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.

Image courtesy of Uplift Kitchen

Sequestered in each of their own homes, neighbours Antonia Lawrence and Emily Carson didn’t have family around when COVID-19 hit.

All they had was the group chat shared between their friendly neighbours. Often, involving inquiries for grocery trips, wanting to share food items, and recipes between each other—a system built on the sentiment that sharing is caring.

“We kind of created our own little neighbourhood bubble,” said Emily Carson, co-founder of Uplift Kitchen.

On top of the health pandemic, a racial one emerged. The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, and many more Black and Indigenous people, created global uproar.

“We kind of looked at each other at one point and said how do we do something to help?” Carson said. “How do we make sure that the people who are on the front lines, either working or protesting are being safe and secure … And so we automatically went to food.”

Food insecurity disproportionately impacts marginalized communities in Canada. A study shows that Black Canadian families are more than twice as likely to go hungry than white households. Similarly, almost half of all Indigenous families in Canada struggle to access food.

According to the co-founders, Uplift Kitchen started out as an initiative to help a small circle of people but bloomed into a delivery service for Black and Indigenous families all over the GTA.

The co-founders both have backgrounds in non-profit work and food service, which they put to use in the creation of Uplift Kitchen.

“When it comes to making sure that people are fed and clothed and housed, it’s a no-brainer for us. We’re lucky to be in a position where we can help other people, and it would be a waste of our talents not to,” said Lawrence.

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.

Photo courtesy of Isaac Burkam

When Eva von Jagow first learned about food insecurity and inflation in the far North in high school, she couldn’t believe it was happening in Canada.

“I thought it was a disgrace. I was like, ‘There’s no way this is happening in my own country!’” says von Jagow, now a second-year student at McGill University. “And for so many people to not know about it!”

She explains that aside from a brief introduction in high school, education about Indigenous cultures was rarely accessible to her. She had to take initiative herself to learn about suicide and low graduation rates in these communities.

But what stood out to her most was the cost of food. A 2015 Bureau of Statistics survey showed food in Nunavut costs twice the Canadian average, for example.

“To me it didn’t make sense to tackle [other] issues if food was such a major problem,” says von Jagow. “How are children supposed to flourish in school, get lots of opportunities, if they’re not even eating properly?”

This is how DueNORTH began.

What started as a gently-used jewelry sale in her community, which ended up raising $20,000 for the Sakku School in Coral Harbour, Nunavut, has turned into a partnership with communities to tackle food insecurity in the North.

For the most recent fundraising event, von Jagow teamed up with the principal of the Sakku School to organize afterschool workshops. Students in the programs made artwork, some that depicted Inuit life, that was sold in a silent auction at up to $200 a piece.

In turn that money funded a breakfast program at the Northern school.

“People are always wondering if they’re the right person to do something. If you have any capacity to act on something you hear about, even if it’s a small contribution, you’re still contributing,” von Jagow says.

She adds: “You might be helping one person, you might be helping a thousand people, you might be helping a whole community, but if you can do anything, then strive to do that.”

 
Photo by J. Walton

It has been nearly one year since the Liberal government enacted a program to admit 25,000 Syrian refugees arrived in Canada. In their first year, many of the families faced several challenges to overcome: getting to know a brand new country, finding suitable accommodations, and trying to find a job in our country’s tough economic climate, all while facing systemic racism upon arrival. The resettlement process is not easy, and many are still trying to find their way here in Canada. While the Canadian government and private sponsors have helped—offering financial assistance, medical coverage, and housing—the biggest challenge many Syrians have faced is finding community.

What often connects community members is a good home-cooked meal. The table is where we gather, not just to eat, but to talk, share, and connect. Food gets people talking; it facilitates conversation. Many Canadians are privileged enough to forget our ready-access to kitchens and supermarkets filled with endless foodstuffs, and the power it has to bring communities together.

After witnessing in the Canadian media many Syrian refugees stranded in hotels and with little opportunity to cook and gather for regular meals for weeks at a time, Len Senater, owner and operator of The Depanneur, offered his drop-in kitchen space for Syrian women to cook. From there, Toronto’s Newcomer Kitchen was born.

It has been almost six months since Newcomer Kitchen launched and in that time, several families have utilized Senater’s space as their own. The program has given many newcomers the opportunity to not just cook alongside other Syrian families but to carve out and build for themselves their own identities and communities here in Canada. The kitchen has become a space to gain agency and legitimize traditions in a new country.

For the refugees who have come through the space, the act of cooking was simple and natural. In many Syrian homes, the kitchen is a focal point, and food brings loved ones together at the end of the day. A home-cooked meal can be seen as a seal of friendship. The space emphasizes the need to celebrate this culture—not to assimilate and mask it.

Many of the women who have used Senater’s space have not only connected with one another but also disconnected from the everyday struggles they face in the resettlement process. While Westerners often try to dismantle the gender stereotypes about women’s roles in kitchens, the Newcomer Kitchen program empowers women to showcase their culture. And it has created opportunity: those involved in the program catered 1,200 meals during Toronto’s Luminato Festival, and cooked for Toronto Mayor John Tory.

Meanwhile, some newcomers have started their own enterprises. In Hamilton, Ont., three Syrian women—Manahel Al Shareef, Dalal Al Zoubi and Rawa’a Aloliwi—launched a new catering business , along with co-founder Brittani Farrington. Their meeting was a bit cosmic in nature: Farrington explains she had planned a welcome dinner for a handful of displaced families at her church. Yet, it was these families who ended up cooking for her and the other volunteers that evening. The food planted a seed with the newcomers, as Al Shareef shared with CBC via Google translate: “We weren’t surprised when you were happy trying the Syrian food, because we know very well that the Syrian food is the best, especially if we are cooking it.” That evening spurred the creation of Karam Kitchen.

The catering company, which markets itself as a way to “empower Syrian newcomers to build a new life in Hamilton and contribute to [the city’s] vibrant community,” is just getting off the ground and recently launched a Kickstarter campaign that brought in $6,500 to fund its capital costs. Since its launch, the founders have worked on refining their catering menu to include a mix of Syrian classics and recognizable dishes to locals, such as tabouleh and hummus. So far, the business model is paying off, and the women have a packed few months ahead of them. “We Syrians are such a hard working people, we love to work and earn our own money and build ourselves even in the worst circumstances,” Al Shareef told CBC. As more Syrian families are welcomed into Canada and face the adaptation and acculturation process, these newcomers face the task of finding employment—and these kitchens can change that. “The biggest barrier to employment is a lack of a network, whether that be social, professional, or otherwise,” Jeremy Dutton, program coordinator for Immigrant Services Calgary’s integrated mentorship program, told the Globe and Mail. By connecting and networking through these programs, newcomers are building a professional network they need to make and create professional opportunities for themselves.

Utilizing their own skills, culture, and cuisine, these women have created the opportunity to not only build a community but build a career from it. Food has connected these families with other Canadians—and it is bound to continue empowering these Syrian-Canadians to create opportunities for themselves in the future.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Picture this: In your neighbourhood, there’s a place you can go for a healthy meal. It’s prepared by a chef, with farm-fresh ingredients. It’s served in a large, bright, communal dining room popping with conversation. And it’s free.

You’re in that room because you had to leave your job to care for your ailing parents, and you struggle to find money at the end of the month for food. At your table, there are students living off loans, a young mom and her chatty daughter, a widower who lives alone. You eat together, and the meal is delicious. You’re a few of the millions of food-insecure Canadians who can’t always afford enough food to eat, who sometimes need to ask for help. But this place isn’t about charity: it’s about dignity.

The community food centre is busy today. In the kitchen, 14 seniors are making a stir fry together in a cooking class focused on diabetes prevention. Outside, staff are prepping a compost workshop for kids in the after-school program. Volunteer gardeners are harvesting lettuce and squash for tomorrow’s lunch, and their own kitchens. After lunch, people are meeting to plan a campaign calling for more financial support for caregivers.

Government and private funding for places like this one, places that build community around good food and make it available to anyone who needs it, is helping to curb the rates of diet-related illness that have been skyrocketing in low-income neighbourhoods for years. People are healthier and more empowered, too.

There are dozens of community food centres across the country now—more and more every year. They’ve become like libraries, but for food literacy: community gathering places where people exchange recipes, seeds, stories, and support. And the people that keep these spaces going—the students, the widowers, the young moms, and construction workers—have been organizing with other Canadians who are fed up with the unreal state of the food system: fried chicken–flavoured nail polish, sugar-bomb sodas in schools, food workers who can’t afford the food they produce, toxic agricultural practices, food swamps with French fries for miles but not a fresh vegetable in sight. Local fights for better access, wages, and regulations have ignited a paradigm shift. And that shift is bringing in progressive policies that prioritize the health of all Canadians over the wellbeing and profit of a few.

The idea that food is a public good doesn’t seem so radical anymore. Planners are putting food commons back at the centre of communities, and those communities are taking their food decisions into their own hands. People are concerned not only with where their food comes from, but who has access to it. It’s about equality, it’s about health, and it’s about sustainability. We’re getting there. When you start with a good meal, anything can happen.

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

Meet the foodies on the hunt to redefine Canadian cuisine

Anita Stewart has spent more than 30 years travelling across Canada, all in the name of food. In B.C., Stewart scuba-dived off the coast of southern Vancouver Island to see sea cucumbers and urchins. On the edges of the east coast, she tried everything from caviar to moonshine. And in the prairies, Stewart tasted sweet Saskatoon berry pies, bison meat, and everything in between. Through all these culinary adventures, Stewart searched for the answer to one, elusive question: What is Canadian cuisine?

When Stewart began her journey in the in the 1980s she says, there was a real sense Canadian cuisine didn’t exist—or, at least, nobody was calling it that. “It was really an oxymoron,” she quips. But now, embracing Canadian cuisine has become a movement, even a form of activism, with chefs, farmers, and bloggers from all across the country advocating for Canadian cuisine to be promoted and celebrated. These days, Stewart bristles at the suggestion Canadian cuisine isn’t actually a thing. If Canadian cuisine doesn’t exist, she says, then neither does Italian. “A cuisine is the way a people eat,” she adds. “It’s the product of a people and a place and the ingredients.”

Still, ask Canadians and non-Canadians alike to name our nation’s food and many are likely to respond with the stereotypical: poutine, beavertails, maple syrup—perhaps Tim Hortons. Stewart says she doesn’t care if people want to argue over the minutia of whether a poutine is Canadian; she defines Canadian cuisine as one of possibilities. That is, a diverse spectrum of local, regional and national ingredients that come together to create unique dishes—one that celebrate the huge variety of ingredients that Canada has to offer.

Stewart has written 11 books and co-authored another three. Her most recent book Canada: The Food, The Recipes, The Stories, published in 2008 but reprinted in Spring 2013, is an extensive compilation of recipes from across Canada, and from all the cultures of Canada. Recipes focus on the importance of local fresh ingredients (rather than a small handful of dishes to “represent” Canada). Diversity is celebrated: Ukrainian, Indian, Scottish and French recipes, for example, are included, spanning from Red Shoes gingerbread to lamb and from prune tagine (a Moroccan dish) to grilled pacific halibut garnished with Indian-spiced yogurt.

Such variety doesn’t surprise New Brunswick-based Christina Allain, a food activist and blogger who specializes in Acadian cuisine. Even culinary choices within Acadian cuisine vary vastly from region to region, she says, and that’s just one subculture. “We’re the contrary of a homogenous group,” she adds. “You look at Acadia and
all the differences in the region; they blow up when you look at all of Canada.” Like much of Canadian cuisine, Acadian food has been heavily shaped by relying on regional ingredients. Whatever grew in the area became a central part of the food—one reason why seafood is so prominent.

Allain’s favourite recipe is Acadian chicken fricot, which she describes as “a hearty stew containing potatoes, dumplings, chicken, and summer savoury.” Allain adds that a dish like chicken fricot can be reinvented depending on where the cook is located in Canada and what seasonal ingredients are available.

Let’s not forget the role of pre-colonial food, either. Indigenous cuisine is anything but new—you could call it the original food of Canada, produced centuries before our legal independence as a country in 1867. Yet unlike other historical comeback foods, such as Acadian cuisine, indigenous dishes are rarely available in restaurants, and there is no sense they’ve become popularized in grocery stores. Like with the broader Canadian cuisine conundrum, indigenous food is hard to define. Despite stereotypes that would limit it to bannock, indigenous cuisines across Canada are both diverse and largely dependent on the geography and natural vegetation of the region.

Rich Francis is an aboriginal chef (his father is Tetlit Gwich’in and his mother is Tuscarora). He’s currently working on perfecting his own restaurant, District Red, which specializes in indigenous cuisine. He’s also a Season 4 Top Chef Canada finalist. His focus is on pre-contact indigenous food—dishes that existed before European colonizers came to the land North America. First Nations food, from post-contact right up to today, says Francis, is perceived as both bland and boring— largely because it was a colonized diet given to First Nations. Much of the original tradition and culture was lost in that colonization, he adds. But that’s changing.

Francis hopes District Red will help bring indigenous foods to mainstream cuisine in Canada. “The ways I achieve this is by going back to before pre-contact,” says Francis, “utilizing what’s been given to us through tradition, culture and storytelling.” Francis wants to add his “personal touch, fearless creativity, and modern cooking technique”
to traditional indigenous foods, without feeling constricted by labeling his food as Canadian.

When I later ask Stewart how she would explain Canadian cuisine to someone who’s not from Canada, she says she’d tell them to get in the car, start driving, and eat their way across the country. Though a cross-country road trip may not be exactly practical, Stewart has a point. Maybe that’s what Canadian cuisine is: not a few iconic dishes, but a constant exploration of foods and people—a cross-country journey of flavours and histories that make up an entire nation’s cuisine. “If we squander our food tradition, and we turn our back our own products, then we turn our backs on our history, because food is the basis of everything,” says Stewart. “All I know is we’re cooking really good food in Canada and have for a long time.”

Photo by Janet Morton

In spring 2014, the ReMediate project brought together artist Christina Kingsbury, writer Anna Bowen, and non-profit Pollination Guelph, to make a 305 square metre quilt for the decommissioned Eastview Landfill in Guelph, Ont. Embedded with native seeds Kingsbury collected, the quilt was made from recycled paper and plant material. Sewn together entirely on site, the quilt is now in the process of biodegrading, taking root, and becoming a living habitat for threatened pollinators, such as native solitary and ground nesting bees, bumble bees, butterflies, and other indigenous species. Pollinators account for plant reproduction and are responsible for an estimated one out of three bites of food people eat. Devastatingly, however, there is a widespread global decline in pollinator diversity due to habitat loss, pesticide exposure, and climate change.

The Eastview Landfill site was historically wetland, and in parts, farmland. In use from 1961-2003, the site is now capped with clay and harvested for methane. Through research and interviews with professionals and citizens who held memories and information about the site, Bowen and Kingsbury documented fragments of its natural and waste history. The interviews informed Bowen’s accompanying poetry, which tells the story of the layered history of the landfill site, the writer’s experience, and the making of the quilt. During the installation, as Kingsbury sewed, Bowen printed selections from her poetry onto the sewn quilt. The public was invited to hear the poetry at audio listening stations on-site and to participate in the performative process of sewing and planting.

A gesture of care that critiques the exploitation of land and labour inherent in a consumer culture, the ReMediate project makes many connections: between work that is devalued in our economic paradigm; the labour of bees and pollinators; the domestic labour of women; and the low-wage labour of outsourced workers. Its creation embodies an intimacy that moves beyond commodification and nurtures different possibilities for relating with ecology.

Photo by Dan Hauser

Pins and needles

I

The man leans back and shifts his weight
looks out the kitchen window to the barn

He sees the starlings like iron filing overhead
the slump of bulrushes near the swamp

The spring peepers are out
and fireflies will light the field this evening

His son has seen them,
so many splinters of light caught glowing in the grass

He leans back and glances at the clock
its sturdy oak and constant ticking comfort

His wife does the dishes
her hands are ruddy from the scalding and soapless water

II

Women sewing together remember the landfill
how people would gather and compare their trash

Mattresses with the springs poking through
fridge magnets from trips to New York, burnt out night lights

The fabric puckers, a scramble for seam rippers
the plastic kettle is reboiled for decaffeinated tea

—I heard the man who sold the land took his own life
when he found out it was going to be a dump

—I heard that too

III

The man goes out to the barn once his dishes are done
takes the slop to the barrel-bodied pigs
Hey-o there you are

The boys have gone back out to play kick the can
to catch frogs in the failing light by the edge of the marsh,
its fat-thumbed bulrushes bobbing in the low wind

IV

Seams ripped, the women resume their sewing
Pull-pull, sew
Pull-pull, sew

One of the women pours the boiled water for tea
scalds a finger, stomps her foot

Recovered, she produces a wax paper-lined tin from her shopping bag,
passes around butter cookies

—I heard it was the neighbour.

Photo by Janet Morton

We know the wildness

We know the wildness
that treads above the two foot thick clay cap:

Coyote flank in the cold wood
that traces the edge of the creek

The unlikely heron arcing down to land
on an October hillside between fence and vetch—
somewhere deep in the cells of its iron-feathered wings
its heron body knew this place

An apple tree gone wild but sweet
having thrown off years of pruning

We know that wildness
we feel its paws on the clay cap
breaking into the shell like an egg tooth
slipping through a membrane of soap and
sinking up to its coyote knees in plastics

But the unread wildness awaits us:
decay, the shuddering of elements coming home

Photos by Robert Kingsbury

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

Inside food banks’ controversial no junk food policies

Controversy erupted in August after Ottawa’s Parkdale Food Centre announced it would stop accepting junk food, such as Kraft Dinner and hot dogs, effective immediately. Some wholeheartedly agreed with the centre’s stand; others virulently opposed to new restriction. Those in favour felt, like Karen Secord, Parkdale’s co-ordinator, that food bank users’ health is worth as much as anyone’s, and Parkdale should strive to provide healthy food. Those opposed to the move, however, asked why the food bank felt it had the authority to restrict people’s diet choices. Some former food bank users shared the opinion hotdogs were better than nothing, while others pointed out they didn’t have refrigeration to store so-called healthier food. Yet, for or against, and whether the commentary was rooted in personal experience, politics or stereotypes, the public conversation revealed something essential: our own attitudes toward those using food banks.

Parkdale isn’t the first or only food bank to restrict food donations. Founded more than 30 years ago, Toronto’s The Stop Community Food Centre, has made it the centre’s policy to only accept healthy food—a policy created after the community members it serves told the organization they wanted it that way. “We started as a food bank in the traditional sense, and over time our community members told us the food that we were providing was not enough,” says Kathe Rogers, The Stop’s communications manager. “It was not healthy enough, it was not meeting their dietary needs. And so over time, we became a healthy food bank. Because that is what people really need when they’re struggling. When they’re out there on low incomes, or they’re living in poverty, these are the items that are beyond their means.”

“I often joke that the folks at the food bank in The Stop have, without question,  more organic food than my kids do,” adds executive director Rachel Gray. “And that’s one of the things we think is really important.” Her philosophy is people can’t get or be healthy without healthy food. Heavily processed food loaded with sugar, salt or fat is unhealthy no matter how you slice it, she adds. Gray says people can debate whether it’s nice to have a box of macaroni and cheese, but if that’s all a person has to eat it becomes problematic: there’s no choice; it may be culturally inappropriate or irrelevant; and it’s not a balanced diet. “It’s not the way to good health,” she adds. “And if we’re not supporting people to get healthy, what are we achieving?”

Ideas such as “any type of food helps”—which goes hand-in-hand with the assumption that low-income people should be grateful for whatever they get—can belie fundamental assumptions about people’s worth. Stigma that blames the economically disadvantaged for their situation is often included in conversations about food banks, as are the stereotypes “poor people don’t like to cook” and only like junk food. A report from Washington, DC-based organization Cooking Matters, found that while assumptions about the eating habits of low-income Americans were rampant, the reality is poor families most often cook dinner at home, mostly from scratch, and are highly interested in making healthy meals. The stumbling block for many families is the price. An article by Jesse Bauman entitled “Poor People Can’t Cook and Other Myths,” published on Food Secure Canada’s website, reflects similar data for Canadians. In a small survey that asked low-income people about their food skills, Bauman found those who have to carefully budget a meal plan simply can’t afford to eat out. Instead, he writes, people “have developed many of the skills necessary to make the best of their situation.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the food bank discussion will go away anytime soon. Every month, more than 830,000 Canadians access a food bank, according to HungerCount 2013, a report created by Food Banks Canada. Of these 37 percent are children. And, despite being once envisioned as a short-term solution to economic crisis in the ’80s, food bank usage is on the rise. “Within the food bank network,” HungerCount 2013 reports, “crisis has become the norm. Canadians continue to give generously, and food banks continue to stock, give, and re-stock.” While Gray would like to see food banks become obsolete—The Stop advocates for increases to social assistance and minimum wage that would put solid safety nets in place—she agrees they’re double-edged swords. “Food banks are still around because people are still hungry,” says Gray. “Our food bank is busy and thriving because food banks don’t work as a means of addressing poverty and hunger.”

Illustration by Caitlin Taguibao

On the front lines of the North’s rising food crisis

A young, Arctic Bay protestor, about as tall as a baby tree, appears snug in pink mittens and a fur-trimmed coat. Their hands clasp onto a rectangular-shaped cardboard sign: “I need milk.” For Nunavut residents, two litres of milk can cost as much as $14.

Canada’s North is in crisis. The short phrase “food insecurity”—as blunt as the high-price stickers—comes with a complex history of the North’s experience with Westernization, poverty, and isolation. The term itself refers to inaccessibility of healthy and affordable food. In Nunavut, there is a 70 percent rate of household food insecurity, over eight times higher than Canada’s average household. Essentially, this means many Nunavummiut go hungry every day. And on June 9, 2012, they decided to stop suffering in silence.

That day, 30 members of Feeding my Family, a Facebook community of Northerners founded in that same month to bring awareness to the area’s high food costs, took their protests offline. Gathered in front of Iqaluit’sbig box grocery store,NorthMart, the group cheered, chanted, and waved protest signs. Within four days of the inaugural peaceful protest, Feeding my Family’s online member count jumped from around 4,000 to 19,000—over half of Nunavut’s population.Two years and five protests later, the Facebook page is updated daily with posts from Northern citizens and angered Canadians who want to help.

Feeding My Family creator,Leesee Papatsie, who launched the group as an answer to the territory’s outrageous food costs, says that she expected to only do one protest. However, after the first protest, community members expressed a desire to do more. If you were to look up the word “protest” in an Inuit dictionary, she says, there would be no definition. Though speaking against injustice is “not traditionally who [Inuit] are,” she adds, “You look at those prices and think, ‘Who in the world would put those prices?’”

Today, the group continues as a “wall” of shame: members post pictures of food, household items, diapers, hygiene products, showing their high costs. On May 29, 2012, Papatsie shared some of the group’s first photos showing the high cost of food in Nunavut: $16 for cranberry juice, $11.65 for four litres of milk and $13.69 for 2.2 kilograms of flour. Feeding My Family now has 21,000 members. Yet, prices have not improved. In September 2014, for instance, a member posted a photo of an Orville Redenbacher’s 10-bowl pop-up popcorn that cost $20.59. Ontarians have the luxury of visiting their local Walmart to buy the same product for $6.97.

Papatsie says she understands food costs in the North will be higher—they’re in an isolated area with scant resources for infrastructure—but she maintains retailers hold some responsibility when it comes to pricing: “They are ripping people off. Period.”

Chris Klar, who manages one of the two independently-owned retail stores in Arviat, Nunavut, located in the Kivalliq Region, says that isn’t the case. At Klar’s store, customers can buy a pound of lean ground beef for $4.99, an 18 carton of eggs for $4.99 and four litres of milk for $6.79. This is, he adds, thanks to competition—unlike other Northern retailers that might be the only store in the community, his store, Eskimo Point Lumber Supply, can abide by the laws of supply and demand.

Even so, Klar contends many people who complain about food prices in the North are actually misinformed. Some foods, he adds, such as flavoured water and most “junk food,” are not covered under the Nutrition North Canada (NNC) federal subsidy program. Introduced in April 2011, NCC replaced the former Food Mail program.NCC differs in two key areas: unlike Food Mail, it only subsidizes so-called “healthy” foods, and, also unlike Food Mail, it passes those savings directly to the retailers. Subsidies are based on the cost per kilogram of a particular food, multiplied by the kilograms of the product. Stores are supposed to pass savings onto the customers. Some indicate what a product would cost if there were no subsidy; others don’t.

Reasons or blame aside, some just want to help. The grassroots group Helping Our Northern Neighbours works with members of Feeding My Family to connect those seeking food donations with those eager to donate. As of September 2014, the group’s donor list (those waiting for donations) consisted of 106 families. It includes elders, single parents, couples with children, grandparents raising grandchildren, and extended families living together, according to B.C. resident and group director Jennifer Gwilliam. “We need to get our name and mission out there so that we can reach many more potential donors,” Gwilliam says, “I hate having to make people wait a long time for help.” People are often desperate, she adds, and many tell her they go without food for a day or more so they can feed their children. Some days an entire family may not eat.

The Government of Nunavut has also created an initiative to alleviate hunger and poverty. The Nunavut Food Security Coalition—which includes Feeding My Family and grocery chain North West Company—released the Nunavut Food Security Strategy and Action Plan in May 2014. The plan is designed to “provide Nunavummiut with an adequate supply of safe, culturally preferable, affordable, nutritious food” and to also promote traditional values and  and environmental sustainability. The Coalition has identified six focus points, including food production and legislation, alongside several objectives, such as enhancing school nutrition programming.

Sara Statham, the territorial food security coordinator for the Government of Nunavut, admits there are still a lot of “big picture items” that need to be addressed—such as the loss of traditional culture—but believes the plan is a start. Grocery stores, for example, she says, are relatively new in the North. Papatsie adds it’s a common misconception for southerners to think the Inuit can easily harvest food.Many are finding it harder to keep up with the demanding prices of harvesting country food, such as caribou, char and berries. Foundational changes must be made, says Statham. “But in the meantime,” she adds, “we can do what we can in terms of ensuring people have access to resources that can help them in the short term.”

In Feb. 2014, Samara, a Canadian research group, nominated Papatsie for their “Everyday Political Citizen Award.” Papatsie accepted the nomination with hesitation. “I didn’t create Feeding My Family for me. I created it for the people. The people who keep posting pictures and the people who keep the site alive,” she says. “I know kids go hungry daily. I know people struggle to put food on the table meal-by-meal, day-by-day. That’s who the site is created for.”