Catherine Mah, Dalhousie University

Food (In)Security Policy in Canada (and Likely Elsewhere) has been Derailed by Attention to Food Access: The proposed presentation articulates a critical examination of the role of food law and policy in household food insecurity policy in Canada, based on our recent publication in Social Policy & Society (Mah & McIntyre 2026). This paper contends that the intractability of food insecurity as a social policy issue may have arisen in part because food access has become central to the interpretation of what is required to be food secure. We revisit key features of the evolution of the right to food and examine developments in the instruments used to monitor right to food progress. We articulate how the materiality of food access has come to the forefront of food systems policy, within which food insecurity is embedded but its structural underpinnings are lost. In turn, civil society food-based responses to growing food insecurity prevalence prevail. The pre-eminence of objectified food access as a socio-political orientation to food insecurity has refabricated the social problem of food need. A conscious uncoupling of food access from how we study and respond to food insecurity is needed to re-design food insecurity policy that is grounded in poverty alleviation.

Reference: Mah, C. L., & McIntyre, L. (2026). Food (In) Security policy in Canada (and likely Elsewhere) has been derailed by attention to food access. Social Policy and Society, 25(1), 122-136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S147474642510081X

Bill Jeffery, Centre for Health Science and Law (CHSL)

Generational Change in Life Expectancy and the and the Vegetation of Canadian Law-Making and Legal Education to Address the Legal Determinants of Public Health Nutrition: Since confederation, life expectancy from birth in Canada has risen from 45 to 82 years. What could be more (potentially) indicative of generational change in food law and policy than a nearly two-fold increase in life expectancy? We are what we eat, literally.

However, Canada did not surpass the current average life expectancy of India or Kenya (for example) until the late 1950s. And, Canadian neighbourhood studies indicate that average life expectancy varies geographically inside Canada almost as much as it does globally, largely due to social, commercial, and legal determinants of health and healthy life expectancy has risen only 1.5 years since 2000. While many food and health social norms are reproduced at the family level, food-relevant laws governing poverty, school curriculum, food production & marketing, and the workplace and schools have as much potential to reduce food-related health inequities as to preserve them.

While much added lifespan has been attributed to improvements in nutrition, much potential progress has been foregone by laws that furthered misunderstandings about the relationship between diet and disease along the way, e.g., obsessing with enough food, then enough micronutrients, and still not quite focused on enough-but-not-too-much whole foods. Moreover, food laws that have indulged commercially motivated misinformation and unhealthy food production and consumption patterns certainly hampered achievements in public health nutrition in ways that have received scant attention in the classroom.

I will examine the food and health curriculum at four of Canada’s oldest law schools, dating back to confederation to examine the extent to which law educators were contributing to thinking in the legal community about the social, commercial and legal determinants of public health nutrition, measured against a backdrop of law and policy trends in legislatures, jurisprudence and (mainly federal) government policy shops.