We should approach it in terms of what I call resilience. On the economic, social and environmental fronts, this would provide the food system and the players in the food chain with mechanisms that would be triggered in the event of an emergency.
As you said, we are talking about a few days. The same is true for the city of Ottawa; we are talking about four or five days. If food were no longer delivered to the cities, we would have to make do with the food we had at home. But most people would not have enough.
This year, I prepared a status report about food. I looked at whether people were ready for this possibility. More than half of Canadians would have food for only one day in the event of an emergency.
Food security is important in the short term and in critical moments. You talked about nutritional security, but the term “food security” is more exact. Food security is the availability of food, the physical, economic and cultural access to food, and its use. Resilience supports those three pillars, if I can put it that way. Those tools are there in the long term as well.
Of course the army and the Red Cross could be a solution, but in the case of a city of several million people, only certain areas would be served. The entire population must be able to build community food security, which would also be supported by a national policy.