Last week, I visited my local outdoor community fridge to drop off a few items. The fridge is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Anyone can take food from the fridge at any time, and anyone, including businesses and residents, can donate. Most times, I drop food off without encountering anyone. Sometimes I’ve chatted with a few folks, maybe three or four, who have thanked me for donating and shared their struggles with food insecurity.
When I visited last Friday, there was a crowd of about 30 people surrounding the fridge. At first I thought it was a scheduled donation from a local organization, but I quickly realized that wasn’t the case. These were people eagerly awaiting food drop-offs, likely because the fridge was empty (the crowd was so big I couldn’t even see inside its glass doors). I said hello and asked the group what they were most looking for. One man, standing near the back of the crowd, said: “We’ll take just about anything you’ve got.” I left and promised to return with more.
This isn’t just happening in small communities like mine. It’s happening all across Canada, in cities big and small, and it’s only getting worse. At the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, CEO David Long is seeing triple the number of visitors compared to five years ago. For the first time, many of his clients are people with jobs and decent salaries who, after paying for rent and transportation, don’t have enough to cover groceries. In this first-person account for Maclean’s, Long details what it’s like running Vancouver’s biggest food bank, and what needs to happen to address Canada’s food insecurity crisis.
—Arisa Valyear, newsletter editor
