Portrait of a researcher
Food insecurity: A crisis situation
Malek Batal
FACULTY OF MEDICINE - DEPARTMENT OF NUTRITION
Full Professor, Faculty of Medicine -
Accredited Member, School of Public Health -
Malek Batal was born in Lebanon and came to Canada in 1993 with a bachelor鈥檚 degree in human nutrition and dietetics and a master鈥檚 degree in food science from the American University of Beirut. Like many landed immigrants, he had a difficult time getting recognition for his credentials. But three years later, he was working on a Ph.D. in human nutrition at McGill University and celebrating his 30th birthday in a Yellowknife bar.
鈥淎t first, it was quite a change to be at the end of the world studying the traditional foods of the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon and of Denendeh in the Northwest Territories,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut I love learning about cultures and I鈥檓 sensitive to political issues and social justice.鈥� During the years he spent travelling across the vast Far North, he had two car accidents, fell in love with the 鈥渆nd of the world鈥� and became an authority on the food challenges facing First Nations, caught between ancestral practices and the siren call of modernity.
His work has also taken him to the antithesis of Yellowknife: to Ecuador, Haiti, Africa and Belgium. Since 2014, Batal has been the director of , a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Nutrition Changes and Development. 鈥淩apid dietary changes in developing countries are causing increases in obesity and diabetes, and spreading the multiple plagues of malnutrition: anemia, vitamin A deficiency, stunted growth in children,鈥� he says. Since 2020, Batal has also held the .
You鈥檙e sounding the alarm about rising food insecurity.
I became aware of it while participating in a large-scale 10-year study, from 2008 to 2018, in 92 First Nations communities. It found that half of the households suffer from food insecurity, much higher than the Canadian average. Food insecurity has become a global problem, driven by globalization, industrialization and dumping.* This is very worrisome for all countries that depend on imports for their food. The situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic and can only get worse with climate change.
* Selling a product on a foreign market at below the domestic price, sometimes even below cost.
Are you personally very strict about what you eat?
I鈥檓 very strict about the taste. I don鈥檛 like processed, manipulated foods that no longer resemble 鈥渞eal鈥� food. It is a major social problem. Food is contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem and of agricultural land. In Quebec, we see endless fields of corn and soybeans that are being grown for animal feed or for export, at the expense of family farming and the preservation of the rural landscape.
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