Allyson Proulx wants people to know that she and Andy Cadotte do not speak for all of the volunteers in Forest City Food Not Bombs. They are just two people in a collective looking to create change in London, Ontario.

Forest City Food Not Bombs is a volunteer collective addressing food insecurity, poverty, and homelessness by providing free meals to those in need. On the last Saturday of every month, the group shares free soup with the London community. All of the soup is handmade by volunteers, using food that would otherwise be thrown out or freshly grown vegetables donated by Urban Roots London. Initially, they set up a table at London’s downtown Victoria Park for people to pick up their meals. But when volunteers saw how few people showed up in the winter, they started going mobile, hand-delivering food to encampments along the Deshkan Ziibi.

“Food Not Bombs, for me, is mutual aid…We’re not a charity,” says Proulx, who has volunteered with the group since the summer of 2023. “We’re not just ‘going to feed homeless people’, it’s ‘how do we work with people who are unhoused?’”

The Forest City group is one of many Food Not Bombs chapters worldwide. The U.S.-born collective was started in 1980 by a group of anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each Food Not Bombs group is a completely independent organization that operates according to their community’s needs. The groups are non-hierarchical, meaning that there are no leaders—everybody is a volunteer.

Previous iterations of London Food Not Bombs groups existed in 2008 and 2012, but fizzled out due to activists moving cities and pursuing different projects over the years. The current London chapter started in June 2023 by a crew of activists who were interested in seeing a movement like this come back to the city. “It’s such a powerful, beautiful thing to feed one another on multiple levels, like spiritually, emotionally, intellectually,” Proulx says.

In 2023, between 1,700 to 2,100 people were unhoused in London, according to a “snapshot” published by the city earlier this year. The data comes from the City of London’s “By-Name List,” which allows them to track the changing size and composition of their unhoused population. Over 350 people lived completely unsheltered, meaning they never stayed in emergency housing. In November 2023, there were 103 active encampments. This was the highest number of active encampments during the year, though it does not reflect the total number of tents in 2023.

“The thing about London is that everybody knows everybody,” says Cadotte, a current volunteer who was also part of the 2008 group. “There’s a real opportunity to come together as a community and decide a different path to take in our lives, rather than keep pursuing this path of capitalism.”

Cadotte and Proulx both say that the size of London and its geographic layout helps activism thrive. People live and work in close proximity with each other—plus, they are sharing similar lived experiences as working Canadians. “We’re all together in the sandbox,” says Cadotte.

Proulx also points to the land which London’s activism happens on. “The land itself dictates the activism on the land,” they say. “[There is] Deshkan Ziibi—the river that we live along—the nations that are here, the knowledge that we gained from them about what it means to decolonize and what it means to be in relationship with the food that grows from the land.”

On top of end-of-month meal services, Forest City Food Not Bombs has become a mainstay at advocacy events in the city, standing in solidarity and providing food in the process. As crowds filled the steps outside London City Hall to protest a proposed police budget increase in February or took to the streets of downtown London as part of ongoing Palestinian resistance, Forest City Food Not Bombs set up a plastic folding table with a cardboard sign advertising “free soup.”

Most recently, Food Not Bombs volunteers stood at the front gates of London’s Western University alongside striking graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). GTAs, represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada Local 610, are seeking a livable wage in the context of the maximum 10 hours per week they are allowed to work. “If you’re going to have collective resistance ongoing, you need to feed people so that they can continue to show up to these protests,” says Proulx.

Coming up on the group’s one year anniversary, Cadotte and Proulx both said they want Forest City Food Not Bombs to be sustainable as it continues to make change in the London community. “I don’t want to see the standards of success, like exponential growth—it’s not a stock market,” Proulx says. “I want it to grow into the ground.”

As Forest City Food Not Bombs moves into its second year, the group hopes to build its volunteer team and increase its activism, using the present to make change in London.

Photo by Jonathan Kemper

Kevin Sidlar’s garden has been a refuge for the past two decades, if not quite a major source of sustenance. For much of his adult life, he’s grown annual flowers, peas, and tomatoes in his backyard.

In the early days of 2020, something shifted within Sidlar. He felt nervous about disease and the security of our food systems. Surveying his abilities to meet his own basic needs in a suddenly uncertain future, the Thunder Bay resident decided to get serious about growing his own food.

Sidlar was sure that increasing his self-sufficiency would settle his nerves about what he felt could be an impending societal collapse, and spending more time with the earth would improve his mental health in the short term. He grew up on a farm that had been in his family for 100 years, and he’d absorbed the rhythms and methods surrounding him. “Gardening teaches me responsibility. Also, I’ve got more fresh food in the house, that leaves me less reliant on the grocery store and frozen foods,” he says. An application developer for the region’s major phone and internet company by day, Sidlar delves deep into one or two hobbies at a time. In his 40s, his major avocations have included foraging for wild mushrooms, sailing, and drumming with a local band. Translating that energy to food production made sense.

For one thing, grocery stores didn’t carry some of Sidlar’s childhood favourites, like kohlrabi, perhaps because it’s impossible to machine harvest large quantities. Also, shade from nearby apartment buildings and trees limits the kinds of crops viable in population-dense urban areas, and Sidlar wanted to diversify the crops he was able to grow. He found a Facebook post advertising affordable rental garden plots located a few minutes’ drive from his home, just within city limits.

Adventure 38 was Jay Tarabocchia’s response to the growing needs of his urban neighbours. He and his father were only able to use a small portion of the 38 acres they lived on, and Tarabocchia had seen how much joy and contentment gardening had brought his father in his senior years. Having moved back to Thunder Bay from Ottawa to care for his dad in the family home of 50 years, Tarabocchia extended use of the land to would-be gardeners who lacked the space. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do some kind of project to keep expanding on the gardening theme, keep him excited for life?’ So I started making more gardens.” It wasn’t long before he thought to share the space with others.

Nutrient-rich soil and unimpeded sunlight offered exciting opportunities at Sidlar’s rental plot—he could finally grow corn after innumerable failed backyard attempts. His first growing season was a learning experience, though, and he took note of how different the conditions were between his lakeside backyard and the farm plot, which is farther inland.

Lake Superior affects the weather in Thunder Bay, which means more moderate temperatures in town. Adventure 38 experiences a shorter, more intense season. The hotter summer days offer greater outputs, provided gardeners are able to time sowings appropriately. Crops requiring higher evening temperatures, like okra, corn, and peppers, do well there. Seed packages offer guidelines, but it’s only through trial and error that farmers learn when to plant which crops, and which plant relationships are mutually beneficial when interplanted. This long-term thinking with considerations for the rhythms of the seasons gives Sidlar a sense of profound satisfaction, and an afternoon spent in the dirt offers a quiet ease that can be hard to attain in late-stage capitalism’s dizzying circus.

The deep disconnect many of us have from food sources has deleterious effects on mental and physical health. Joining a community garden like Tarabocchia’s is one way to stitch our relationships with food, ourselves, and the earth back together.

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When food prices shot up enough that many fully employed people weren’t able to feed themselves or their families, it was time to go back to basics. Whether the unending, oppressive food scarcity is partially or entirely artificial, the only recourse many Canadians have is to seize the means of production.

Almost everyone has felt the mounting pressure from climbing food prices in the last two years. The Bank of Canada has, since 1991, tried to keep inflation to two percent yearly, yet grocery store prices have risen steadily since December 2021. The metric for prices is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which uses a “basket” of foods most families consider staples to calculate the changing costs of a trip to the grocery store. As of August 2023 it contained hundreds of items spanning different cultural and dietary considerations: avocados, baby food, chicken, dried lentils. In 2022, the CPI for food had its largest year-over-year increase in 41 years at 11.4 percent. The metric for all items went up 6.8 percent, and that year saw an increase in average wages of only five percent. Following a 2022 poll, Statistics Canada estimated that 20 percent of Canadians would need to use a food bank in the next six months.

Primary causes for the jump in food prices include supply chain interruptions with COVID-19 outbreaks and facility closures, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and changing weather. With concurrent increases in housing and energy costs, most people have difficult choices to make. While harnessing solar or geothermal energy may be outside the budget for many, the average Canadian can take steps toward improving their food security.

Once thought of as a quaint hobby primarily enjoyed by retired folks, gardening has taken off and captured the hearts of people across demographics. Due to a surge in first-time home gardeners, stores in Canada’s cities were sold out of many gardening supplies in spring 2020, and similar purchasing frenzies occurred in 2021. As the vast majority of Canadians live in cities and lack the space, soil, and light sufficient to grow much food, community gardening solutions have proliferated to meet our changing needs.

A meta-analysis of community gardens in Canada and five other countries showed a 19 percent increase in use from 2018 through 2019. Following decreased interest at the onset of the pandemic, numbers surged again in 2021 and levelled off in 2022. The city of Edmonton created 350 ad-hoc community garden allotments in 2020, while Victoria reallocated resources at Beacon Hill Park to grow food for distribution, prioritizing socially vulnerable populations. Brampton responded to pandemic gardening needs by distributing gardening materials to home growers, who either consumed the food they grew or donated it to the community.

In Winnipeg, Wolseley Community Gardens (WCG) sprung up in 2021 as a response to some of this increased demand. They offer garden space mostly to those living in multi-family dwellings and apartment buildings. WCG co-chair Jade Raizenne says that they received 47 applications for 20 plots in 2021; 39 in 2022; and 37 in 2023. The group expanded the garden each year, so it now hosts 24 raised beds, a native pollinator garden, and an orchard of fruit trees. “Since we started, everyone I’ve talked to has mentioned how much they love coming here, and how good it is for their mental health. One man who doesn’t rent a plot, but walks through the orchards every day, said it’s often the high point of his day,” Raizenne says. At times of social unrest and anxiety, community gardens are resilient, offering respite and a relatively safe third space in cities.

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As globalization and capitalism accelerate, operators of large farms have found it increasingly challenging to make a living growing food. Rates of suicide among farmers have soared in the past decade, and many young adults coming of age in the aughts were unable to envision a financially feasible future farming. Large farms became more technologically advanced over the past 20 years, with the proliferation of drones, robotics, and sensing technologies. While these advances can drastically increase quantities of food being produced, the ecological costs may not be fully understood.

The opposite is true for less tech-dependent, older methods. Permaculture has been a buzzword for the last two decades, and merits consideration by anyone looking to optimize their land use. It’s a framework that works with the land, rather than imposing changes in an effort to yield species that may not do well in a given region. Colonizers famously brought invasive species with them wherever they went, and despite how charming some of these species can be, like bellflower, they can choke out native plants that offer more to ecosystems. Most invasive plants, though, can be replaced by a native species with a little research.

And in a growing number of gardens, ancient, Indigenous cultivation methods are in use despite settlers’ efforts to supplant them. Three Sisters is commonly practiced among gardeners and the symbiosis of beans, squash, and corn gives each crop advantages they lack when grown individually. Intertwining stalks and varying growth habits makes that triumvirate impossible to machine harvest, so we see how cultivation with respect for innate qualities of plants and the earth they grow in is inextricably linked with slow food practices.

Regardless of what type of food plants are grown where, it is clear that monoculture is the enemy of sustainability. When agents of industry realized that one species of orange and one variety of banana performed best, those varieties were grown on huge farms to the exclusion of all others. Today, the only banana commercially available is the Cavendish seedless, which is a clone. Because every tree on a plantation has the same DNA, if a novel fungus attacks, the entire crop can be wiped out. This already happened with the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel, in the 1950s. Without genetic diversity allowing for adaptations to changing pathogens, farmers have had to continually increase pesticide use on bananas. In the past decade, some years saw seasons of near-total losses of navel oranges and russet potatoes. Late-stage capitalism and an unconscious preference for uniformity have brought food production systems to a point where staple crops are needlessly vulnerable in ways that biodiverse farms aren’t.

At community gardens the world over, including Adventure 38, gardeners are constantly learning through trial and error, and by exchanging ideas. There are innumerable choices that farmers make, consciously and not. Whether to use pesticides, fertilizers, and whether to use cost-effective synthetic products versus old-school organics like bone meal and composted manure are just a few of the variables to consider. People are experimenting with and reviving traditions that had almost been forgotten, like hugelkultur. This German practice creates large mounds of decaying logs, offering lower-effort raised beds than the more commonly seen flat rectangles, fabricated with lumber. The sloping sides increase available growing space, and soil quality improves as the wood decomposes. One person whose plot neighbours Sidlar’s uses two-litre plastic bottles, standing upright in small hills. They fill with rainwater, overflow runs downslope, and these reservoirs keep plants happy without having to get out a hose. Not having to irrigate cuts down on labour, allowing the grower to make fewer trips to tend to their farm.

As small farmers return to pre-tractor methods that may decrease yield, they find that some kinds of input become unnecessary. Fertilizer prices skyrocketed following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and ensuing sanctions, as Russia and Belarus are two of the world’s top exporters. But bringing kitchen scraps to a composter, learning more about how to revitalize soil, and narrowing the scope of a farm have allowed hobby farmers and intentional communities to approach self-sufficiency. Sourcing hyperlocal materials such as a neighbour’s livestock manure can decrease dependence on global supply chains while building connections with others.

The idea of gardening was deeply implanted in Sidlar’s family history, but those new to gardening can consult books, radio programs, and community members. For those who are able, gardeners and small farmers are always looking for labour, and trading effort for produce is one way to broaden the reach of community gardens. For folks whose time is consumed by work, community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes of produce can connect them with local food systems. This gives farmers more money for input at the beginning of the season, and customers get high-quality, local food at an accessible location without having to brave the markets.

It’s more of a challenge, but self-grown food is popular in the city, too. At the Thunder Bay Conservatory, a grassroots organization has put on workshops teaching alternative gardening methods, like straw-bale planting. Not everyone can rent and transport themselves to a garden, or perform the manual labour required. Time, fuel, and physical ability considerations make community gardens inaccessible to many. Planting into the surface of straw bales brings the garden a few feet off the ground, making them accessible to some wheelchair users or folks with physical limitations. Methods like these show that almost everyone can learn how to grow their own food.

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While Canadians may be waiting a long while for agricultural trends to change, on a microscopic level, small farmers and gardeners can steer things in a more sustainable direction. Though quantities will always be smaller than what factory farms provide, the benefits to small-crop growth are immeasurable. Paying close attention to the relationships between plants and weather facilitates an attunement with natural rhythms. And being emotionally invested in food production prevents waste. “If I put my sweat into a tomato, I’m eating it before it goes bad,” Sidlar says.

CSA kohlrabi in Thunder Bay may cost more than the cheapest alternatives at big box stores. But it has more intact enzymes, a lower carbon cost, and promotes a future of resilient, biodiverse small-scale agriculture that won’t accelerate climate catastrophe or exploit disadvantaged farm labourers elsewhere. It’s probably a lot tastier, too.

Graphic by Valerie Thai

The average grocery bill for Canadians has increased by 170 percent over the last two decades, according to Canada’s Food Price Report 2021. This is especially so over the last two years—since the COVID-19 pandemic was declared in March 2020, Canadians have seen a major bump in their grocery bills.

Food production issues resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic have touched every province and territory in Canada. The pandemic caused border and facility closures, labour shortages (including brief restrictions on temporary foreign workers), and shifted consumer demand from foodservice to food retail as restaurants grappled with shutdowns. New safety measures and procedures, such as physical distancing, meant processing plants were operating below capacity and efficiency.

Meanwhile, the price of oil was down in 2020, in turn lowering energy and distribution costs for food products. However, this weakened the Canadian dollar, shooting import costs up.

Atlantic Canada

Provinces on the Atlantic coast are highly vulnerable to systemic variables, as most food production and processing is done outside the region. It’s expected that the Atlantic region will continue to see costs rising above the national average. One food bank in Charlottetown, P.E.I., reported a 10 percent user increase in May 2021, up from the previous year, due to swelling food and gas prices.

British Columbia

B.C. agricultural producers have suffered from severe drought and wildfires over the past two years. BC Cattlemen’s Association estimated that the province lost approximately 3.5 million hectares of land to forest fires in the last five years, meaning cattle had less green space to graze. While B.C. farmers would typically purchase feed from the Prairies to compensate, those provinces, too, were experiencing dry conditions. It could be three to five years before the beef industry sees some resolution.

The Prairies

Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba all saw record heat levels and little rain in 2021. While some droughts are cyclical, last year’s dry conditions were particularly unusual, exacerbated by climate change. With less supply, processors must pay more for their inputs, especially wheat and canola—an expense destined to catch up with consumers.

Ontario and Quebec

Despite the hefty price of meat, residents in Ontario and Quebec have decreased their meat budget the least among Canadians at 46 percent compared to Albertans’ 57 percent. Ahead of Thanksgiving 2021, a Toronto butcher estimated turkey was up a dollar per pound compared to 2020. A CTV news report said retailers are taking the brunt of consumers’ frustrations. In Montreal, the two-dollar increase of a six-pack of yogurt ($5.99 to $7.99) has forced some customers to skip the product altogether.

The North

Food prices in the North are so high that one Inuk woman, Kyra Flaherty, started using TikTok to bring awareness to the exorbitant costs and their impact. Despite a federal food subsidy program, northerners still face food insecurity every day, owing to long-distance shipping expenses. This issue existed long before the pandemic.

In addition, traditional food sources are threatened by climate change: animals’ migration patterns are changing; travel required for hunting, trapping, and fishing are limited because of ice made unstable by warming temperatures; and low water levels make canoe trips difficult.

Everybody eats, but not all experiences are reflected in food media. When Kyla Pascal and Kathryn Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon started hanging out in 2018 they bonded over critiquing food magazines and television. As activists and organizers in their communities of Edmonton and Vancouver, and with long histories in the food industry, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon decided to act instead of complaining about what they didn’t like in food media, and Hungry Zine was born.

A city’s best food and restaurants is often celebrated annually in alt-weekly publications, but instead of highlighting great eats from various communities, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon saw an example of how marginalized communities are misrepresented. Gwun-Yeen 君妍Lennon comments on how Chinese restaurants fall under categories of best late night or hangover food and how those who are making food in those restaurants are referred to as cooks instead of chefs.

“I think that’s why this project is so exciting because instead of critiquing and seeing the things that are missing and why aren’t they better, we can try to offer an alternative model of what that could look like,” says Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon.

Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon began brainstorming what their zine could look like when they saw a copy of Chinese Protest Recipes, a zine that could be purchased or downloaded and printed. They became interested in the accessibility and openness of the zine medium and in January 2021, they put out a call for submissions for the first issue. “We’re not trying to be a food industry magazine that’s about reviewing restaurants and that kind of thing,” says Gwun-Yeen君妍 Lennon. “I think by emphasizing more the literary and arts and zine aspects that kind of helps us put the focus on the community voices we’re hoping to gather.”

Showcasing marginalized voices and building relationships are the driving motivations for Hungry Zine. As food lovers who are moved to make changes around the cultural appropriation of food, Pascal and Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon know that having opinions and values about who owns ethnic restaurants, who is in their kitchens, and who grows and produces food can be isolating, but as the submissions came in, they saw that other people felt like there’s a need for the type of space they’re creating. The pair looks towards the future of Hungry Zine and the launch of the home cooking issue scheduled for this spring. Pascal hopes they can “hold on to that radical, that community, that the voices are from everywhere and on topics that are so broad and diverse and interesting.”