Dr. Valerie Tarasuk will discuss the scale of household food insecurity in Canada and the evidence of its impact on health and health care spending. Drawing on several recent studies by PROOF, she will unpack the relationship between problems of food insecurity and public policy decisions in Canada, highlighting some promising directions for more effective, evidence-based responses.

Dr. Valerie Tarasuk will be receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen's University at the convocation ceremony on 1 June, 2018. Dr. Tarasuk is a Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.  Her research extends to Canadian food policy, but her primary focus has been household food insecurity. Her ground-breaking work in this area has included several studies to examine the effectiveness of community-based responses, including food banks and charitable meal programs.  Most recently, she has led PROOF, an interdisciplinary research program funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and designed to identify effective policy approaches to reduce household food insecurity in Canada