The Relationship Between Food Banks and Food Insecurity: Insights from Canada
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The Relationship Between Food Banks and Food Insecurity: Insights from Canada Valerie Tarasuk1 • Andre´e-Anne Fafard St-Germain1 • Rachel Loopstra2
Ó International Society for Third-Sector Research and The Johns Hopkins University 2019
Abstract Food banks have become the first line of response to problems of hunger and food insecurity in affluent nations. Although originating in the USA, food banks are now well established in Canada, Australia, and some Nordic countries, and they have rapidly expanded in the UK and other parts of Europe in the past two decades. Defined by the mobilization of food donations and volunteer labor within communities to provide food to those in need, food banks are undeniably a response to food insecurity, but their relevance to this problem is rarely assessed. We drew on data from the 2008 Canadian Household Panel Survey Pilot to assess the relationship between food bank use and household food insecurity over the prior 12 months and examine the interrelation between foodinsecure households’ use of other resource augmentation strategies and their use of food banks. We found that most food-insecure households delayed bill payments and sought financial help from friends and family, but only 21.1% used food banks. Food bank users appeared to be more desperate: They had substantially lower incomes than food-insecure households who did not use food banks and were more likely to seek help from relatives and friends and other community agencies. Our findings challenge the current
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-019-00092-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & Valerie Tarasuk [email protected] 1
Department of Nutritional Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto, 150 College Street, Toronto, ON M6G 2W6, Canada
2
Division of Diabetes and Nutritional Sciences, King’s College London, London, England, UK
emphasis on food charity as a response to household food insecurity. Measures are needed to address the underlying causes of household food insecurity. Keywords Food insecurity Food banks Household resources Canada
Introduction Although originating in the USA (Daponte and Bade 2006; Poppendieck 1994, 1998), food banks are now well established in Canada, Australia (Booth and Whelan 2014), and some Nordic countries (Salonen 2016; Silvasti and Karjalainen 2014), and have rapidly expanded in the UK (Loopstra et al. 2015b; Dowler and O’Connor 2012; Lambie-Mumford and Dowler 2014), other parts of Europe, and Asia (Martin-Fernandez et al. 2013; Riches and Silvasti 2014; Gonzalez-Torre and Coque 2016, 2014) in the 2000s. While the organizational structures, operations, and levels of government investment in food bank operations vary across countries, these initiatives are broadly defined by the mobilization of food donations and volunteer labor within communities to provide food to those in need. In this sense, they are inarguably responses to local c
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