Malek Batal was born in Lebanon and came to Canada in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in human nutrition and dietetics and a master’s degree in food science from the American University of Beirut. Like many landed immigrants, he had a difficult time getting recognition for his credentials. But three years later, he was working on a Ph.D. in human nutrition at McGill University and celebrating his 30th birthday in a Yellowknife bar.

“At first, it was quite a change to be at the end of the world studying the traditional foods of the Indigenous peoples of the Yukon and of Denendeh in the Northwest Territories,” he says. “But I love learning about cultures and I’m sensitive to political issues and social justice.” During the years he spent travelling across the vast Far North, he had two car accidents, fell in love with the “end of the world” and became an authority on the food challenges facing First Nations, caught between ancestral practices and the siren call of modernity.

His work has also taken him to the antithesis of Yellowknife: to Ecuador, Haiti, Africa and Belgium. Since 2014, Batal has been the director of TRANSNUT, a World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Nutrition Changes and Development. “Rapid dietary changes in developing countries are causing increases in obesity and diabetes, and spreading the multiple plagues of malnutrition: anemia, vitamin A deficiency, stunted growth in children,” he says. Since 2020, Batal has also held the Canada Research Chair in Nutrition and Health Inequalities.