Food price fears no surprise to Saint John food bank
National survey found 24% worry about paying for groceries, change spending habits amid fluctuating prices
A new study that shows nearly one-quarter of Canadians are worried about how to pay for groceries comes as no surprise to the co-ordinator of a food bank in Saint John.
The Community Food Basket conducted its survey this summer and found almost half of its estimated 1,000 clients rely on the food they get from the service as their primary source of food each month, said David McCready.
"That is staggering," he said, noting when food banks were established in the 1980s, their mandate was to provide emergency food, enough for only three or four days.
The local survey also found 40 per cent of respondents, who have an average monthly household income of between $700 and $800, skip at least one meal a month and are hungry more than once a month, said McCready.
"So our clients are in a precarious position," he said.
The national survey, released by Dalhousie University researchers on Monday, found Canadians are spending more of their household incomes on food, due to rising costs, said lead researcher Sylvain Charlebois, dean of the faculty of management.
About 24 per cent of the more than 1,000 adults surveyed said they concerned about food security for their families, and more than 70 per cent of them said they are more concerned about food prices than they were a year ago, he said.
The findings also revealed more than half of the respondents changed the way they shop for groceries during the past 12 months because of fluctuations in the price of food, said Charlebois.
They have become more price conscious and are now looking at flyers for deals and stocking up on sale items, he said.
"We were expecting the Maritimes and the Prairies would be more hard hit because obviously [their economies haven't] been thriving as much, but surprisingly Ontario and Quebec, we found consumers there … have changed their habits more so than any other place in the country."
Shopping around isn't an option for many food bank clients because they can't afford transportation to wherever the sales are, McCready pointed out. "Many of our clients are limited to the convenience store down the street," he said.
And while the food bank has always shopped that way, looking for deals, its food costs are steadily rising, along with other costs, such as heat and electricity, while food and financial donations are dropping, said McCready. "We're struggling."
The food budget when he took the helm two years ago was $71,000, but it's projected to be $84,000 in 2017. "We are running at a deficit — and have been for a while," he said.
More difficult to feed families
"Certainly there's no doubt the cost of food is really impacting folks," said Anne Driscoll, of the Crescent Valley Resource Centre, and bulk purchasing is a "fabulous economical way to get fruits and vegetables at a low cost."
The program, started by the Community Health Centre at St. Joseph's Hospital, offers one bag of healthy food for $15 or two bags for $25.
Other food-related educational programs offered at the Crescent Valley Resource Centre, such as Savvy Soup, Healthy Snack, and Yack and Snack, where low-cost nutritious food items are made on-site and distributed, have also seen an increase in numbers, said Driscoll.
She suspects people are "finding it more and more difficult to feed their families" and are "looking for more avenues to help them around food insecurity."
The national study surveyed more than 1,000 adults in Canada online between Oct. 8 and Oct. 31 to determine if price swings prompted shoppers to rethink how they choose pantry staples.
The polling industry's professional body, the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population
With files from Information Morning Moncton