Below are highlights from our interview with Urshila Sriram
Read the full conversation.

Dr. Urshila Sriram from the Simmons University Department of Nutrition joined us for an insightful conversation on the vital link between community nutrition and public health and what it may look like to have food security for everyone.

Tell us a little bit about your educational journey and how your public health studies lead to you pursuing your PhD in community nutrition. 

During my MPH I had a chance to do a practicum with a professor at the University of Toronto focused on food insecurity in Toronto, where I grew up. We looked at household-level determinants of food insecurity, trying to map rates of food insecurity across different cities in Canada to see how much was related to housing costs versus other costs. I had the chance to work with folks that did policy around food insecurity and go to conferences with practitioners and clinicians. It was a really nice way to integrate research with practice, and I realized I wanted to keep going. That’s what drew me to my PhD program in community nutrition, which in my mind, still has so many elements of public health and why I’m still interested in public health more broadly.

Could you speak to some of your experiences working with professionals with different backgrounds to put your heads together to understand and address these issues?

My master's practicum was my first introduction to that type of work. I came into it feeling very new, but it was fascinating to meet other researchers in the food insecurity space. They were part of an interdisciplinary research group called PROOF, which focused on policy options related to food insecurity. It was interesting to hear how the researchers and policymakers part of the group thought about their research. I started to see the connections and how people applied the work beyond publishing papers in hopes that practitioners will see and use them.

How does your background and personal knowledge of Canadian society inform your teaching and research now, especially regarding different approaches to social support systems for issues like food insecurity? 

That’s something I think about a lot...What surprised me when learning about the U.S. system is that Canada doesn't have federal programs like SNAP or WIC. There really is no federal network of nutrition programs in Canada. It's up to provinces and cities to create programs and resources. Even programs like school lunch and breakfast, we didn't have that going through public school in Canada...There’s a strong charitable food network, which has pros and cons. I think that's why there's even more of a push towards larger policy changes, like a livable income, so that everyone has their own ability to purchase the food they need.

Could you talk about your current research and interests around food security?

Campus food security is something that resonates with so many of us who have been students. The high cost of education, particularly in the U.S., sets many people up to not have adequate access to resources like food. A lot of my research interests are centered around improving access to nutrition and food resources, all falling under that food security umbrella.

What are some of the biggest barriers to food security that you've encountered in your work that you would eliminate if you could…if you could create a utopia where food insecurity isn’t an issue?

The more I've learned, the more I come back to a basic liveable income. I think that ends up being the root of affordability and access, not just to food, but to all resources that everyone should have access to...In an ideal world, we would also have unlimited funding for community organizations to keep doing the essential work they do. Ideally, there wouldn’t be a need to distribute food resources specifically, because everyone would be able to acquire them in different ways. But there is certainly a need for the educational initiatives, community gardens, and other programs that these organizations provide, which increase food access while also offering social and community benefits...So, I think a basic livable income and adequate funding for community organizations are the two key things. Together, they would hopefully give everybody the variety of access to food that they would want and need.