Freedom 90 commits to raising its voice to demand an end
to poverty and an end
to the need for food banks and emergency meal programs in
Ontario. |
| December 26, 2014 |
| The Hamilton Spectator - Howard Elliott - Editorial |
| Instead of battling food insecurity, let's fix it |
 Food insecurity is a useful term in many ways. It refers to people and situations where an adequate supply of decent food is absent, or where it may be available one day without the knowledge that it will be available the next day, week or month.
But while it is useful, it is also inadequate. It doesn't give an accurate sense of the visceral situation for people who have to decide whether to pay bills or buy food. Or people who are compelled to serve their kids pasta with ketchup instead of sauce. Many of us have known lean times. Not so many know what it's like to be consistently hungry due to our life circumstance.
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| Click here to read the full article |
| December 18, 2014 |
| The Hamilton Spectator - Peter Graefe - McMaster University |
| Wynne has tools to take a bite out of hunger |
 As Christmas approaches, food drives are popping up everywhere. One cannot help but be touched by the sense of solidarity and justice behind these efforts, which respond to a real crisis of hunger in our community. But what if they are the wrong tool for the job?
Food banks were created in the 1980s as an emergency response to hunger. By 2014 they are a permanent fixture, a parallel food system to the grocery store. Food is gathered at multiple locations, shipped, sorted, stocked and distributed. Countless paid and volunteer hours are devoted to this work, as well as work interviewing clients at intake, applying for funding and reporting on opportunities.
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| Click here to read the full article |
| December 18, 2014 |
| Oceanside Star - Brian Wilford |
| Why do we need food banks? |
 Graham Riches was teaching at the University of Regina in 1983 when the province opened its first food bank.
"I was curious because I had no idea what a food bank was," he recalls. "They told me and I thought: Well, that's odd in the bread basket of the world and in a country with a well-developed social safety net."
Riches, retired in Qualicum Beach as Professor Emeritus and former director of the School of Social Work at the University of British Columbia, is one of the world's foremost experts on hunger and the right to food.
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| Click here to read the full article |
| January 14, 2015 |
| Times Colonist - Trevor Hancock - University of Victoria |
| B.C. should guarantee right to food security |
 Food is not only a necessity, it is a right under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and several other international conventions that Canada has signed. Yet since the first food bank in B.C. opened more than 30 years ago, they have become a permanent fixture. Which means that hunger and malnutrition have become accepted as a permanent feature of Canadian society and we have established an institutionalized charitable response.
The UN's Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, in his 2013 report on Canada to the UN Human Rights Council, noted that while "Canada has a duty to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food ... Canada does not currently afford constitutional or legal protection of the right to food." In such a rich country and province, this is embarrassing.
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| Click here to read the full article |
| January 17, 2015 |
| Times Colonist - Graham Riches - University of British Columbia |
| Answer to hunger is to raise incomes |
| I wish Trevor Hancock had gone one step further.
While the answer to hunger and food insecurity might appear to be food, it is not. It is a matter of income poverty and the need for adequate wages and welfare benefits.
The 2005 B.C. provincial health officer's annual report made this point, stating that the inability "to afford nutritious food in B.C. includes higher costs of a basic 'market basket' of items, higher housing costs, inadequate social assistance rates, increased levels of homelessness and a minimum wage level that can result in even full-time workers ... falling below the federal low-income cut-off." This analysis reflects federal and international data.
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| Click here to read the full response |
| December 11, 2014 |
| Rabble - Cathy Crowe's Blog |
| Socks are not enough: Social justice lies upstream from charity |
 There is a parable called Upstream Downstream that has guided me in my work as a street nurse. It's about visiting health care workers in a developing country. Standing by a riverbed they suddenly see bodies floating down the river. Frantically, they start pulling the bodies out and begin resuscitation. When they look up they see a continual flow of bodies down the river. They call for help and keep pulling the bodies onto the riverbank and apply CPR. Finally, one of them asks: "Who or what is upstream pushing the bodies into the river?" |
| Click here to read the full blog post |
| December 19, 2014 |
| Upstream - Rachel Engler-Stringer - University of Saskatchewan |
| An Upstream Take on Food Bank Giving ... |
 Here's what we know about the situation of food insecurity in Canada. According to the most recent national data, 12.6% of Canadians or 2.8 million adults and 1.6 million children experience some degree of food insecurity (and this number is much higher in Northern communities). Food insecurity was significantly higher in 2012 than it was in 2008. Although an under-representation of the problem, we often look to food bank usage as a sign of growing food insecurity. The 2014 HungerCount report, published by Food Banks Canada, found that 841,191 people use a food bank monthly, which is 25% higher than in 2008.
This is an important problem with long term health and mental health consequences, and I know that food insecurity to this degree is both unacceptable and totally preventable. My work and the way I live my life has allowed me to see up close the consequences of food insecurity, and the immense effort parents living in poverty go to in order to try to make ends meet for their family.
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| Click here to read the full article |
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