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Does Satisfying Your Stomach Satisfy Your Soul?
Mazon’s official Vision is “Jews joining with other Canadians to ensure that every individual in Canada leads a hunger-free life.”
What does that actually mean, concretely? It is commonly accepted in the food aid sector that the cause of hunger is – simply put – that people don’t have enough money for all their basic necessities.
So, a Canada without hunger is one in which living costs are low enough and incomes high enough that everyone can consistently afford food. Solutions might include building more affordable housing or raising incomes of the lowest earners with more generous social assistance.
But is “ending hunger” enough?
Imagine if there was no kosher chicken for Shabbat dinner at the supermarket! Or no whitefish with which to make gefilte fish!
If the food you need simply isn’t available, then all the money in the world will not satisfy your soul.
Over the past two centuries, North American Jews have established kosher butcher shops, grocery stores, and restaurants; made hechsher labels ubiquitous on commonplace packaged items; and set up complex production systems of kosher food in Canada and internationally.
But many communities that arrived more recently still rely on imports to access their cultural foods – so our increasingly complex, globalized supply chains make that access tenuous, regardless of individual household budgets. That’s why some immigrant communities are starting to grow their cultural foods locally.
The term for this direct control over the food we eat is food sovereignty: “... the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
And food sovereignty is not just a heartwarming ideal – for many communities, it actually is the best way to address hunger.
Inuit people in Canada’s North have been eating country food – caribou, narwhal, and other nutritious, locally abundant meats – for millennia.
For generations, Canadian governments restricted the ability to hunt and forcibly replaced Inuit diets with food shipped from the South. Shipping is expensive, however, and a majority of Inuit in the North can’t afford as much as they need, even with federal grocery subsidies. The math just doesn’t work.
So, Inuit communities are calling to reform the government program that provides food subsidies at grocery stores to instead focus on reviving traditional foodways. For many Inuit, access to country food is not a luxury on top of fighting hunger – it’s the simplest solution to it!
So yes, Mazon’s Vision is to "ensure that every individual in Canada leads a hunger-free life.” But hunger is not just about meeting 2,000 daily calories.
To create a Canada without hunger, we need to make it easier for communities to support themselves and flourish. Monetary solutions are needed, surely. But they aren't sufficient to provide nourishment for all.
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