Holiday campaigns 'fill the gap' when people need food in remote, northern communities
CBC's Sounds of the Season will help deliver food up north on Friday, December 14
CBC Thunder Bay's annual Sounds of the Season event is quickly approaching and for the past three years we've partnered with the Regional Food Distribution Association (RFDA), the Thunder Bay International Airport as well as a handful of airline companies to deliver thousands of pounds of non-perishable items to remote First Nation communities in northern Ontario to help address food insecurity in the north.
"There are a lot of different components of food security," Rebecca Schiff, an associate professor at Lakehead University's department of health and sciences, told CBC News. "It's about being able to afford food ... about it being accessible ... it also is related to being able to get food that's appropriate to your diet ... and it's also about being able to get food that's nutritious."
She said in remote, northern communities food is not only very expensive but also harder to access.
"It's the cost of food that's very high and then it's also the quality of food," Schiff said. "You might buy some tomatoes and bring them home and the next day they're rotten and you can't use them anymore," she explained, adding that there's also a limited selection of the kind of produce and food available at the local grocery stores.
Many of these communities also don't have a local grocery, Schiff said, which means residents are forced to travel outside of their community if they want to buy fresh food and produce.
Food banks help 'fill the gap'
According to Schiff, food banks are like homeless shelters as they are "something that we are always going to need ... but they shouldn't be something that people need to depend on."
Unfortunately, in remote communities up north, there are no food banks available like there are in Thunder Bay.
She said in Thunder Bay "if someone has an emergency, they can go to the food bank and get some food to help them through that emergency time. In remote communities, there aren't ... a lot of food banks, so there might not be any place for people to go in their community to get food," adding that campaigns like CBC's Sounds of the Season and the work done by organizations like the RFDA are "important to help fill that gap in emergencies when people need food."
For many families in the north, the need for food is an ongoing emergency.
"We need to find ways to make food of a better quality ... so fixing transportation, fixing distribution ... so that's one aspect of it," Schiff explained, "but I think there are also a lot of other options that each community can determine for themselves what they might want to do in terms of, for example, growing food," or finding ways to "support people who are interested in hunting and fishing."
She said she believes remote, northern communities should "have control over their own food system ... and decide where they want to get their food from," and make sure everyone in the community has access to the kind of foods that they want and need to "live healthy lives."