Feed hungry children at school, recommends group

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Canada is the only G8 country without a nation-wide meal program for hungry children at school, reports the Conference Board of Canada. This conservative business group estimates that about two million Canadians suffer from “food insecurity” and almost half of those are children attending school.

There are lunch and breakfast programs in some schools across the country but that is not enough according to the report entitled Enough For All: Household Food Insecurity in Canada.

“Food insecurity is a term that we use to define a state where nutritious food is either unavailable or inaccessible or the supply is unstable,” said Alison Howard, researcher and co-author of the report. “That can range from a fear of not being able to provide or obtain food to actual hunger due to food shortages.”

 

Why some Canadians suffer food insecurity

Incomes may be too low to provide food reliably. Another problem is the cost of non-food essentials like housing, transportation, geographic isolation. The report suggests another contributing problem is a lack of food literacy. Some people don’t have the skills, knowledge or money to find the foods that are most nutritious like milk, meat, fruit or vegetables, and instead  they choose calorie-dense processed foods.

Food insecurity can have many negative impacts on children says Howard. “Teenagers are at higher risk of suffering from depression, social anxiety, suicide. Nutritionally-deprived children also experience more health problems including anemia, weight loss, colds, infections,” she says. “They tend to be absent from school more often and have more learning difficulties. In addition diet-deprived children are less able to concentrate and perform well at school and this threatens their opportunity to gain an education and those vital skills they will need for the rest of their lives.”

A “simple, convenient” way to reach vulnerable children

A pan-Canadian school-based nutrition program would be the most simple and convenient way to access vulnerable children, thinks Howard. She suggests all provincial and territorial governments “get the ball rolling” to set up such a program since, in Canada, education falls under their jurisdiction. They could involve the federal government, community agencies and farmers’ groups. She recommends there be frequent assessments to see whether the meal programs are indeed an effective way to curb food insecurity.

Feeding students would “be an investment in them for the rest of their lives and also for society,” says Howard, “because it will save us in the short and long-term on health care costs and also will help to improve our labour capacity in the long-term.”