Valerie speaks about food access as a Professor and focusing on facts, and data with infographics from her communication via PROOF. She is well spoken – but also is direct about complex topics. Be ready to hear about food, cost, pricing, and the challenging decisions people make when it is hard to acquire food. Mostly we spoke about food security work, however she also had a unique perspective and answer on many of the other food questions asked. If you are ready to hear a different perspective – please tune in. She is well known in the food advocacy, health professional and research areas – or basically – a name in the inside scoop conversations. [Proof]
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Listen directly from embed player on website-blog: https://www.letstastecanada.ca/ or download link
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“Food… is not something everyone has access to in ways that they should… it is a playground right now for a lot of special interests to play out… so I see it very much as a political thing.”
“Principal investigator of PROOF… what we think is the uptake of ideas of raising awareness of this problem… to educate Canadians of all stripes of the magnitude of the problem.”
“…More than 4 million of Canadians are living in households with some level of food insecurity, and that 4 million has to be an underestimate because the lens through which we are viewing this problem is the Canadian Health Survey and that Survey is not connected to First Nations communities, and so we know that people living on reserves are very very vulnerable but we also know they are not being counted in this 4 million, so that is one stat…”
“Almost everyone on social assistance in this country, is food insecure… overall the average is somewhere around 65-70%.”
“We’ve done a lot of work through PROOF… food insecurity presents a huge burden on a health system…”
“she got a payment for something… she talked about going and buying a chicken… roasting it for her and her daughter, and she said how good it felt to roast a chicken finally… when you hear that story your heart just breaks.”
“It’s huge progress that it’s even on their radar to invite me to a meeting… so we have come a long way… and food insecurity was front and centre.”
“two-thirds of people who are food insecure are in the workforce… ”
“I’d need to be persuaded first of all that there are such things as treat foods.. and that they’re an important part of people’s lives.. and that we can identify them and we need to talk about them and how frequently they are being consumed.”
““Critical of fortification of vitamins and minerals at the discretion of manufacturers…”
“A big part of the influence is press – there has to be a huge amount of this marketing of food… we need to do a better job incorporating their family’s food preferences and at the same time managing the cost of things.”
“We are abdicating our responsibility… I’ve tried really hard to go where I’m needed”
“I cook most of my food from scratch, carrots.. you never see my home without carrots, I believe in milk, I am very aware of the importance of calcium, so milk and cheese are always in my house – and yogurt, those are staples in that house, and I make my own bread. I do my best to walk my talk.”