“Oh, lookit!
“There’s corn. We haven’t had corn yet.”
Dr. Catherine L. Mah, holder of the Canada Research Chair in Promoting Healthy Populations at Dalhousie University, gets positively giddy strolling around the Halifax Seaport Farmers’ Market.
So it’s probably not a coincidence that her lab’s research examines how our environments and public policies affect our diets.
“We’re pioneering the combination, but this is absolutely building on a huge body of nutrition work and policy research,” said Mah during a weekday morning visit to the market.
“I think it’s really, really interesting, the topics that we cover or how we cover them when we talk about healthy eating.
“If we talk about access to healthy food and we think about food policies and community environments — are our neighbourhoods organized in the best way, do our workplaces promote health, our school cafeterias — that’s obviously a very different lens we bring to solving a problem.”
Mah grew up in Alberta and said she had been thinking at a young age about the food supply and how goods are consumed in Canada.
“Sometime in late elementary school I wrote my first letter to the editor of the paper. It was at the time before the Newfoundland cod moratorium, and things were heating up a little bit with France and with trade,” she said.
“I don’t think there was a linear path between then and now, but when I think back, I think that obviously kind of captured my attention when I was in school.”
Access to healthy eating
Mah leads the Food Policy Lab at Dalhousie. She’s lived in Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as southern Ontario, and the stops have informed her thinking about food policy.
“What really interests me is what are the disparities in people’s access to food across those various environments,” she said.
“This is really an issue in Atlantic Canada especially. We have a really high rural population compared to other jurisdictions in Canada.”
She frames the results of some of her projects in real-world terms that had practical outcomes. In Toronto, researchers worked on a healthy corner store initiative that included group-buying plans for small independent retailers. The effort was replicated in a community about two hours outside St. John’s, she said.
“I think it’s evidence to inform policy. It’s very real solutions that we’re talking about,” Mah said.
“Our food system has gotten really skewed over time. There are fewer companies; it’s more vertically consolidated.
“Small stores have a lot of trouble in some communities accessing the regular food distribution system that a big grocery store chain would be able to access.”
She also provided feedback during the formulation of the latest version of Canada’s Food Guide, released this year. She praised the new one as science-based and free of food industry lobbying.
“We’re on our seventh or eighth iteration. It’s obviously changed over time, in terms of the process for developing it,” said Mah.
“Ultimately, over 400 pieces of credible evidence went into the food guide that link the relationships between nutrients in food and individual and public health.”
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Mah sees visits to farmers markets as a way to fit the guide into the household shopping.
“This is a good place to come to think about how we can incorporate more vegetables in our diet, which the new Canada food guide really promotes,” she said.
“Farmers markets are amazing because they’re multi-faceted community spaces where food is at the centre.”
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