Document(s) 8 of 11

 

 

“In one community, there was a lovely old woman who had cherry orchards and goats. She was dirt poor, but incredibly generous and spirited. It was a soul-fulfilling experience to meet people and hear them talk about their lives, their relationship to food, and the land.” - Elizabeth Hunter

 

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At the tender age of 10, Elizabeth Hunter made her first connection to food and justice: she sold cookies to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund. Less than a decade later, while pursing a liberal arts degree at Concordia University in Montréal, she was heading research for the Québec Public Interest Research Group on campus. Her chief interest: food.

 

“We took people who were worried about food systems on supermarket tours,” she recalls, laughing. “They were pretty depressing. We’d talk about pesticides, overpackaging, and hormones in meat. We’d try to provide a few solutions, but our work was very much based on the problem. So we started to do something that would provide alternatives.”

 

The result was Hungry for Justice: the Montreal Guide to Socially Responsible Food Choices. While cookies didn’t make it into the guide, she still credits her childhood for giving her the taste for social justice issues, particularly for food security.

 

After graduating in 1992, Hunter delved deeper into food issues in Québec. Between 1996 and 2002, as a co-founder, director, and program coordinator of Équiterre, Hunter secured funding for an ecological agriculture program, wrote and published a book on community-supported agriculture, and created a network of 50 farms. In effect, she put into concrete form the ideals of growing and sharing food responsibly that were expressed in Hungry for Justice.

 

 

By 2003, Hunter was pursuing her interest in food security across the globe. She spent several years in Lebanon, combining motherhood with freelance writing, volunteer work, studying, and research. Ultimately, she obtained Canadian funding for a project to help transfer knowledge about traditional Lebanese foods between the generations. Meanwhile, she enrolled part-time in the Master’s in Rural Economics Program at Université Laval in Québec City, returning to Canada for a semester of courses and taking the rest at a distance. She had already undertaken research into the relationship between diet, biodiversity, and food security: IDRC’s EcoHealth Award enabled her to finish the work.

 

Traditional Lebanese cuisine, she explains, draws on the country’s rich biodiversity, which includes thousands of endemic plant species. As such, it primarily uses fresh legumes, vegetables, and fruit. Quintessential Lebanese dishes include tabbouleh (parsley and cracked wheat salad) and hummus (chick peas and sesame paste).

 

 

Over the past four decades, however, Western style food consumption — along with urbanization — has become the pattern. In the 1950s, for example, the predominantly rural population would eat bulgur or bread made locally from hard wheat. Today, more people live in cities and eat imported soft wheat, which has less nutritional value.

 

There is increasing evidence, she points out, that the “double burden” of malnutrition and increased consumption of meat increases the risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. With so many wild edible plants in Lebanon, Hunter hypothesized that reliance on more traditional foods could improve diets and also address food insecurity, and that all of this was connected to biodiversity.

 

 

Her research was part of a larger IDRC-funded project at the American University of Beirut that sought to improve the health of rural and urban poor through the use of wild edible plants. She helped analyze data collected from 798 women and men in three villages, particularly responses relevant to her own research. Building on this data, she interviewed agriculture and trade specialists to understand the role of government in preserving biodiversity, and surveyed markets to establish the cost and availability of different “food baskets” in the communities under study.

 

Among her findings: government policy — subsidies for white bread, for example — unwittingly supports unhealthy foods. Given the lingering impact of the civil unrest, however, agricultural policy is a low priority for Lebanon. Indeed, longstanding subsidies for sugar beets, which ended only recently, were targeted more at helping farmers in strife-devastated regions than at a coherent agricultural strategy.

 

 

The potential for wild edible plants to provide healthier diets may have implications for biodiversity. “There is concern that if we promoted consumption, especially among urban people, there could be a ‘rush’ on the plants. Conservation of biodiversity and its use have to be balanced.”

 

Correlations were also found between wild edible plant consumption and food security, but “due to the small sample of food-insecure people, and the fact that we only had data from one time period, we couldn’t prove scientifically that wild edible plants help to alleviate food insecurity,” she notes. “People [with access to food] may also collect them because they’re poor. These are complex issues, and we’ve brought up questions that should be looked at further.”

 

Now based in Montréal, Elizabeth Hunter is coordinating a new oceans campaign for Greenpeace Canada, even as she completes her thesis. “We’re concerned with the extreme decline in fish stocks, especially among top predators,” she says. “That ties into food security. The growing popularity of sushi, for example, has a major impact on people who depend on tuna as their main protein source but don’t even know what sushi is. Western diets are changing people’s food security across the planet. In that sense, there is a strong connection between my thesis and what I’m doing now.”

 

 

Document(s) 8 of 11