Thank you for that question. It's a question that comes up a lot in our sector.
I sit on an innovation committee for Food Banks Canada, where we're trying to dream about what the food bank network will look like. We're about 40 years in from when most food banks were created in the early eighties, and we're asking what it will look like in 40 years.
That is a topic that comes up consistently. If people had more resources available, they would be able to spend those resources to get the things they need. It is part of the solution, but it's not the solution in its entirety. Food insecurity has existed for almost as long as humans have existed, so we need to have a robust thought process on how we address it. Certainly in part of it, food education has to come into it, as well as taking care of the food we've created.
We're working on a project right now to create a food rescue centre, specifically because we are wasting so much food that we've spent the resources to create as a society. We've had the farmers spend the fuel to plow the fields to plant the food, and then because the market is soft or because there's no way to get it from point A to point B or there's no one to take it, we say that we'll just plow it back into the ground, but we've already spent the resources to use it, so we need to find a way to capture those resources. There's zero reason to throw food away if there are people in our community who need food.
I use the word “criminal”, and I use it wrongly. Admittedly, it's not criminal, but there's something morally wrong with our saying that we're willing to just throw food out en masse when we have people in our communities who are struggling to feed their children. We have to look at things very broadly when it comes to food insecurity. Income is certainly a part of that conversation.