Statistics Canada told us on Tuesday that, despite the rate of inflation easing, food prices remain high. With food inflation over 9% in June, many people have to (further) compress the share of the budget devoted to food.
“We have to stop seeing food as something that can be compressed and which is always the minimum,” maintains sociologist Jean-Philippe Laperrière, director at Concertation en sécurité agricole de Saint-Léonard. He signs a study on the subject with his colleague Mylène Thériault.
“We don’t want to impose a recalculation of everything,” he said. What we mean is that today, we should perhaps give more space to food. It’s important for health, but it’s also important for mental health and identity health. »
The researchers propose a new indicator, the Decent Food Budget, which would take into account the ethnocultural specificities linked to food, even an idea of pleasure and flavor which is naturally discarded when it comes to food security in a survival situation.
A Kraft Dinner is okay. We can eat it. But can we also make a real mac and cheese? Is it crazy to think that, tonight, we’re eating macaroni with products from Quebec?
Jean-Philippe Laperrière, Director at Food Security Consultation
According to calculations often used, the minimum amount that should be spent on food fluctuates around $10 per day, per person.
It is quite possible, say the two researchers, but it does not make good sense in the medium term, or even in the short term.
Because to reach this total, day after day, you have to cook everything, without having access to local or organic ingredients, which are often too expensive. Unless you get them back through a helper program, which is always possible, but takes extra effort.
It is also necessary to put a cross on products that give a little respite in the kitchen, such as already marinated meat or roast chicken, because their price is also too high.
Even bought without artifice, meat is becoming increasingly rare in the baskets of families with lower incomes, because it is too expensive. For a few days, substitutions can be an enjoyable creative exercise; year-round is stressful, researchers say.
“It takes about twice the minimum [établi autour de 10 $] to be able to make choices,” says Jean-Philippe Laperrière, who has been teaching the Nourrir la ville course for 12 years at UQAM.
Because the cheapest possible food is inevitably generic. “It is the most banal rice and the most banal flour. »
From single to double
The Canadian government’s Nutritious Food Basket and the Montreal Diet Dispensary calculate the minimum amount that should be spent on healthy eating. The Dispensary has been doing the exercise for more than 70 years. With the current context, the tool was adjusted and at the beginning of the year became the Nutritious and economical shopping basket. It is estimated that it takes at least $8.70 for a person who wants to eat well – with variables depending on each person’s situation.
“Filling in a weekly food budget of $250 requires households to make sacrifices in their personal tastes to the point of having to give up some key parts of their cooking repertoire,” the report reads.
Jean-Philippe Laperrière and Mylène Thériault calculate that it is rather $18.96 that should be devoted to the daily food budget.
Both work in the community setting and that’s where they decided to test their ideas.
About thirty consumers took part in their project; their annual incomes were $15,000 to $80,000.
This allowed them to confirm that less affluent people spend a larger share of their budget on food, over 30% in their sample. People with lower incomes spend an average of $16.12 on food per day, according to data collected in the spring of 2022.
“We see that in the field, even the least affluent people spend more than $10 a day,” says Mylène Thériault. This figure is not realistic. »
The risk, they say, is that by always using indicators that define the bare minimum, it becomes an established and acceptable standard.
The study titled Emergence of a new indicator for a decent food budget for Quebec households is published in the journal Organizations & Territories.
“We clung to the word ‘decent’, because it recalls dignity, says Jean-Philippe Laperrière. We often talk about the viable, but you have to know that we feed two things when we eat: the body, but also the imagination and the identity. »
Learn more
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- $13,000
- It would take almost $13,000 per year, at a minimum, for the grocery budget of a family of four, an increase of 15% in one year, from summer 2021 to 2022.
source: Montreal Diet Dispensary.