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Hello and welcome to Best Of Maclean’s.

I run a food bank. We’ve seen a 60 per cent increase in demand.

I’ve been working at the Mississauga Food Bank for 13 years. I started as the director of marketing and fund development, and I’m now coming up on five years as CEO. Our work has never been more urgent than it is right now. We’ve seen a 60 per cent increase in demand since the pandemic began. In the past, we were growing proactively, expanding our services to serve more people and reaching out to those living in poverty who didn’t know a food bank was available to support them. That’s very different from how we’ve had to adjust recently.

Throughout the pandemic, the need for food banks steadily increased. We used to serve about 19,000 people per year—now it’s more than 30,000. In October, we had the highest demand on record with more than 11,000 visitors to one of the food banks in our network.

Over the past 12 months, as food prices rose, every month has been a record-breaking one. On average, we’ve seen a 30 per cent increase in new food bank users during the pandemic. Everyday people access our services: about 75 per cent of people who use the food bank have a source of income, whether that’s through employment, social assistance or disability benefits. And this is the first time we’ve had a significant number of people tell us that it’s the cost of food, specifically, that has put them over the edge. A parent of five children who comes to our food bank told us that even when they do have money to shop for their own groceries, they end up leaving half the cart behind because things are too expensive. The weight of bills combined with rising grocery prices is crushing. Like many people living in poverty, this family is stuck in a loop: either they earn enough money to disqualify them for any support when they still need it, or they don’t make enough to cover basic expenses.

In the past, for folks living in poverty, there was still enough room to cut costs in certain places, shuffle things around, and maybe make ends meet. But now that things cost so much more than they used to, people don’t have that little bit to borrow from one pocket to put into another. On average, grocery prices have increased by around 12 per cent—the biggest surge since the early ’80s—and staples have become even more expensive. This year alone, the price of fresh fruit and meat has gone up about 10 per cent. People have no choice but to turn to food banks...

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