Successful food banks, unsuccessful cities

The concept of food banks was first developed to be a stop-gap measure against hunger, especially for families with children. Local charities would collect boxed cereal and milk, bread, peanut butter, canned beans and pasta to help families facing hunger, just for a short term.

That isn't how things have evolved, is it?

Today, across the country, food banks are now too large a part of a broader strategy for coping with poverty. Depending on how you look at things, either the coping strategy is failing, or food banks have become a great success.

In Red Deer, after more than doubling during the past recession, demand at our food bank has settled back and has remained more or less steady at something like 50 per cent higher than it was before the recession hit.

Last year, 16,500 people made use of the food bank in Red Deer, some of them multiple times. Since our food bank also serves people from communities in our immediate region, we can surmise that roughly 10 per cent (or perhaps less) of our local population required help to keep from going hungry at one time or another in the past year.

That's way too high.

Nationally, while the Canadian economy continues to make small gains, the number of people going to a food bank in March 2013 was more than 833,000, a drop from just over 872,000 in March of 2012.

I know this is poor math, but let's use this to make what comparisons we can. Extrapolated over a year, that national monthly figure works out to roughly a million people — or just under three per cent of the Canadian population.

While admitting these are rough figures, the comparison is still rather jarring.

Years ago, while Stockwell Day was Red Deer's MLA, he used an economics model to explain food bank growth. You could view it as a success story, I suppose.

He said demand for a free product would grow infinitely, as long as the supply lasted. The Red Deer Food Bank was simply being successful in growing with this demand, but ultimately would fail, since supply could not possibly grow infinitely.

If my math is poor, Day's understanding of economics and poverty was even worse. People do not go to the food bank because the food is free, they go because they cannot afford to buy food. And people need food to live.

Whatever, in the decades that have followed, the group of Canadians with direct contact with a food bank has grown. Two years ago, the national office of the Salvation Army hired Angus Reid to determine what portion of Canada had direct experience with homelessness and hunger at some point in their lives.

The answer: about one in four. That's really high.

About seven per cent of respondents in the survey said they had been homeless at some point in their lives, and had either slept on the street, or made use of a shelter. About 25 per cent said they made use of a food bank, either now or at some time in their lives.

That's with a three-per-cent national usage rate.

My math is either unbelievably poor, or at our local rate of food bank use, we will surpass the national figure very soon, if we haven't already. One in four? That is not success.

What do we do with this information?

I believe the success of food banks has to include an admission of failure in other areas. We cannot accept the poor economics of supply and demand where food is concerned, but we also cannot grow the food bank indefinitely.

One food bank in Nashville has a kitchen where people devise recipes from whatever donations come in. They cook meals in an industrial pressure cooker and flash freezes them (these meals store for a year or more), and distribute free nutritious heat-and-eat meals.

I don't think we want to go there.

Poverty, housing, minimum wage, living wage, illiteracy, social supports, none of these are the the purview of cities. But cities are where all the services in these areas are delivered. It's where these issues live.

Therefore, cities do need to be at the table where they are discussed. Cities should not just get behind the non-profits who advocate on issues around poverty, homelessness and hunger, but lead the efforts to make decision-makers at higher levels of government pay better attention.

Changes in quality of life affect how cities grow, and determine whether cities prosper or whither.

If we can't convince our local civic leaders to take the lead in this, we are left with needing to continuously restock our food banks. That's not success — for food banks or for cities.