Food Insecurity in an Overlooked Subpopulation - An Ethnographic and Autoethnographic Enquiry


Nicole Pasloski, University of Saskatchewan

Food insecurity has become a growing issue for many Canadian subpopulations. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in March of 2020, countless Canadian food-insecure households and individuals were not able to use previously relied-upon services or practises to ease their struggles with food insecurity due to a variety of societal, logistical, economic and public health factors. This case study focuses on post-secondary students as one disproportionately affected subgroup and uses a critical ethnographic approach paired with an autoethnographic lens to explore these experiences. The researcher combined two methods in order to portray a clearer and more in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. Drawing on one-on-one interviews and interrogation of her own lived experiences, the researcher draws out the complex, comingled, and often painful realities of food insecurity in the lives of university students. Participants’ struggles to obtain sustenance and their compulsion to minimize the difficulties they face is explored through discussion matters that uniquely affect post-secondary students at the University of Saskatchewan. Combining these intimate interviews with the first-person contribution of the researcher who also struggles with food insecurity resulted in not only an additive but a multiplicative enrichment to the analysis and depth of understanding. The author is incredibly adept at household food management due to her previous years of experience as a restaurateur and professional cook. This perspective offers unique understanding of food systems and economics, and this view paired with personal experience as a single mother and student make for a compelling narrative around an often shame-filled subject. The interviewees offered open and abundant views into their distressing experiences struggling with food access during a difficult period in history and painted something of a dismal picture for future students. Combining these one-on-one interviews with autoethnographic inquiry also attempts to lift some of the stigma attached to food insecurity, and to open up the conversation with the reader in a non-anonymous way. However, amidst the critiques they offer of structural barriers, neglect, and inadequate supports, the participants and the researcher are hopeful, and proffer ideas on how to make changes that could improve the food security of future cohorts of post-secondary students. Economic organization and social norms have framed food insecurity, and more broadly, poverty, as a personal failing. However, over time as more education achieves less financial stability, individual food security impacts generations’ choices to continue higher education, which in turn will impact the face of the Canadian labour force. While typical inflation affects Canadians at the grocery store on an average year, the rate of inflation since 2020 has gone beyond typical and has ascended to profit-driven price-gouging. Experiences of struggles relating to food insecurity are becoming more common, and affecting more individuals than ever before, creating a wider gap in income equality, namely among groups who are already faced with adversity like new Canadians, Indigenous populations, single parents, and those with permanent health restrictions.

This paper will be presented at the following session: