When a food bank puts out a call for donations, Canadians may be motivated to share their boxes of mac n’ cheese, cans of baked beans, or schools of sardine tins that have been collecting dust in their pantry. But they shouldn’t fool themselves into believing that all food banks would welcome canned currency as a replacement for real dollars. Many food banks, soup kitchens, and school meal programs, like those operating in Northern Canada, would much prefer it if southern Canadians kept their lunch but shared their lunch money. They need financial donations so that they can serve a growing food insecure population; support a healthier community; and continue to play a central role in the preservation of culture through dietary traditions and lifestyles.

In southern Canada, food prices are generally stable and spike only when a cold snap affects the cost of imports from warmer climate countries, or when the Canadian dollar plummets. In Northern Canada, however, store-bought foods are flown-in and arrive to market with an outrageous price tag already attached. The high-cost of shipping heavily impacts donation packages too, sometimes exceeding the price of the canned items themselves because of their heavy weight and bulk. Food banks in Nunavut could make better use of these costs to serve their community on a regular basis.

⦁ Food banks and soup kitchens can purchase bulk or wholesale items at a fraction of the cost of buying and shipping donated retail food items.

Financial donations enable food programs to make locally-based decisions on how best to allocate their funds. Food banks can supplement a single family’s meal, or soup kitchens can purchase raw or bulk ingredients so that they can cook a meal for a larger group. Dollar for dollar it makes more fiscal sense to put funding into the hands of food banks that can make the money stretch instead of wasting funds on non-edible shipment costs.

⦁ Food banks and school meal programs can use monetary donations to ensure they support their community without major disruptions.

As food insecurity and poverty continues to rise in Nunavut, more pressure is placed on food programs to serve larger numbers of vulnerable people, and increasingly, more children. The Niqinik Nuatsivik Nunavut Food Bank is a good example of this growing need: it started serving 30 families when it first opened its doors in 2001, and now works hard to ensure that it has enough to provide for 120 families every two weeks. Rising food insecurity is also affecting school programs like the one at the Sam Pudlat school in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, that recently ran out of funding to provide hot breakfasts and healthy snacks for it’s students.   

Financial donations would enable food banks to operate at higher capacities, and still have some funding to cover operational costs or unexpected emergency funds, like a burnt out stove element, or when the Canadian dollar drops drastically.

Northern food insecurity and poverty resulted from various socio-economic, political and colonial factors, including 30-year-long animal welfare campaigns that curtailed the Northern fur trade, and the primary loss of hunting and land skills, and the transfer of that knowledge to the next generation of Inuit, because of the high cost of hunting equipment, supplies and fuel. These and other circumstances have led to a ‘nutrition transition’ to processed, high-fructose, zero caloric foods due in part to cost, access, and an unfamiliarity with some raw unprocessed ingredients on store shelves. Western diseases like obesity, heart disease and diabetes are appearing in many Northern Inuit communities, in which case cheap, non-perishable foods from the south become wasteful and potentially harmful to people developing western nutrition-based illnesses.

⦁ Food banks are best equipped to understand the nutritional needs of local families and children, as well as and individuals’ health requirements, dietary needs, or personal preferences. Funding food banks helps to cut down on worsening health conditions by removing the possibility that shipments of high-fructose foods, for example, end up in the hands of pre-diabetics.  Financial donations to school nutrition programs, like the Tusarvik School breakfast program in Naujaat, Nunavut, can be used to purchase fresh produce and healthy snacks for students who would otherwise not have access to them.

Food is an important element of identity and culture. When southern Canadians ship food up north, they unwittingly attach invisible strings to their packages. These food donations could result in a drastic alteration of the Inuit culture through an introduction to “acceptable” western dietary preferences and practices. Assimilated food customs and preparation methods can alter local opinion about traditional foods as being backwards or un-modern.

⦁ Food banks play an important role in cultural preservation

Food banks can preserve cooking knowledge, dietary customs and habits. They can minimize wasted food (and associated shipping losses) by feeding foods that are interesting, customary, or those that match a local preference. Soup kitchens can prepare and share recipes that do not require western cooking knowledge or that promote new-age health kicks.

⦁ Food banks play an important role in local hunting and economy

Food banks can purchase locally-available country food, like hunted seal or caribou, or they can subsidize a family’s meals with traditional bannock bread. Inuit children and youth are transitioning to the western diet faster than any other age group and therefore food banks could share or prepare meals that expose younger generations to “develop a taste for their own foods“.

Shipping cans to food banks in Nunavut simply does not make cents

Pantry castaways don’t fit the bill for every food bank, especially those that serve communities outside of a local food drive perimeter.

Shipping food to the north is a short-term Band-Aid solution to food insecurity, and is a waste of valuable funds. A family in southern Canada that buys $100 worth of food to ship to the north will likely have to pay more than $150 dollars in shipping costs. These are lost funds since the money could go further (and be spent more wisely) in the hands of food program managers. But the loss doesn’t stop there. Shipment costs are wasteful because southern shipments cannot take advantage of the Nutrition North Canada program (NCC), a federal government subsidy for commercial shipments of nutritious foods to the north. Local food programs across Nunavut can go beyond providing a single (and expensive) meal-in-a-box, if they are given the financial opportunity to do so. Southern Canadians need to put away the packing tape, and focus instead on putting the bank back into the food bank through hunger awareness campaigns like Feeding Nunavut’s Skip-a-Meal campaign.

Additional resources

Read Food Bank Canada’s HungerCount 2015, a report from an annual study of more than 4,000 food banks and programs in every province and territory across Canada.

Northern food banks and soup kitchens, rely on donations from people like you to serve the need in their communities. Please support their important work.