Do healthy food baskets assess food security?

Developing indicators to measure the different facets of food security presents numerous conceptual and methodological challenges. This paper adopts an ecological framework to reflect on these issues through an examination of the Healthy Food Basket (HFB) tool. The HFB tool is used to measure food security conditions by determining the cost and availability of a group of foods in a shopping basket across a range of stores in different regions and neighbourhoods. The paper discusses the ability of the HFB tool to describe micro-, meso- and macro-level influences on food security and the use of the ecological model in developing complementary and alternative strategies for understanding and monitoring food security.