Calgary food banks help, but not with food insecurity: expert
Posted Apr 6, 2023 10:34 am.
Last Updated Apr 6, 2023 10:35 am.
Neighbours helping neighbours combat hunger.
Calgary grassroots community food banks help communities combat hunger, but do they help relieve food insecurity in Canada?
Some like Love with Humanity Association, which sets up community cupboards, and the Forest Lawn Community Food Bank have been expanding citywide.
“When it comes to the milk, we try to see how long this one would last. So this one, for example, you dilute it when you need it with the water,” Gar Gar said.
Gar Gar founded the Forest Lawn Bank. He says some families need food while waiting for a hamper from the Calgary Food Bank.
“The biggest need that we always look for, we hope, number one, to sustain it to see it running and at least to help one family in need even just once a month or twice a month and to do that, we can’t do it without donations,” he said.
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Elaine Power, a professor at the school of kinesiology and health studies at Queen’s University, has been doing work relating to food insecurity for 30 years.
She says she appreciates the heartfelt gesture of grassroots food banks, but the initiatives will not be able to end food insecurity for the millions of Canadians that face it.
“The only thing that the research has shown that reduces food insecurity is income, more income for people,” Power said.
“And if you look at the rates of social assistance, for example, and minimum wage jobs, and people working in the gig economy, and you look at their income and compare it to the basic cost of living for shelter and food, it’s easy to understand why there’s so many people that are food insecure, because it just doesn’t add up.”
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Power says that food banks do allow people to be less hungry, but they don’t dent the number of food insecure.
Helping people in his neighbourhood be less hungry is something that Gar Gar is helping to accomplish with the Forest Lawn Food Bank.
“We got the concept of grassroots that it takes a village to raise a child. I myself might be in the same position tomorrow,” Gar Gar said.
