The Star
This is the time of year when the three of us turn off CBC Radio.
We can’t bear to listen to the Sounds of the Season’s cheerful promotion of food bank donations.
We are not Grinches or Scrooges. We most assuredly want everyone in Canada not to have to worry about putting food on the table.
But we object to our national broadcaster helping to perpetuate the myth that if we all just “pitch in” for food banks, then we can “end hunger.” This comforting fable is a convenient smokescreen for government inaction on poverty and the intersecting gender, racist and ableist inequities that disproportionately keep women, BIPOC, and people with disabilities in poverty and food insecurity. These are problems that food bank donations can never fix.
Being worried about being able to buy groceries, having to eat foods with too few vital nutrients, or not having enough to eat because of lack of money is a condition known as food insecurity. More than four million people in Canada, including more than a million children, are food insecure — and that was before the COVID pandemic.
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