or not: as Durkheim warned, a contract. No scale of philanthropy, network, nor bidirectionality between the giver and the recipient, can obscure that the right to food is thus placed within an enclosed social contract between the charitable provider and the recipient.
The right to food, like other social and economic rights, was intended to foreground the progressive realisation of human welfare where inequitable economic systems manifest social gradients within and between populations, in ownership over and access to a recognised standard of living. This is where reorganising the distribution of food objects is particularly insufficient, because it simultaneously renders food producers invisible (Lambek, Reference Lambek2024) while positioning intermediary food redistributors to make the estimation and identification of social policy targets as a matter of practice: in policy studies, critiqued as a form of downstream determination of need (Schneider and Ingram Reference Schneider and Ingram1993). There is no justice in this: neither fundamental equality of persons, nor equality before the law, can be determined in practice or downstream as an enforcement activity of a bureaucratic – and in this case, social infrastructural, apparatus. We have reified the food within food access as the means to address food insecurity, towards the right to food, and as such we have tacitly accepted that the presence of food is necessary, specific to, and often sufficient, in response to food need.
Meanwhile, social infrastructures concerned with increasing access to food try harder. Although there is ample evidence that food bank utilisation is a fraction of measured food insecurity prevalence (Loopstra and Tarasuk, Reference Loopstra and Tarasuk2015), the charitable provider-imperative – perhaps rightly so – is certainly to continue to quality-improve its implementation of ‘food access’ strategies, devote energies to reducing stigma or the nutritional composition of the meagre resources provided as ‘demand’ for the service grows. Material food access is the glue that providers can offer to temporarily fill the widening cracks in social solidarity and care left by strained health systems and social policies (Blair et al., Reference Blair, Eville, Johnson and Monahan2025).
A telling example from Canada can be found in a recent federal government audit on hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to a ‘Local Food Infrastructure Fund (LFIF)’, a response to pandemic food insecurity, directed principally at the nation’s largest food charities. The audit determined that the programme showed no impact on the government’s own food insecurity measures that were contemporaneously reported as part of its poverty reduction plan. Rather, ‘the [LFIF] Program’s design is effective in terms of supporting community food security outcomes rather than the stated ultimate outcome of reduced household food insecurity’ (AAFC, 2024b). In other words, the policy outcome: funds alleviated the stress of food charities responding to growing need. In a turn of perverse logic, the conclusion of the report was that adjustments be made to monitoring, ensuring ‘the Program’s ultimate outcome to better reflect its community food security design.’
We are mired in a cycle of social policy as social-material responses to provide food – and as a matter of convenience, to make our political project the aspiration to improve those feeding programmes through incremental revisions, such as the strengthened charitable organisation operations, expansion of deservedness, or the quality of foods – and away from pursuing just relations and socio-material structural reforms in the first place.
Pointing once more to Sen’s distinction of the causal reasoning necessary to direct one’s attention away from food availability towards food entitlements as a human right, it is apparent that food access cannot, by definition, cause anyone to become food secure. Causal reasoning does not depend on holism (i.e., capturing all potential explanatory factors in a given definition) but rather, counterfactuals (i.e., how outcomes are contingent to the presence or absence of exposures; how factors are sufficient and adequately specific to mechanisms; how feedback loops and adaptation occur in complex causal paths). Food access is not enough to reduce food insecurity among those who are food insecure: even in UN terms, it is (only) a ‘principal’ obligation in the progressive realisation, to mitigate against short-term precarity. The suggestion that ‘joined-up’ national food policies may help provide the institutional framework for resolving food insecurity (among other policy goals) (Lang et al., Reference Lang, Barling and Caraher2009; DeSchutter, Reference DeSchutter2012a, Reference DeSchutter2012b) connects dots of a ‘food system’ that is itself structured by societal institutions; however, it is on the individuals enclosed by institutions where our eyes must remain. Drèze and Sen (Reference Drèze and Sen1989) once cautioned that policy concern with ‘displacement’ of national food production that might otherwise feed the hungry is misguided (e.g., cash crops and/or export-oriented economies).
We argue that even well-intentioned calls for ‘joined-up’ food policy as a solution to food insecurity, imbued with food access measurement and approaches, are precisely conflating what Drèze and Sen warned against. Entitlements cannot be conferred through social and economic systems, but those systems can infringe upon entitlements (Sen, Reference Sen2009). Entitlements include the affirmative responsibilities of states often overlooked in liberal democracies (Nussbaum, Reference Nussbaum1997). At the level of the nation-state, food entitlements may begin in some cases with what can be grown or harvested to meet nutritional needs for its people (self-sufficiency), but in virtually all economic contexts today extends to that which can be acquired through exchange. Food acquisition through income and as an entitlement is thus distinct from supply of the commodity food (Drèze and Sen, Reference Drèze and Sen1989, p.168). At the household and individual level, the exchange value of food resources is further structured by social relations that lend normative sanction in that society or community, such as construction of and moderating effect of intrafamilial assets (e.g., between a married man and woman under gendered divisions of consumption and work) (ibid, p. 50–9).
Food access is ostensibly a targeted and effective waystation on the pathway to full and universal distributional justice. But on what causal pathway, and what evidence, could we make this claim? Rather, the 1974 Rome World Food Conference affirmed that providing for food access is what is politically practicable: in this solution to hunger, food access helps fulfil the right – when the right is deemed equivalent to achieving food security. Food access is thus a happy sociopolitical idea. It allows the unhappy affect of unfairness, precarity, famine, and being governed – of coming to terms with difference – to be replaced by a temporary positive affect of sameness in universalism, security, and consumer commensality (the happy affect of sharing a meal). Power relations undergird food systems, and striving for food access is part of a dynamic and negotiated social contract dictating the terms for provisioning and consumption across uneven and risky collectivities, which has left social policy ‘for food access’ to be a link between enabling, noble providers and enabled, grateful recipients. Food access has tied us into the knot of regarding food providers as social protection providers because we accept the objectification of food and the right to be fed.
As a social protection device, food provisioning for the food insecure is the ultimate targeted intervention. The late Thandika Mkandawire, former UN Research Institute for Social Development director, disentangled the politics of universalism versus targeting in social policy as follows (Mkandawire, Reference Mkandawire2005):
It would indeed seem that targeting is a ‘luxury’ which only countries with sophisticated administrative apparatus and substantive state reach can enjoy. For it does seem that, by the logic of the argument for targeting, countries that need targeting (given their limited fiscal resources) cannot do so, while those that can (given their wealth) need not do so.
Mkandawire’s (Reference Mkandawire2005) analysis centres upon explanatory factors including: an extreme skew in both lower- and higher-income countries towards a shift to targeting, with tacit and explicit shifts between the 1960s–1970s and the post-1980s era; fiscal crisis (scarcity/constraint), and a prioritising of efficiency, defined as ‘efficient allocation of resources subject to budget constraints and the exigencies of globalisation, [where] what is actually at stake is the fundamental question about a polity’s values and its responsibilities to all its members’. This speaks to a crisis of universalism – in particular, the satisficing towards a ‘stratified universalism’, defined as a universalism merely ‘stratified and tended to apply to social groups directly linked to the nation-building project’ and hence conditioned by political regimes. Social policy is thus marginalised, left with a residual role in its ends and instrumental in its means, chosen only to progress the consequences of macroeconomic policy.
Conclusion: food access has derailed food insecurity policy
This paper has examined the intransigence of the social problem of food insecurity with broad attention to UN definitions and key examples of implementation of the right to food in Canada. We have argued that the foregrounding of food access within the right to food is a policy mistake. Narrowing the right to a positive concept of food security as an exchange outcome of a global food system is an entanglement that gestures for public policy to remain in the ‘food policy’ domain. We do not seek to undermine the conceptual coherence of food access per se. Rather, we interrogate how a particular materiality of unrestricted food access that we now know colloquially as food security has come to the forefront of how we operationalise the right to food, as an expression of individual entitlement, in social policy debate. Food access has become normative in how legislators design health and social policies to respond to hunger, despite maintaining an overarching rhetoric of economic inequality as food insecurity’s root cause. Such framing betrays the socio-political approach in food access: grounded in a material conception of food need. Indeed, we posit that food security work now really has no interest in food insecurity, because there seems to be enough food but so much more to do to keep it that way.
That food can have a range of social and cultural purposes, as well as material and physiological benefits (and harms) is besides the point: at issue is that food’s material effects have been mistaken for moral rationale to advance food access as a basis for new social institutions, politics, and policy – a right to be fed. The right to food cannot risk further diluting as an expression of human rights governance against commodity markets, in which a universalist conception of rights must be made convincing. It is time to consciously uncouple food access from how we study and respond to food insecurity. Social development need not be relegated to a pittance of poverty reduction and a sidenote of food systems evaluation. If we uncouple food access from how we study and respond to food insecurity, we can attend to the social and economic forces that create disparities.
In conclusion, food insecurity policy has been derailed by attention to food access. Food insecurity indicators measure lack of food access. Food access can support a right to be fed but it is not enough to make anyone food secure and may incur social harm. Food is a paltry basis for a transformative politics and food is not enough justice for social justice. We must uncouple food access from food insecurity and recouple zero hunger and poverty reduction and address the social relations that impede both aims.
Financial support
CLM receives support from the Canada Research Chairs programme.
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