In this talk, Dr. Lesley Frank (’95) will share insights contained in her new book, Out of Milk: Infant food Insecurity in a Rich Nation – the origins of which began as questions she grappled with working as a prenatal/postnatal outreach worker in the Annapolis Valley – a position she took up shortly after graduating from Acadia University.

Out of Milk reveals the experiences of mothers struggling to feed their children and the policy gaps that put babies at risk of going hungry in a high-income nation. Three storylines will be shared: 1) how breastfeeding is experienced as a food security strategy; 2) how structural inequities render breastfeeding a non-sustainable food system; and 3) the struggle to afford infant formula - leading to forage for formula from charity and social media platforms.

Dr. Frank will also share her plans to address urgent knowledge and measurement gaps on family and early childhood food insecurity in her new position as Acadia’s Tier II Canada Research Chair in Food, Health, and Social Justice.   

Speaker Bio

Dr. Lesley Frank

Dr. Lesley Frank is Acadia University’s new Canada Research Chair in Food, Health, and Social Justice. She is a leading scholar of family poverty and food insecurity, and author of Out of Milk: Infant Food Insecurity in a Rich Nation (UBC Press 2020). Her work has been featured on CBC’s The Current, and she is a regular media commentator locally on matters related to family poverty. She is a long-standing author of the annual Child and Family Poverty Report Card for Nova Scotia. Preceding her academic career, she spent several years providing prenatal services and family resource support to women living in low-income circumstances in the Annapolis Valley.  She has a BA (’89) from University of Kings College; MA (’95), Acadia University; and PhD (’13), University of New Brunswick.

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