The White House wants to talk about Food and your Health

But Canada still pretends the issue doesn’t exist.

There is a growing pool of scientific evidence that the consumption of real food (i.e., the least processed possible, and certainly not ultra-processed) is helpful to avoid a number of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers, obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Put another way, consuming highly processed food (basically, almost everything in the frozen food aisles and in the centre of your grocery store) will increase your risk of getting heart disease, bowel cancer and prematurely dying, as well as becoming overweight, obese and living with Type 2 diabetes for the rest of your life.

The United Kingdom has been doing ground-breaking work on the food system, its relation to individual health and environmental damage. Part of the main conclusions of this exercise has been to acknowledge the harmful effects of highly processed food on the average UK diet and suggest pathways forward to address changes in our overall diet as well as changes to how and what food is grown.

The United States has finally caught the same bug and the White House is hosting a conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. The conference aims to examine five main themes:

• Food access and affordability;
• The integration of nutrition and health;
• Empowering consumers to make & obtain healthy choices;
• Supporting physical activity for all; and
• Enhancing food nutrition and security research.

As the commentary on the conference site indicates, the top levels of the US Administration haven’t looked at food policy in a comprehensive manner since 1969 — a gap of over 50 years. Since then, our food system has faced — and continues to face — multiple challenges that require a policy response: a global pandemic, weakening food chains, dramatic climate events, war, rising levels of chronic diseases (leading to unsustainable increases in healthcare spending), inflation, etc.

Well, you may ask, that’s great for the UK and the USA. What about Canada?

As I’ve written about on multiple occasions on this platform, Canada has decided to put its head in the sand and ignore the issue.

The few feeble policy responses on the part of our national health and agriculture departments are just that: feeble. They lack direction, are not informed, are not coordinated in any manner to address the whole issue — from farm to retail store to health— and when they do come out with something, it is months, if not years, after, making the response ineffective.

The Canadian Food Policy? It was developed in 2018, is 13 pages slim, and since then, has relied on a top-heavy Advisory Council to provide Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada with advice on how to implement it. It is almost entirely focused on carbon credits, reforming the Agricultural Labour Strategy, implement regional food hubs (not defined) and determining statistical needs in concert with Statistics Canada. Not exactly the same issues being addressed by either the US or the UK, and certainly not the issues that are straining our food systems today.

There is not a peep on how to reform our strained food chains, what food consumers should be eating, what food our farmers should/could be producing, how to help farmers survive climate change, how to address the linkage between food consumption and individual health or how to help Canada develop a food system that provides affordable real food to consumers who are struggling with food inflation.

Health Canada? Don’t even bother. When they last looked at the linkage between food and health in 2005, they put together a ‘healthy living strategy’ that was supposed to be applied across the country to drive better living habits — including healthier eating habits, more physical activity and ‘healthier’ body weights. That was almost 20 years ago. Since then? Not a peep.

Well, OK, what about the Provinces?

Ditto. Only Quebec has marginally improved things by addressing food system reform through their move to implement ‘food sovereignty’ (sourcing more of what Quebeckers eat in Quebec) by setting targets for provincial production and pouring money into greenhouse construction and supporting very local farms that deliver real food direct to consumers. Add to that the flurry of announcements in the current election campaign on the part of various provincial parties to assist consumers with meeting their monthly food budget expense through direct checks to households or tax decreases.

Other provinces? It’s just not a priority.

So, what’s happened in the UK since the independent report on a National Food Strategy was released in 2019?

Quite a bit, actually.

The UK Government responded with a policy paper of its own, based on the work of the independent review conducted by Henry Dimbleby and his Advisory Panel. They’ve outlined three broad objectives:

• developing a prosperous agri-food and seafood sector that ensures a secure food supply in an unpredictable world and contributes to the levelling up agenda through good quality jobs around the country;
• development of a sustainable, nature positive, affordable food system that provides choice and access to high quality products that support healthier and home-grown diets for all; and
• encourages trade that provides export opportunities and consumer choice through imports, without compromising our regulatory standards for food, whether produced domestically or imported.

To do this, the government has outlined a number of goals to achieve those objectives, namely:

• maintain the current level of food produced domestically in the UK;
• ensure that by 2030, pay, employment and productivity, as well as completion of high-quality skills training will have risen in the agri-food industry in every area of the UK, to support their production and levelling up objectives;
• halve childhood obesity by 2030, reducing the healthy life expectancy (HLE) gap between local areas where it is highest and lowest by 2030, adding 5 years to HLE by 2035 and reducing the proportion of the population living with diet-related illnesses; and to support this, increasing the proportion of healthier food sold;
• reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the environmental impacts of the food system, in line with our net zero commitments and biodiversity targets and preparing for the risks from a changing climate;
• contribute to their export strategy goal to reach £1 trillion of exports annually by 2030 and supporting more UK food and drink businesses, particularly small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), to take advantage of new market access and free trade agreements (FTAs) post-Brexit; and
• maintain high standards for food consumed in the UK, wherever it is produced.

These policies have been met with some skepticism; Dimbleby himself has stated that the government has implemented about 50% of what he recommended, and added that, it was being implemented without a single vision across the whole food system.

Sound familiar? It should, as this is how Canadian food policy — such as it is — is currently being developed: haphazardly, in silos, with no linkages across departments, and little to no linkages between different levels of government.

But its 50% more than what Canada is doing. I’d go further: it’s 100% more than Canada is doing. The UK — and now the US —has done, or is doing, all the necessary legwork to lay the foundations for a new way to produce, distribute and consume food, linked to health, environmental and trade policy goals during increasingly uncertain, and unpredictable, times. They’re having conversations with major stakeholders. They’re commissioning independent reviews that result is bold visions for a food future that is sustainable and more resilient.

Canada? It’s as if our policy-makers don’t eat food. Or, don’t care about the food they eat, where it comes from, who produces it, how nutritious it is, and what effect it has on their health. Or even worse — not care how Canadians will get their food in times of climate change, war and pandemics.

And that should make us all a little worried about what our weekly food basket is going to look like in the future, and how much we’ll pay for it.