Why are food banks so Canadian?

Why doesn't everyone have enough to eat?

From a Storm to a Hurricane.

Culture is a mosaic of language, music, art, and food. People build culture on a foundation of eating well, with regional specialties that bring people together to bond over the shared experience of breaking bread, where a sense of thanksgiving runs through them, fueling camaraderie and creativity.

“Canadian culture” is not a thing, as Trudeaus, now and then, has told us we have no core identity. In a tax haven that loves cars, real estate, mining, and oil the most, with strikingly different regional features, it isn’t easy to tie people together with a single type of food. Which is how we ended up with a sad sludge of french fries smothered in curds and gravy as a stand-in for a national dish.

For me, it’s not poutine. It’s a patty. The warm, golden hand pies of flaky pastry I found all over Toronto, in little warming ovens, ready to eat. I ate countless spicy beef patties on streetcars in the 80s - a quick dinner some nights moving between jobs. It was my little treat in that mean decade that gave rise to food banks, a temporary measure that’s never gone away.

In fact, there were more visits to food banks in Canada this year than ever before: 1,462,795. 1 in 7 Canadians is food insecure. More people are going without. Is this Canadian culture?