Struggling to afford rent, groceries, more hungry Montrealers turn to dumpster divers for food
‘By dumpster diving you’re redistributing the wealth,’ dumpster diver says
One by one, the people from the crowd unload stacks of boxes from a white van. Across the street, a bustling trio of volunteers positions the boxes teeming with produce on a church lawn. Tonight's harvest serves up tomatoes, lettuce, grapes and squash.
Guillaume Girard, the man who is feeding the crowd, says the turnout tonight in Montreal's Petite-Patrie neighbourhood is more than 50 people. A few weeks ago, he says 100 showed up. On other nights, they meet in front of the abandoned, graffitied Esposito grocery store in the neighbourhood of Saint-Michel, a few blocks away.
Standing by a shopping cart filled to the brim with baguettes, Girard holds up a flashlight in the dark. "One sliced loaf and one bakery loaf each," he says, and the queue of people moves forward, each making the rounds, filling a grocery bag. Some ask for a second go.
There are distributions almost every day of the week, depending on what he and his volunteers can muster. Some of the food is collected from bakeries at the end of the day. Some of the fruits and vegetables are what food banks were set to discard.
The other main source of food is no secret: Montreal's dumpsters.
In recent months, the queues have only gotten longer with lots of new arrivals — foreign students, asylum seekers, even refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, he said.
"Rent takes up a lot of people's money, so there's not much left over for groceries," said Girard. "The big rise in costs started in the pandemic and it hasn't stopped."
Recycled harvest
Girard dumpster dives daily. For the past 15 years he has been sourcing food from dumpsters all over the city and sharing the spoils, from Pointe-Claire to Repentigny, from Laval to Montreal's South Shore.
Mostly nocturnal, he prefers to collect the discarded harvest at night. Dépanneurs, pharmacies and grocery stores are best, he says, adding he avoids restaurants — which unlike the other stores, don't wrap the food they throw out, leaving it exposed to the elements.
Seeing how the food system overproduces and discards perfectly good food while people go hungry is what got him searching through the city's trash for what could be salvaged, he said.
"By dumpster diving you're redistributing the wealth," said Girard. "I sometimes get quantities of food that are really industrial — several tonnes."
On Monday, while families gather around the supper table for Thanksgiving feasts and some food aid organizations like food banks close their doors, Girard may return to the street sharing the bounty.
"A lot of people count on us," he said.
'Living is a luxury'
Cindy Shaw, a double amputee, rode her electric wheelchair all the way from the borough of Anjou to get some food. She and her son, Jeffery, have been coming for the last three months and they've come several times this week.
Unable to work because of her medical condition, Shaw says she is having a harder and harder time stretching her welfare cheques.
"We can't make it," said Shaw. "Everyone needs to eat. I'm on disability, and we don't get much from the government. [With] the prices of rent now, the money that they give us to live on is not much, just to get by and pay the bills. Living is a luxury."
Holding back tears, Jeffery says he recently lost his job at a glass factory.
"We have to resort to scraps, whatever the stores don't want to sell anymore," he said.
Eating food from the dumpster was a lot for him to stomach at first, but he says it no longer bothers him.
"It gives food that's going into landfills a second chance," he said. "There's food that's in the garbage that can feed a family of two."
An orderly in a long-term care home, Gigi Kerboud came straight after her shift to help dole out food.
"It's extraordinary … giving to others for free for nothing in return. It's very humane. I love seeing people smile, happy with what they are receiving," she said.
"Before it was mostly unhoused people, now it's more families and students."
Food system disconnect
A poverty report released last month by Food Banks Canada found that nearly 15 per cent of Quebecers are food insecure. While that number is lower than in other provinces, Quebecers spend 12.4 per cent of their household income on food, among the highest rates in the country. At the same time, food prices there have shot up by 9.3 per cent over the past year, the second highest in Canada.
Wade Thorhaug, executive director of Food Secure Canada, says 2022 was one of the most difficult years in terms of food security in recent years, with 2023 possibly shaping up to be even worse.
"I think to me it highlights a huge disconnect in how we structure our food system," said Thorhaug. "We should push retailers to have a system for distributing these surplus foods, but we don't. There's no responsibility for retailers to do anything but throw these things in the garbage."
Waste aside, people need to have money in their pockets to buy food, something that is now beyond many Canadians. He says a universal basic income would go a long way toward giving people the means to feed themselves as current income support policies are too convoluted and narrowly focused, leaving many food-insecure people without access to aid.
"We haven't necessarily progressed much from the Middle Ages if all we're doing to tackle food insecurity for the people in the lowest incomes is to give them the scraps that nobody else wants."
According to a June 2022 Recyc-Québec report using data from 2019, 1.2 million tonnes of edible food — or 16 per cent of food entering the bio-food system — is lost or wasted in the province.
A 2019 report by Second Harvest, a food rescue organization, found that 58 per cent of all food produced in Canada is lost or wasted.
On Thursday, federal Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the country's five largest grocery chains — Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart — delivered plans to stabilize food prices to the federal government that include more discounts, price freezes and price-matching campaigns.
The Competition Bureau reported in June that Canada's grocery sector lacks competition and is dominated by Loblaw, Sobeys and Metro. It called on the government to encourage new market entrants to bring down prices.
In August, the price of food purchased from stores increased by 6.9 per cent compared to last year. While that's substantially higher than the overall inflation rate of four per cent, it's down from a recent high of more than 11 per cent.
Earlier this year, a parliamentary committee investigating grocery store giants for alleged price-gouging said Ottawa should consider hitting the companies with a windfall tax on excess profits if the Competition Bureau finds they were profiting excessively from food inflation.
WATCH | University of Ottawa students dumpster dive for ingredients:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
