NEWSLETTER #2
FOOD POLICY LAB | JUNE 2021
MESSAGE FROM THE PI
SOURDOUGH STORIES
Last month, we introduced our lab Deep Dive, the alternate-week internal workshop series that we use at our online lab meetings.
Deep Dive is about research skill development, and career development, as craft. Deep Dive lifts up and places value in peer learning and reflexive practice. They are one of the ways in which we turn what could be a solo, siloed, ever more narrow and expert endeavour (i.e., a graduate degree, a professional practicum, a project grant) into teamwork, by a community. They are about how science always represents a collective achievement.
I don’t lead them all—only a select few—and I don’t come up with the curriculum. That’s a group-sourced effort too.
I love Deep Dive. We talk shop. We do skills training. Trainees and staff alike present work in progress, and thesis updates. It’s built-in public speaking practice. The style of the presentation is ever changing, and always engaging. In the debrief, we share stories. We muse about what the dreaded ‘Reviewer Number 1’ could have possibly been thinking. Somebody brings up Thomas Kuhn, and somebody else pokes fun at him and his men of science. We blame #federalism. We debate how to future-proof against precarity in academic work, and bring up the latest study on unconscious bias in evaluation of our work (there is always one). We reflect on the enormous freedom and power in asking questions for a living.
Stay tuned for more each month as we spotlight one of our Deep Dive topics in the newsletter.
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This month, we’re making sourdough.
Each year as one of the Deep Dives, I run a CV bootcamp. At bootcamp, I use the analogy of a sourdough starter to explain how I keep a working curriculum vitae master file. I use it as the basis for every time I need to write about my career, or create CVs for a functional purpose like a grant or an annual report. No one else sees the master file, but it constantly gets fed with fresh new inputs.
It captures the ‘big things’: every paper, every grant, yes, but also every bit and bob of the ‘things that make the things’: consultations, talks small and large, group facilitation, committee involvements, meetings, contributions to a community events. Non-academic writing. These things are added immediately as they arrive on my calendar and in my email. This is not the CV that gets shared, but when I am ready to craft a finished ‘loaf’, I scoop the right elements from my starter, at the right degree of maturity and completion, and use them as a basis to write about myself, and to prepare other CVs for specific purposes.
The CV starter needs care. Things get discarded. It takes energy and new inputs to make it a full expression of my work at any given time. But one thing is for sure. It tastes ever better as the craft of my colleagues, students, and lab members’ careers is interwoven into mine. I’m also continually learning how to use it in other forms, to suit an ever greater variety of finished products.
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What else are we cooking up?
We talked to CBC Newfoundland and Labrador about what rural stores mean for health. Emily shares more about our latest Healthy Stores NL project in the Project Spotlight.
In the Researcher Spotlight, Gabriella explains what we know—and don’t know—about the cost of a healthy diet in Canada, and how a PhD can happen somewhere in the sweet spot between a supportive environment, statistical code, and great baked goods.
Ryan shares some of his past research on legislation to address household food insecurity in the Deep Dive. Gabriella and Ryan’s work both connect to the longer trajectory of our lab’s involvement with the PROOF research program based at the University of Toronto, led by Dr. Valerie Tarasuk and Dr. Lynn McIntyre, respectively. It is clear that these dynamic mentors and trailblazers have inspired generations of researchers (see, sourdough!), work that is only growing in importance as we begin to grasp the health equity impacts of the pandemic.
Gabriella is also collaborating with Maria to lead a series of Infographic resources for facilitators. Our goal is to help you (sourdough?) start a conversation on food, health, equity, and the environmental and policy determinants of diet and consumption, just like we might at one of our lab meetings. This month, we introduce the first of a set on regional variation in diets in Canada, on vegetables—just in time for a summer of our favourite local produce.
Plus, we couldn’t leave you without an actual sourdough Recipe. This one is contributed by our resident ‘California baker’ and CIHR Health System Impact Fellow, Rebecca.
-Make more sourdough, share it with your friends,
Cathy
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: FOOD FIRST NL
The Healthy Corner Stores NL project is graciously funded by the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada. We’re hoping to better understand retailer factors that influence the retail food environment, and by extension, diets and health.
With the onset of COVID-19, we’ve reorganized the flow of the project and are beginning with a set of retailer interviews this summer. This reorganization has also helped us see where we could fill added research gaps through our fieldwork. Following the interviews, we intend to develop a survey and an accompanying Store Environment Assessment audit that can be completed by retail owners and managers across Newfoundland and Labrador, from large-scale supermarkets and convenience stores, to gas station and multi-licensed food retail establishments.
Newfoundland and Labrador is an essential place for research to illuminate the nuances of food retail practices in rural and remote communities, but also to understand how the large forces in our food system and food policies play out at the local level. We know that even in many rural and remote places, people purchase most of their food and beverages from retail food businesses. We’re excited to learn more about how we could better promote health through the price, promotion, and placement of products from the retailer perspective.
-Emily
RESEARCHER SPOTLIGHT: GABRIELLA LUONGO
Gabriella is a PhD in Health student at Dalhousie and a member of the Food Policy Lab. She advocates for the development of healthy public policies and population level interventions as methods for reducing tobacco and poor diet based non-communicable diseases. She holds a CIHR Doctoral Research Award, a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship and a Scotia Scholar Award (Doctoral). In this interview, we discuss the life cycle of a PhD Health student, Gabriella’s doctoral research, surviving burnout and the subtle differences between the east and west coast food environments. We caught up with Gabriella over zoom.
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Can you tell us about your thesis topic?
Gabriella: My thesis is looking at the association between diet cost and dietary intake. There is an assumption that the more money you spend towards food, the better your diet quality is and there is a body of literature that supports that thinking. What I’m suggesting is the methods used to assign prices to diet can be improved. If we do a better job of assigning prices to intake, there might be a change in that relationship. This type of research has been conducted largely in the United States and France but has yet to be done in Canada. Regardless of the outcome, I think it will be interesting to see how the association plays out with Canadian data.
….
deep dive: legislation debated as responses to household food insecurity in canada, 1995-2012
McIntyre L, Lukic R, Patterson PB, Anderson LC, Mah CL. Legislation debated as responses to household food insecurity in Canada, 1995–2012. Journal of Hunger & Environmental Nutrition. 2016 Oct 1;11(4):441-55. https://doi.org/10.1080/19320248.2016.1157551
Household food insecurity is a persistent problem in Canada that continues to have an impact on nutrition and overall health of millions of Canadians—in recent estimates even before the pandemic, 1 in 8 households, and up to 1 in 5 households with children in Atlantic Canada. Experts and advocates working in food insecurity have argued that it is in many instances a direct consequence of policy actions, and that specific policies are needed to address the serious impact of food insecurity on people’s lives and health.
In 2015, I worked on a study with Cathy and Dr. Lynn McIntyre as part of the PROOF research program. We aimed to identify the policy actions that Canadian legislators had advanced to address food insecurity for nearly two decades.
The study tracked policy recommendations made by lawmakers in British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario, and the federal government, from 1995-2012; examined which suggestions led to legislation; and examined the implications of each bill for reducing food insecurity.
We used Hansard record extracts from legislative debates to identify specific policy proposals as a starting point for finding bills, and found that legislators debated a wide variety of policy possibilities. However, proposals that made it partially or fully through the legislative process were from a narrow range that almost exclusively focused on food provision, despite our ample evidence base that food insecurity is a problem of economic access to food in Canada.
Nearly twenty years—how many bills do you think we found? Out of 1,025 Hansard passages where legislators recommended policy action to address food insecurity, we found just ten bills. 10! And of these, only four received royal assent.
The majority of bills focused on increasing the volume of food donated to food banks, either by removing liability on the part of the donors, or incentivizing donations through tax credits. Other bills focused on food safety and labelling, though were argued to help address hunger. In general, our political representatives agreed that food insecurity was fundamentally an issue of inadequate income and poverty—but presented solutions that further encouraged charitable actions (food banks), rather than a substantive public policy commitment to alleviating the problem of a lack of economic security in our society.
-Ryan
INFOGRAPHIC
Are you a graduate student in nutrition or health policy?
Faculty member teaching health research methods?
Community organizer that wants to bring evidence to a public meeting to inform food systems discussion?
This is the first in a series of conversation-starter infographics we will release in conjunction with the newsletter. Our first set looks at regional variation in Canadians’ diets. This month, we use the 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey-Nutrition (CCHS-N) to investigate vegetable consumption among adults by province. This survey is a high quality, population-representative Statistics Canada product, and is only the 2nd national nutrition survey Canada has ever completed; the first was in 2004.
The CCHS-N is part of the CCHS program by Statistics Canada, but is a separate survey from the main CCHS. The goal is to produce reliable information about dietary intake so we can ask ever better research questions about the determinants of diet, and inform programs and policy. The target population is Canadians aged 1 year and older living in private households in the ten provinces, which means it excludes certain populations such as those living in institutional settings, the territories, and on-reserve. The survey is cross-sectional (a slice in time), based on a multistage sampling strategy that takes into account age, sex, geography, and socioeconomic status.
In the infographic below, we looked at interprovincial variation in vegetable intake. We suggest you use the infographic in conjunction with Canada’s Food Guide. Potential starting questions to ask yourself and peers:
What could the differences in vegetable intakes across provinces suggest about Canadian food environments?
What might the top vegetable sources by province suggest about the Canadian food supply?
-Gabriella and Maria
To save this infographic, first click on it - this will take you to a new webpage. Then right click on the graphic and choose “Save image as..” Select your desired location on your computer and save!
what’s cooking at FPL: Stay at home sourdough
I started making sourdough after I was gifted ‘discard’ from a foodie friend and food ethics researcher during her postdoctoral fellowship examining the social determinants of guaranteed income with the Stanford Basic Income Lab. I honed my recipe during California’s stay at home order in a mini-kitchen using a kitchen scale and a toaster oven.
The heart of sourdough is the starter. Some celebrated starters are passed down over generations. You can find starter from someone in your community, at your local farmers market, or get one started from scratch with this recipe.
Once you have a starter going, here is my tried and true simple-ish recipe (and timing) adapted from the following recipe video.
I use a covered cast-iron Dutch oven to bake the bread, which traps steam inside and helps make a nice crispy crust.
Sourdough is like science: you can follow the right steps, but sometimes need trial and error to get that ‘aha’ moment.
-Rebecca
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RECIPE
If you store your starter in the fridge, begin to feed it a few days before you bake. For each feeding, discard all but 1/2 cup of the starter and add equal parts water and flour.
Day 1 (takes approximately 5 hours with rest time)
Starting in the late afternoon or early eve, mix 200 grams (~ 1 cup) of sourdough, 400 grams (~1 3/4 cups) of water and 600 grams (~ 3 3/4 cups) of flour. Mix with hands or wooden spoon until you get a loosely formed ball.
Rest for 30 minutes.
Add 12 grams (~ 1.5 tbsp) of salt and a splash of water.
Knead dough for 10 minutes. Rebecca’s favourite method is to throw (as if swatting a bug), fold and repeat.
Let sit covered in a warm environment for 4 hours.
Drop dough on a floured countertop. Fold the dough over itself, turn 45 degrees and repeat until you have formed a tight ball.
Lightly flour a tea towel lined bowl, or if you want to level up, banneton. Dust with flour and cover with towel. Leave overnight in fridge.
Day 2
Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Heat your Dutch oven in the oven as it reaches the cooking temperature.
Flip dough from bowl or banneton onto a floured surface.
Score the bread with a sharp knife or razor blade (an exacto knife gets the best designs). Let your creativity soar with the scoring.
Remove your preheated Dutch oven from the big oven, and place sourdough inside. Spray your loaf with a water bottle or sprinkle with water to create steam for cooking (watch out! hot steam!), then place the lid of the pot back on.
Bake for 20 minutes with lid on, and 20 minutes with lid off.
Let the bread rest and cool on its side or on a rack for at least 1-2h before cutting. It’s hard to wait when it smells so good, but I promise, it will be worth it.
Most importantly, don’t worry if your bread doesn’t look like Instagram (post it anyway, because you made bread, yay!) With enough time in the steps above (depends on your room temperature and humidity, and it’s colder in much of Canada than California!), if you liked making it and you have something to eat with your friends, then it was a success!
Congratulations to…
Korede, who was accepted into the Master’s of Applied Health Services Research program at Saint Mary’s University.
Ryan, who was awarded the Scotia Scholars PhD Scholarship on admission to the PhD in Health program at Dalhousie University.
