Just north of where Yorkville meets The Annex, on the edge of a neighborhood called Summerhill, the Avenue Road Food Bank usually provides groceries for 700 people a week. In mid-November, the numbers jumped to 950. On a Wednesday afternoon, clients start to line up at about one o’clock, even though the doors don’t open until three. A lot of people are going hungry in this affluent part of Toronto.
Most of the clients who use the food bank live in our neighborhood, others work here, and some are students. If you lived nearby, you would recognize people. Some of them have used the food bank since it opened in 2018. Long-term clients are more likely to use food banks because they rely on disability, or another type of social assistance, as their main source of income. Disability support tops out at $1368 a month, or $16,416 annually. In Toronto, the poverty line is $24,720; the deep poverty line is $18,540. For people who rely on social assistance that keeps them well below the poverty line, food banks are a lifeline.
Most of the people who use the food bank, though, work full-time. Ivan is from Kyiv. He came to Canada two and a half years ago. His first job was at a factory that makes plastics, where he worked twenty hours a day. When he quit that job, exhausted, he started using the food bank. After a few weeks, he also started volunteering. “I can help people here, because other Ukrainians use the food bank, and I can speak to them.” He continued volunteering even after he got a new job at Walmart. Every Wednesday afternoon he stands next to Bob, one of the food bank founders, handing out beef or chicken. Ivan kept volunteering even after he took a second job, working construction at night to pay for a heart operation his mother needed back home. “The people here at the food bank, this is my Canadian family. I love the people here; this is where I feel at home.”
Food prices have risen 21.4% in the past three years. According to Canada’s Food Price Report, an individual spent about $445 a month on food in 2024. Ivan estimates that after expenses like rent, internet, cellphone, and TTC, he has about $150 a month to spend on food. He gets another $50 worth of groceries each week from the food bank.
Daniela and her husband are also new to Canada. They have been here two years, but they only started using the food bank four months ago. They didn’t want to ask for help, she tells me, they “wanted to do things the right way.” But working 40 hours a week in a warehouse, at the minimum wage of $17.20 per hour, her husband makes $2044 a month after taxes. Their rent is $1400. Daniela used to work too, in a restaurant, but she quit when their baby was born. “It would be very, very hard without help from the food bank.” What Daniela really wants to talk about, though, is how much she loves Canada. We are outside on a cold day and, as she pulls her hood closer, she tells me how much she loves this weather. She also loves the feeling of safety she has here.
About 60% of the food we offer each week comes from Daily Bread and Second Harvest. Those two organizations are funded by private donations and corporate partnerships. Daily Bread gets donations from food manufacturers, and they partner with Ontario farmers to take produce that would otherwise be discarded. Second Harvest is focused on rescuing and redistributing surplus food to reduce food waste. They provide some of our fresh produce, but we also get things like instant soup packets, which are popular because they make a quick hot meal, even if they aren’t very high in nutrition.
Both trucks normally show up at about 8:30 Wednesday morning with pallets and boxes of food. Volunteers move quickly to get the food off the trucks and into the church hall, before settling into the longer job of sorting and setting up that will turn the sanctuary into a temporary supermarket. By the time people enter in the afternoon, the food is piled on tables around the room, and there’s a small play area set up for children.
The volunteers come regularly, and so do most of the clients. One client’s husband is dying of cancer, and a volunteer slips her an extra apple as she asks after him. It’s a paltry offering, but it gives her a chance to squeeze her hand. A few minutes later there’s a new face, a woman without a coat. It’s her first time at the food bank, and one of the volunteers steers her into a hallway where we keep some winter clothes. When she leaves, she’s wearing a down jacket, along with a hat and gloves. When she returns the following week, she twirls to show how well it fits.
The other 40% of the food we give away is paid for by money we raise ourselves. We spend most of that money on beef, chicken, cheese, eggs, milk, and bread. We keep an emergency supply of tuna in a small closet. In July, we spent just over $12,000, but we went over $16,000 in October. In the last few years, the number of people using the food bank has climbed to a peak in March before slowly tapering off as summer approaches. Each year, though, it peaks higher than it did the year before.
Please consider donating to the Avenue Road Food Bank.
Courtney Jung is a professor at the University of Toronto and a volunteer at the Avenue Road Food Bank.
