Our plate costs more, that’s undeniable. In its most recent data on the consumer price index (CPI), published in June, Statistics Canada estimated the increase in the grocery basket at 9.7% over one year. For a growing proportion of Quebecers, this plate paradoxically weighs less. More frugal, it is also less healthy, a vicious circle that feeds our too many food deserts, as evidenced by an analysis of the To have to which shows that more than half of the residential areas of the metropolis fall into this narrow category.
On a daily basis, everyone will agree that filling the plate inevitably ends up weighing you down. Lack of imagination, disorganization, time that flies, culinary skills in decline: a thousand reasons explain a generally temporary lack of love. For a growing number, however, this imperative is coupled with a structural stress that ends up wearing out. Distance, when it becomes unreasonable, is indeed a major obstacle to healthy eating. This fragility weighs even more heavily in times of galloping inflation.
For households that own a car (and can still afford to drive it), this can be circumvented quite easily with a little time and organization. This is the case for the inhabitants of L’Île-Bizard–Sainte-Geneviève, a well-to-do neighborhood where more than 70% of the residential territory constitutes a food desert without this necessarily affecting the plates. This is not the case in the more disadvantaged neighborhoods, where every dollar counts, such as Saint-Léonard, which is one of those with the highest proportion of food deserts on the island.
When the grocery store is too far away, sourcing becomes a headache that leads to convenience stores and dollar stores, where supply comes with an overrepresentation of processed foods to the detriment—sometimes even erasing— fresh products. The problem is that it is also in these neighborhoods that fast food restaurants are concentrated. In Montreal-North, for example, there is only one supermarket for nine fast-food restaurants, which feast on this forced shortage.
A detestable dynamic that the borough of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce has managed to break. Not without having to fight hard. Contested all the way to the Supreme Court, his idea of using zoning to limit the areas where new fast food restaurants can set up passed the legal test in the spring. In doing so, the Court has opened a breach in which all municipalities would benefit from rushing to keep junk food at bay.
The turbulence that shakes our plates nevertheless calls for even more structuring gestures. And it’s not a check for $500 that will fill everyone’s stomach. In the first months of the pandemic, food insecurity had reached a worrying level in Quebec. Then evaluated at 26% by the National Institute of Public Health (INSPQ), this proportion went into a spin, inflation and war helping. The latest survey assessed that 24% of households had “inadequate or uncertain access to healthy and nutritious food” last May.
Food banks are struggling to acknowledge this prodigious leap, they who now grant 20% of their baskets to low wage earners. Never seen. However, a scientific watch recently unveiled by the INSPQ is a cruel reminder that the basket remains an imperfect solution. And not because it compensates for the failings of the state. Stingy with fruits and vegetables, low in iron and calcium, he abuses sugar and sodium, according to the INSPQ review. Its portions are also poorly balanced or insufficient, in addition to serving as a dumping ground for expired products.
All this masks a “hidden hunger”, which translates into deficiencies in vitamins and micronutrients. The universal blue plate we dream of cannot be satisfied with so little. Especially since those who can afford it are becoming scarce, as evidenced in particular by the fact that regulars of local vegetable baskets are abandoning them this summer to save their wallets. A worrying trend.
More and more voices are therefore calling for state intervention to secure access to basic foodstuffs. The fruit is more than ripe. We are already familiar with the mechanics, the basics of supply management can inspire us. It will also be an opportunity to do a double blow by granting additional support to those who feed us. They deserve it.
The CAQ government, which is already defending several promising ideas to increase Quebec’s food autonomy, would be wrong to wait for the elections to pull out of its hat new actions targeting food security more specifically. Firstly because hunger does not wait, but above all because it will get worse, Canadian food suppliers warned on Wednesday, who prepare news rises for the fall. Let’s sit down ?