Contemporary food policy often focuses on "downstream" elements of the food system, particularly the roles and responsibilities of individual members of a consuming public. For example, to address the effects of food and beverage advertising on child health, in the absence of widespread agreement on the most appropriate form of collective action, policy debate has tended to revolve around moral reasoning about how children should behave and interact with the world around them. In this paper, we attempt to broaden this debate by sharing results from in-depth interviews (n=35) carried out as part of our Food Advertising to Children: Ethics for Policy study, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. We will discuss how "food citizenship" can be viewed not only in terms of consumption roles (e.g. children's behaviour), but the expectations for participation embedded within policy actor roles (e.g. health professionals, "government" broadly defined). Such framing is important for how diverse policy actors understand and incorporate citizenship into their practices. Whether health professionals are construed as only "program delivery agents", for example, or active citizens, can affect their power to influence policy processes; it also conditions the range of policy options deemed suitable for public debate.