Food | On the plate of Canadians

What do Canadians eat? Several indices make it possible to know what they put in their plate. One, measured by Statistics Canada, assesses the “availability” of food for every Canadian. Take a look at the latest data.

Judith Lachapelle
The Press

Available, but not necessarily consumed

What are we eating, exactly? How many kilos of apples, liters of milk, eggs are consumed by each Canadian during a year? “It’s very difficult to measure actual consumption,” explains Rémy Lambert, professor in the agro-food economics department at Laval University.

To approach this, Statistics Canada measures the “availability of food” using the factual data at its disposal. “For each food, we add what we produce and what we import, we subtract what we export, we compare the inventories at the beginning and at the end of the year, and we divide by the number of Canadians he says.

The result indicates the “availability” of a food, which Statistics Canada also calls “apparent consumption”. This “available” food is not necessarily bought by the consumer: it can be bought by a processor who will make a new product out of it. Nor does it take into account the particularities of the territory, underlines Sébastien Rioux, of the Canada Research Chair in the Political Economy of Food and Well-Being. “The food supply varies depending on where you live, for example, if you live near vegetable farming areas. »

The more people eat it, the more a food is available… or not?

Typically, the availability of a product follows demand, but not always: in 2021, due to supply chain issues, “the relationship between food availability and consumer preferences was harder to discern”, writes Statistics Canada in its report published on May 31. There are several reasons for the availability of a product to vary.

For example, demand for flour was high during the pandemic (thanks, Ricardo), but its availability was down…and not just because of demand. The decrease in the availability of wheat flour in 2021 coincides “with a drop in wheat production due to drought conditions in Western Canada” in 2020, specifies Statistics Canada.

Less availability, more diversity

Nevertheless, the observation of food availability reflects the evolution of food preferences. One of the most notable declines is in the amount of milk available for consumption. Over the past ten years, the quantity of milk available per person has fallen from 76.5 liters in 2011 to 60.9 liters in 2021 – a drop of 20.3%.

Why is there less milk available? In a study published in 2017, Statistics Canada suggested that the decline observed since 2009 could be attributable to “dairy substitutes available to consumers, such as soy milk and almond milk”. “Some people also choose frozen desserts made with coconut oil, for example, over ice cream. »

The same phenomenon partly explains the decrease in the availability of beer over the past 20 years; besides the increase in the quantity of wine available, one only has to take a look in the category of other drinks to understand that alcohol drinkers have not stopped toasting.

When export undermines availability

Exporting is one of the variables in the equation that greatly influences the availability of a product. If the availability of maple sugar has decreased by 10% in one year, it is mainly due to a short sugaring season in the spring of 2020 and an increase in exports. Similarly, Canadian beef, in high demand in the United States in 2021, has seen its availability decrease by 3.4% in one year. But the availability of beef has been steadily declining for a decade, also a sign of changing food preferences.