Let’s Talk About Food

Global Water Futures scientists Brian Laird and Kelly Skinner are working with Northern communities to understand how freshwater quality is connected to food security and human health, and how we can talk about it together.

As the world grapples with climate change and pollution, freshwater is increasingly at risk. What happens to water – including changes in its quality and availability – also has impacts on food and food security, from the plants and berries we harvest, to the fish and other animals we consume, along with broths and teas made from those sources.

Since the changes taking place on our planet can have serious impacts for human and ecosystem health, we need to talk about food. Any way you slice it, food is cultural. A diet can be intensely local, and it can be informed by generations of knowledge.

How we understand and communicate environmental changes and what they mean for food in small communities can help people adapt to new circumstances. Brian Laird and Kelly Skinner, both Associate Professors at the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences, say the topic of water is coming up increasingly as they study food security in the North.

“When you work with Northern and Indigenous communities, nothing is separate,” Laird says. “It’s one big system – food, water, health. All pieces interact with one another.”

Laird and Skinner are bringing their expertise to three projects that are part of Global Water Futures (GWF), one of the world’s largest university-led freshwater research programs. The projects involve close collaboration with ten First Nations communities across the Sahtu and Dehcho (Northwest Territories), and Mushkegowuk (northern Ontario) regions.

Collaborating to understand benefits and risks to health

While Laird and Skinner come from very different academic backgrounds, the two colleagues have a shared interest in how to evaluate and communicate public health risks, especially when it comes to climate change, pollution, and local food security.

Laird is an environmental toxicologist. “I aim to understand what exposure to contaminants such as mercury, lead, and pesticides means for human health,” he says. “To apply my research, I work with environmental scientists who study levels of contaminants in the environment, as well as social scientists who can help us understand the ways we can make our findings useful to people.”

Skinner is a social scientist. Her work looks at opportunities to support food security and health, such as access to food, its affordability, whether it is safe to eat, and how we communicate benefits and risk. “Food safety is where Brian and I intersect,” she says. “I’m also interested in the mental, cultural, and spiritual aspects of acquiring food, and the act of processing or transferring food-related knowledges and skills through generations.”

Together, the team’s work has impacts at different scales, Laird explains. At a local scale, they’re helping address questions and concerns from Northern, and oftentimes remote, communities. In one project, they looked at how environmental monitoring results describing contaminant levels in fish and the environment are communicated to protect and promote community health.

“Our work showed that even though environmental scientists found mercury in fish in some lakes, for the most part, the level of mercury in people’s bodies had remained far below those known to cause health problems,” he says. “We were able to provide reassurance to communities regarding their food safety.”

At the territorial scale, the team also provides guidance for best practices to policy makers about how to communicate results from environmental monitoring studies. “We want to make government aware of any risks, but we also want to minimize unintended consequences when we find that the exposure is lower than what would cause serious health effects,” Laird says.

At the international level, the team is also working closely with partners regarding the effectiveness of environmental monitoring programs that are focused on contaminants, and the processes used to document exposure. “The best long-term solution isn’t telling people what they can or cannot eat; rather, it’s to work at lowering emission levels in the first place,” he says.

Building a common language

Food and culture go hand in hand. As a result, communities have their own ways of harvesting, and talking about, food. Throughout GWF, the researchers learned about the importance of developing a common language. “Communicating scientific language can be daunting and it doesn’t always translate directly into local languages or ways of knowing,” Laird says. “When we’re talking about food security, a shared terminology can be essential.”

While working in the Sahtu region, for example, the research team learned that the terms they were using either did not have an equivalent word in the local language or when the terms were translated into local languages, they sometimes lost their intended meaning, he explains. There were different cultural understandings of “risk” – for example, a toxicologist thinks about risk differently than a community harvester.

Laird shared that in one of the communities, there was no word for “contaminant” in the way the research team was using it. Rather, it had been translated into the phrase “something that can kill you.”

“This was not our intent, and it did not properly define what we wanted to share about exposure,” he says. From the scientific perspective, he adds, many contaminants won’t have a health impact if below a certain threshold. A misunderstanding of the term contaminant could cause harm and scare people needlessly.

To resolve the language barrier, the team worked together with the community, translators, and knowledge holders to develop terms that could bridge these perspectives and build a common understanding.

“Together we redefined ‘contaminant’ into the local language as ‘something that gets into something else.’ This definition is much more precise,” he says. “It allowed us to talk about levels of contamination and related risks. It was not so black and white.”

Redefining research

Skinner says the team is also changing the way scientists communicate with community leadership and members. “The academic approach has evolved in recent years,” she says. “Previously, the focus was publishing journal articles and long reports. Today, we work collaboratively with our partners to turn our research into messages that are more accessible and useful to the community. There is real value in using accessible language, visuals, and graphics.”

The team also thought more about who should share messages with the community and how they should share them. “We work together as partners. As such, we recognize that our UW team is comprised of invited experts, not long-standing community leaders. The people who share messages with the broader community do not have to be scientists or researchers,” she says. “They could be trusted leaders or Elders, for instance. The key is to deliver clear and relevant messages through preferred mediums or outlets from trusted sources.”

Skinner says this critical work has benefitted from multi-year funding through GWF. “Traditional research funding models result in extreme peaks and valleys. GWF allowed us to build continuity and trust in the communities where we work. We can grow and maintain relationships because we can be regular visitors and committed partners.”

That continuity – and access to a broad network of experts from different disciplines – also supports the idea that water, food, and health are part of a bigger system.

“When we return each year, our partners almost always ask us new questions about changes in their environment. If these questions are outside of our expertise, we can tap into our GWF network for help,” Laird says.

Skinner provides an example. “If the community has a question about why fish are declining in a river, we can connect with our fish biologist colleagues,” she says. “This is the value of an interdisciplinary team.” Laird adds: “Previously, if the questions were out of the scope of our experience, we might have seemed like we were being dismissive.”

Furthermore, both researchers feel they’ve gained new perspectives by working across disciplines. “Learning from my colleagues about how permafrost thaw and forest regeneration impacts food and water gave me opportunities to think about and understand the system more holistically,” Skinner says.

Laird adds that they also benefited from partnering with knowledge users within community, regional, and federal government.

Making an impact

The team’s work informed decisions made by the Government of the Northwest Territories Department of Health and Social Services on how to approach the communication of environmental monitoring results for the public. For example, instead of communicating results site-by-site, reporting on a precise number of fish that could be safely eaten from each of those 10 lakes, they developed one general set of messages that could be applied within the region.

“They moved towards general advice that cuts across water bodies,” says Laird. “This is helpful because it helps builds consistency in how such results are communicated across lakes and regions. Consistency is a key for building understanding while maintaining trust.”

The two researchers are also part of the Arctic Monitoring & Assessment Programme, one of six Working Groups of the Arctic Council. “We’re seeing common work on dietary transition and specific contaminants, as well as how benefits and risk are being communicated in northern regions globally. It’s great to have the chance to work with an international group of researchers who are doing work in other circumpolar countries,” says Skinner.