With food insecurity on the rise, Vancouver food groups innovate to fill the gap

More than 24 per cent of British Columbians are currently experiencing food insecurity, according to Food Bank B.C.’s latest Hunger Report released Dec. 1. With food costs 27 per cent higher than they were five years ago, the average family of four in Canada is expected to spend $994.63 more on food next year, according to Dalhousie University’s latest food price report.

And in Metro Vancouver, the latest Living Wage Report found that 36 per cent of employees made less than the living wage and face ongoing financial hardship. 

Local organizations and non-profits in the city say they are scrambling to keep up with the community’s most immediate needs, while trying to also address the root causes of food insecurity. 

“Our political machinery is still in the charity model, they're still reliant on the charity sector to solve hunger, and it's not working,” says Ian Marcuse, a community food organizer with the Vancouver Food Justice Coalition. “There is a strong movement, a growing movement, towards a recognition that governments have a legal responsibility to uphold the right to food, and that includes a right to food that is dignified and free of charity.”

What that looks like on a community level can be seen in Marcuse’s work with Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Networks, a collective of 19 community food organizations that tackle the issue of food insecurity on a neighbourhood level. One example is the bulk buying program run out of the Britannia Community Services Centre in the Grandview-Woodland neighbourhood where he lives.

Community members pay $15 a month to bulk buy produce like carrots and potatoes at a significantly lower cost than retail, and at a fresher quality because it’s direct wholesale that bypasses the grocery store shelves.

“For us it’s really about people coming together, pooling their resources and getting quality food,” says Cynthia Low, Britannia’s executive director. This model is also more empowering, she says, as it’s run by a team of volunteers with a variety of abilities and vulnerabilities, and keeping food distribution local makes it more physically accessible.

Given the level of need in Vancouver, the neighbourhood food networks are focused on basic food provision via food markets, bulk buying groups and community meals. But they are also working to build what Marcuse describes as “resilient food systems for all, through community development approaches.”

Those approaches include long-term investments into community gardens, community kitchens and skill-building workshops like canning and food preservation.

In October, local youth in Britannia’s Off the Grill program made Italian sausages, caprese skewers and kale caesar salad for more than 45 local community members. Along the way they learned how to shop, prepare, cook, and serve a meal while earning their Food Safe Certificates and learning about how to clean up properly and handle food safely.

Recently gifted 60 salmon from the Lake Babine Nation, the centre plans to run a canning workshop in February, an initiative similar to its urban fish smoking camp that ran for years in partnership with local schools. The neighbourhood is home to Vancouver’s highest population of Indigenous residents, and access to culturally important foods and skills in the area can be limited, says Low.

Keeping these types of initiatives afloat is an ongoing struggle, however, as budgets are strained and public funding is limited. 

On one end of the food security continuum are food banks and provision of emergency food, Marcuse explains. It then moves through a spectrum of urban agriculture, education and strong renewable food systems. On the other end is advocacy, policy work and systemic change, which is why the Vancouver Food Justice Coalition started, he says.

“It came together two years ago, looking at this poly-crisis we're facing — food inflation in particular, climate change issues, the pandemic, all of these issues which are creating increased inequality and rising food insecurity,” he says. “We looked at budgets as well, and realizing that oh my gosh, looking at this Vancouver budget in particular, there was so little money dedicated to food systems. And so we realized, it is time now to get more political.”

Many of these small neighbourhood organizations trying to tackle the root causes of hunger on a more systemic level are “barely hanging in there,” adds Marcuse.

Vancouver City Councillor Sean Orr says it’s remarkable what these organizations are accomplishing with “very little funding from federal, provincial or municipal” sources. 

“Five per cent, in fact, of the funding comes from government sources, which in my opinion is not enough, and we had a budget recently that pretty much froze all spending on that kind of thing. And their funding had already basically been frozen,” he told Vancity Lookout. “It’s just less than a million, but it's been less than a million for the last 10 years. So their funding has stayed the exact same [while] their costs have gone up.”

Despite the low level of funding, grassroots organizations still manage to eke out innovative ways to respond to local food insecurity.

On Dec. 2, a new charitable network launched called the Vancouver Food Recovery Network, which recovers and redistributes an estimated 400,000 pounds of surplus rescued food a month from places like hotels, grocery stores, wholesalers and caterers that would otherwise go to landfills.

Its four existing organizations — CityReach Care Society, Food Stash Foundation, Vancouver Food Runners, and Quest non-profit grocery markets — each tackle a different area of need.  

CityReach and Food Stash support people and families directly, and give to existing community organizations like women’s shelters and schools, whereas Food Runners operate something like a taxi service to pick up and deliver food directly to community service agencies. Quest runs a low-cost non-profit market from donated items where people can shop. 

“We wanted to make the public aware, donors aware, that there is this other approach to food accessibility, lowering food waste while feeding more people who are in need — in addition to the traditional food bank,” says Cheryl McManus, associate executive director of CityReach Care Society, one of four organizations in the network that serves more than 60,000 residents per week.

“We recognize this is a temporary solution. This is not the ideal. The ideal is that grocery prices come down, that suppliers, grocers, and farms are not producing such an excess surplus and poverty is reduced. It’s a whole network of things. That’s part of our work is advocacy, so challenging local, provincial and even federal governments to rethink the systems,” says McManus. 

“In the ideal, we don’t exist at all. The ideal is that people don’t need to rely on a food bank or on donated food, but there’s such a need right now and there’s so much food going to waste that we needed to do something about it.”