Living on a food bank diet - Stacey Lavallie

Across Ontario every month, thousands of people have to make the choice to pay rent rather than buying food, and must rely on the generosity of food banks and soup kitchens.

For one week, 26 people in Greater Sudbury pretended to be one of these people through the Sudbury Social Planning Council’s Do the Math Challenge. Participants in the challenge experience what happens when good, nutritious food is cut from the menu.

I am one of those 26 people.

On Oct. 1, we all made a donation to the food bank to cover the cost of our food for one week. We left the food bank with an emergency three-day kit — and had to make it stretch seven.

Through sharing the experience, we’re raising awareness about what people on the lower end of the poverty scale are eating, and how it affects their lives.

Alice Haasdyk, a nutritionist at Sudbury Regional Hospital, and her husband, Laurentian University professor Ernst Gerhardt, are doing a lot better than I am. They think they will make it to Friday, when the challenge ends.

Haasdyk estimates that people living off a three-day food kit are short anywhere from 300 to 1,000 calories a day.
Vitamins and minerals intakes is also drastically low.

The only daily recommendation people are reaching is sodium, but we’re not taking in as much food as we should.

There is a lack of vegetables and fruit — we were given one can of vegetables — and it seems to be one of the things most difficult for participants to cope with. By Tuesday, four people had dropped out. Headaches, dizziness and lack of attention were all causes.

The host of CBC Radio’s Morning North, Markus Schwabe, is taking part, along with his wife and two of his four children, ages 14 and 12. By the end of the weekend, they went shopping because they needed food for the kid’s lunches. They can’t take peanut products to school, and prickly pear jam, I hear, is to die for — as in the kids will die before they eat it. So now the kids are having good lunches for school.

Through participating in this challenge, we are all now hyper-aware that if we were in a poverty situation, those kids would have nothing. Having experienced what hunger is doing to his ability to focus and pay attention, Schwabe said he understands why hungry kids aren’t doing as well in school as properly nourished kids.

While we talked about the prickly pear jam, Schwabe pointed out that many people donate food to food banks they do not want anymore.

The challenge has changed how we all look at food. I made crackers from flour and water. Gerhardt tried to make mayonnaise, but it “looked like puke.” If we ruin our dinner on a normal day, we toss it out and try again. But ruining dinner on this kind of food budget is catastrophic, not just a set back.

The food those living in poverty are able to get is not healthy for a long-term diet. The long-term consequences of food like this is disease. This isn’t a knock against the food banks, which are valuable, but they can only give what they have.

To track how participants are doing, visit http://dothemathchallenge.blogspot.com or on Facebook, search for Do the Math Challenge.

Stacey Lavellie is the web content co-ordinator for Northern Life.