Abstract

There has been considerable growth in research on food insecurity as the pervasiveness of hunger and food poverty has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Knowledge of the food management practices utilized by poor and/or homeless women can shed light on their resilience in the face of poverty. However, there is a gap in knowledge as few studies have assessed food-insecure women’s coping strategies as essential indicators of their capabilities for dealing with food insecurity in different geographic contexts. The utilization of specific food management strategies may assist women to mitigate their experiences of food insecurity, to survive, and to show resistance and resilience. The current study addresses this gap in knowledge from an intersectional lens. A purposive sampling technique was utilized to recruit twenty women from different agency premises and sites in a Northeastern and a Southwestern city in Ontario. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted and thematically analyzed. The findings revealed that various practices are used by women in food-insecure households in both Southwestern and Northeastern Ontario, but they are still hardly able to make ends meet. The findings of the current study have implications for the development of locally informed, vulnerability-based best practice guidelines that are geographically linked, and that foster resistance and resilience to mitigate women’s food insecurity in different geographical contexts.