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.

High food prices in the Northwest Territories aren’t new, but what isn’t often talked about is the struggle many across the territory face to simply eat. In Inuvik, a trucker comes up from B.C. every two weeks to sell fresh produce from his truck—but he can’t make it year-round. Remote communities throughout the N.W.T. increasingly rely on food banks. Sachs Harbour on Banks Island, population 117, receives government funding to feed its homeless people. Wrigley, population 153, Paulatuk, 327, and Ulukhaktok, 428, do the same.

Myriad factors mean these Arctic hamlets need food banks: The high costs of operating grocery stores in the North, climate change, the decline of wild foods (called country food in the North), cultural change, resource extraction, and environmental contamination create a situation where food is inaccessible. In a territory where borders have changed drastically since Canada was created, big changes continue to occur.

Indigenous people make up exactly half the N.W.T.’s population of 44,469, with most non-Indigenous living in the city of Yellowknife.

“People were largely self-sufficient,” says France Benoit, president of the Yellowknife Farmer’s Market. “But then what happened is when they put the road in, it’s no different than anywhere else in Canada—all of a sudden, food is being trucked from elsewhere.”

In Inuvik, there is one food bank, a homeless shelter, and a community lunch program. At the food bank, demand is outstripping donations so community members now must pay small sums for discounted flats of food. According to a 2013 peer-reviewed paper by James D. Ford, the town has a food insecurity rate of 43 percent—five times the Canadian average.

Benoit says colonial settlement deeply affected food systems in the N.W.T. “[Indigenous groups] were going to the barren lands and then coming back according to the seasons,” she says. “They were using entire areas.” When the N.W.T. was created, various cultural groups were forced together into settlements. In the past, “people were able to take care of each other.”

While game, fish, and berries remain central to many people’s diets, only 14 percent of N.W.T. households get more than three-quarters of their meat and fish directly from the land. Most people in the N.W.T. would like to eat more of it, especially caribou, a traditional staple. But, according to the State of Rural Canada, a 2015 report by non-profit Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation, these foods aren’t as plentiful now. The Bathurst caribou, for example, that roam near the arctic hamlets that now have food banks, have declined from roughly 450,000 animals in the mid-1980s to around 20,000 today.

And now that most people rely on food from grocery stores, high costs are a looming issue. Duane Wilson of Arctic Co-operatives, the support centre for grocery co-ops across the territory, worked in food transportation in the co-op for years.

Building a store that sells to a limited number of people, with utilities up to 10 times more expensive while you store a year’s worth of goods in a heated warehouse, is challenging, he says. And on top of it when something breaks you might need to fly an expert in.

“And we’re going to expect that it’s going to have the same prices as the Walmart Supercentre. Does that sound reasonable to you?”

Ice roads are also more expensive to truck on. Seasonal road and ferry closures mean most N.W.T. communities need to fly their supplies in at least part of the time. Others use marine barges, though the lack of developed ports means it’s costlier. And climate change is altering some harbours, making access even harder. It’s expensive to transport supplies to build new stores. Electricity is five to 10 times more in parts of the North, according to a 2015 government-commissioned study on Northern food retail.

“Many of the co-op retail operations actually are done at a loss to serve their community,” says Wilson. “This truly is life and death for people.”

Despite this, at least some food remains affordable. In Yellowknife, gala apples go for $1.99 a pound. At NorthMart in Inuvik, they’re $3.17 a pound. Prices checked in May 2017 on pears, eggs, milk, and yogurt in both locations were similarly comparable. As the State of Rural Canada report points out however, the standard cost of basic food items is often higher.

Laura Rose manages the Hay River soup kitchen. Despite increasing reliance on the food bank in her community, she points to positive happenings in the N.W.T. “There’s more gardening and growing one’s own food in some of the different communities that’s starting to take off,” she says. “The green thumb bug is catching on with people.”

There’s the Inuvik community greenhouse, dubbed the most northerly greenhouse in North America, housing community plots and a commercial portion.

In Hay River, the non-profit Northern Farm Training Institute has a mission to empower people to restore Northern food systems. Benoit praises Yellowknife organization Food Rescue that collects grocery store food before it’s thrown out and redistributes it to community organizations.

“The land, plants, animals, and humans hold a kin interrelationship that has consummated livelihoods for generations,” reads the State of Rural Canada report on the N.W.T. “Resilience is central to this landscape.” May it be so.