While it’s true that many Canadians would benefit from more exercise and from improving the quality of their diet, research shows that society often blames nutrition problems and food insecurity on personal choices like lack of willpower and imperfect parenting.

However, this thinking largely ignores the well-established social and political factors that shape food choices, nutrition-related chronic disease and Canada’s declining ranking in life expectancy.

Food insecurity in Canada worsened for the third year in a row in 2024, setting another national record, with more than 25 per cent of the population living in households with inadequate access to food due to financial constraints.

We are contributors to the Hungry Stories Project, a growing team of scholars, dietitians and artists who are fighting for the elimination of food insecurity by sharing what it takes to collectively care for each other’s food needs. We are advocating for more comprehensive, accurate and engaging information about the root causes of nutrition inequalities.

Why food banks can’t solve hunger

Food insecurity is a structural issue that is primarily a problem of insufficient income.

Decades of research evidence confirm that food insecurity cannot be solved by providing food through charities such as food banks and soup kitchens. At best, these non-governmental mechanisms may temporarily alleviate hunger for some people. For many reasons, most people living with food insecurity do not access food banks at all.

Research shows that when more people have adequate incomes, food insecurity declines, and that policy changes are essential to ensure that wages, social assistance and pension rates provide a livable income and greater income equality.

In The Case for Basic Income, Jamie Swift and Elaine Power share personal stories of Canadians who participated in the 2017–19 Ontario Basic Income Pilot and unpack the history behind the movement for basic income. They explain why wealth should be built by society, not individuals, and why everyone should have an unconditional right to a fair share.

This thoughtful book helps us consider whether a basic income guarantee could be the way forward to intervene where the market economy and social programs fail.

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• ** Read more: Dear politicians: To solve our food bank crisis, curb corporate greed and implement a basic income ** *

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Teaching kids about the causes of food insecurity

This reality doesn’t affect only adults. How children come to understand the issue is shaped by how we talk about it as a society.

Based on a detailed analysis of children’s books for middle-grade readers, we noticed that most children’s fiction suggests individual choices or life circumstances are to blame for food insecurity and that charity, kind strangers and luck are the solutions. Children seldom see realistic portrayals of the structural causes, consequences or experiences of food insecurity.

This gives them, at best, an incomplete understanding of the social and political issues that produce the problem. Young readers need opportunities to learn about the experiences and belief systems of others.

In an effort to rectify the gaps in available materials for children, Dian Day and Amanda White, two of the artist-scholars in the Hungry Stories Project, teamed up to create the graphic novel Shy Cat and the Stuff-the-Bus Challenge slated to be published by Second Story Press on March 3, 2026.

The graphic novel ‘Shy Cat and the Stuff-the-Bus Challenge’ by Dian Day and Amanda White, forthcoming from Second Story Press, March 2026.

This is the first book catalyzed by the collective, offering a fresh and relatable story about friendship, neighbourhood cats and growing up, while also creating space for hard conversations with kids about why people go hungry in the first place. It offers ideas for reflection and collective action, without providing easy or simplistic answers.

Through quirky Shy Cat comics, the main character Mila imagines many creative solutions to food insecurity, but reality is more complicated: The food bank is only open one day a week, the community garden plots are all spoken for, people are protesting in front of City Hall — and Mila’s friend Kit is still hungry.

It’s important to show children that they have agency in sparking collective change, that they can grapple with complex questions and consider structural solutions.

The transformational potential of school food programs

In 2025, the federal government announced its plan to make Canada’s emerging National School Food Program permanent. The choices being made now will shape whether these programs reduce inequality or reproduce it.

Most Canadian children now rely on lunches packed from home (or go without) on school days, and Canada has been ranked among the worst performing affluent countries in terms of investments in children’s well-being and nutrition.

For school food programs to reach their full potential to serve as a form of community care and a tool for advancing health, education, justice, food sovereignty and sustainability, schools, parents and communities will need ideas and resources to help envision and build the future of school food.

The 2024 book Transforming School Food Politics around the World provides examples of how people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals.

It spotlights the potential of school food systems, and how change depends on valuing the gendered labour that goes into caring for, feeding and educating children. In the Canadian chapter, Jennifer Black teamed up with scholars and school food practitioners to describe valuable ways to think more broadly about health and nutrition in school food programs to actively address issues of justice and equity.

But if we are to galvanize a positive change, we must also pay attention to diverse voices and lived experiences.

While the primary cause of food insecurity for children is inadequate household income often due to systemic inequities, most children’s fiction suggests individual choices or life circumstances are to blame. (Unsplash)

Learning to listen to diverse voices about food experiences

Left of Dial Media, the creators of the newly released Tubby podcast, recently published the Essential Listening Poll, a helpful guide gathered by 300 scholars, audio creators, podcast hosts and writers from around the world. However, it’s a challenge finding Canadian podcasts that look beyond individual behaviour changes and address the wider food systems that shape these choices.

To fill this gap, in 2025, the editors of the journal Canadian Food Studies launched Digesting Food Studies, a podcast that helps break down research on food systems into manageable portions. Episodes tackle topics ranging from food justice and sustainability to infant food insecurity, Indigenous food sovereignty and school food. Meaningful improvements in health will require shifts in public policy. To get there, now more than ever, we need more evidence-based stories that mobilize the public to envision and advocate for better solutions to food insecurity.