Dr Halfon Food Security Summary

At this seminar Dr. Halfon presented information on food security. He started off by informing us he was going to be taking into account the way food security lives in the real world, the way that it is used and how it encounters different people in their lives. Food security is a concept of security, but what does security mean? Security implies some form of protection. So now we must ask the question whose security is being defended, how, and why? Asking this question in this way moves us from a managerial approach of food security, to a political approach. Politics, in this context, is a struggle over power in a sense, because some people win and some people lose. He tells us to pay close attention though to who is winning and who is losing, …show more content…
He explains that each scale has very different implications depending on which kind of food security is being discussed. National scale has a lot of implications. Historically, national scale food security comes from a particular conception of what it means to secure food for the nation and focuses on issues of production and caloric intake. The problem with a production focused notion of food security is that it tends to lead to various forms of insecurity elsewhere. In order to produce food efficiently and in a way that is stable and secure we tend to push towards large scale agricultural production. So we end up with families that end up not having the means to afford the food at all. So national level food security can lead to family level insecurity or insufficiently and likewise caloric sufficiency often gives way to nutritional deficiency of various sorts. This sends us to individual level food securities. Dr.Halfon explains the problem with individual level food security, which is that it is nutritionally focused. While nutritionally focused helps us to secure healthy bodies, it doesn’t always address questions surrounding control of production, commodity change and questions of cultural appropriateness. Culture is often at risk of being seen as a problem to fix rather than a system to be healthy and secure within. This points us to the possibility of community food …show more content…
We talk about food security a lot on this major and I knew what the definition was, but I had never thought if it at many different scales and in these different ways. Is food security focusing on food quality or food quantity? This is all very important information, and I believe it is important for us, as up and coming RD’s, to start thinking about this kind of stuff, because we will be talking to clients that may be food secure but may not feel as though they are, and by what definition are we to go by when thinking about this kind of