Immigration and Food Insecurity: The Canadian Experience--A Literature Review

Diana Tarraf, Dia Sanou and Isabelle Giroux

A chapter in People's Movements in the 21st Century - Risks, Challenges and Benefits from IntechOpen

Abstract: Canada is a popular destination for immigrants and integration of newcomers is an important strategy for its demographic growth and economic development. Food insecurity disproportionately affects newcomers in Canada; unfortunately, they occupy the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum and thus adding to the burden of socio-cultural challenges they are already facing. The high level of food insecurity contributes to poor diet quality and the rise in overweight and other chronic health conditions and therefore to the loss of healthy immigrant status. Indeed, statistical evidence, mainly of the overall Canadian population, demonstrates that individuals living in food-insecure households have higher rates of self-reported poor health and chronic health conditions. Therefore, understanding and properly addressing the factors associated with food insecurity among Canadian immigrants is crucial for an adequate integration of immigrants. This chapter suggests that an adequate and appropriate understanding of food security for Canadian immigrant populations requires consideration of a cultural perspective in addition to the traditional individual, household and community levels and the development of measurement tools to capture this cultural dimension. It is proposed the concept of cultural food insecurity encompasses the four usual dimensions (availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability) and a newly proposed fifth cultural dimension. Future research should aim at validating the relevance of this cultural perspective as a fifth pillar for food security and developing measurement tools to assess it.

Keywords: Canada; Acculturation; food insecurity; availability; accessibility; utilization; stability; cultural appropriateness; immigration; nutritional health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/53486 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:111021

DOI: 10.5772/66824

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from IntechOpen
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Slobodan Momcilovic ().