Guest contributor Angela

As a dietitian and someone with a keen interest in human rights advocacy, food security is an important topic to me. It is not only that I believe that everyone should have access to affordable food. That's only part it. I believe that everyone should have access to food that is also safe, nutritious, and personally acceptable. "Acceptable" includes taste preference, moral issues, and ethical ones. By this definition, someone who receives food they dislike from a foodbank is not food secure. Nor is a vegetarian whose accessible food involves mainly meat products, or a person of Jewish faith who has free access to pork and not much else.

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Guest contributor Elena P.
From To Wheat Or Not To Wheat, March 2004

When I think about the kinds of food to prepare, my mind wanders back to the foods I ate while living in Scotland, Nepal, Japan and other places where I have lived or traveled. It is important to note, however, that it is the properties of these foods, rather than their exotic affiliations, that drive my eating habits. I do not eat sushi, pad thai, and kim chi because I wish to participate in cultural food colonialism, as Heldke (2003) contends. I simply eat these foods because I have an allergy to wheat. No wheat means no cookies, no crackers, no bagels, no breakfast cereal, no cake, no hamburgers, no chicken stripes, no calamari, no burritos, no pizza, no pasta, no bread, and in some cases, no beer. Needless to say, it is extremely difficult to find wheat-free foods at most Canadian restaurants, bakeries, delis and coffee shops.

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Posted by Erika at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)