GUELPH – It costs about $273 a week, or $1,200 a month to feed a family of four a nutritious diet in Wellington, Dufferin and Guelph.
Public health nutritionist Lisa Needham presented Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health’s (WDGPH) annual Nutritious Food Basket report to the board of health on Jan. 4.
It paints a picture of rising food costs and the challenges those costs pose to students, people living on social assistance and fixed incomes, and even those considered gainfully employed.
This fictional, four-person family includes two middle-aged working parents, a 15-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl.
The figures reflect the actual cost of grocery shopping in Guelph, Wellington or Dufferin counties.
The food basket contains food only and not other items you’d purchase at the grocery store, like toilet paper or paper towels.
Needham noted the food basket report follows the new Canada Food Guide released in 2019.
She said one in eight are now considered food insecure, and for two-thirds of those it’s a new experience.
Not surprisingly, the highest risk groups for food insecurity are:
- households with limited assets;
- Indigenous households and other racial or cultural groups;
- low-income households;
- households reliant on income supports; and
- female-led lone parent households.
For the first time the study also includes data on University of Guelph students and that indicates more than 20 per cent of students are also experiencing food insecurity.
And making ends meet can involve some serious priority setting.
“To protect children when the family is threatened by food insecurity, mothers have cut back on their own food intake to feed their children,” states Needham’s report.
“Other Canadian household strategies that attempt to make income go further include using coupons and or returning bottles, postponing bill payments, borrowing money, borrowing food, selling possessions, and buying food on credit.
“Households also consume cheaper foods, skip meals or eat less.”
Board of health member Linda Busuttil said she works with the Willow West Neighbourhood Group in Guelph and has some grassroots experience with low-income families and the difficulty they have putting dinner on the table.
She wondered how public health uses the data it collects.
“It’s public health’s role to have the baseline data,” Needham replied.
“The data gets used by other agencies” like the Guelph-Wellington Poverty Elimination Task Force, The Seed, and those involved in the living wage campaign.
“It does get leveraged by community partners,” she said.
Board member Erin Caton, newly elected to Guelph’s city council, wondered why she didn’t see herself in the report.
Caton is a disabled woman with dietary restrictions who said rising food costs, while a nightmare for many, pose an impossible situation for her.
Gluten-free food options have increased by 183%, Caton said, and people with food allergies will wind up paying $2,000 more per year.
She’d like the Nutritious Food Basket report to include dietary needs for many groups and not only a family of four.
While sympathetic to Caton’s reality, the report follows a specific template, said Dr. Nicola Mercer, “and we can’t change it.”
All health units in the province conduct their own food basket study based on prices in their regions.
The report also found that for those already experiencing income and food issues, their problems were exacerbated during COVID-19 lockdowns.
“The fact that food insecurity impacts all areas of health (i.e., mental, physical, social) demonstrates it is a critical public health issue,” the report states.
It goes on to say “WDGPH needs to continue to monitor food costs and affordability trends through the nutritional food basket protocol annually to identify who in WDG is at highest risk and raise awareness of the issue of food insecurity in WDG as a critical public health issue.
“It is also recommended that WDGPH continue to work with local and provincial groups working to address poverty and food insecurity such as Guelph and Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination.”
The board received the report for information.
