How the Focus on Food Literacy in Ontario’s Food Charter Toolkits Detracts from Meaningful Food (In)Security Action

This article examines the uneasy relationship between the values of food security and food literacy in the context of Ontario’s local food charter discourse. It extends prior research on the competing values and incongruous community identities that food charters constitute by exploring the emerging genre of the food charter toolkit which is intended to help community members implement food charter visions. Situating our analysis within a critical review of recent work on food literacy and its association with food (in)security, we argue that toolkits articulate a superficial and ineffective approach to achieving the food charter goal of “food security for all” because they recommend mainly food literacy initiatives as the primary means for building food-secure communities. Addressed to a privileged audience of citizen-consumers who possess the socio-economic capacity to engage in the toolkits’ recommended actions at both personal and community levels, this genre problematically excludes food-insecure community members as an agentic audience. Despite the ostensible social equity goal to ensure food security for all community members, the prevalence of a neoliberal-communitarian food literacy discourse in the food charter toolkits obscures the systemic-economic causes of, and possible solutions to, food insecurity.