Our love affair with healthy foods abides

Best Eats

We’re not exactly saints here in Metro Vancouver when it comes to diet, with our passion for poutine, Belgian waffles, fried chicken, doughnuts, ice cream, and other trending not-exactlygood-for-us foods. But, overall, we still pride ourselves on our healthconscious, clean-eating ethos.

Poké, acai bowls, kombucha on tap, green (and blue) smoothies, greens of any kind, tofu, quinoa, and tempeh… Name your wholesome food or beverage and you’ll find it here.

Here are a few signs that our love of healthy foods is here to stay.

GOODLY TIMES Earlier this year, the Greater Vancouver Food Bank launched Goodly Foods, a social enterprise addressing wasted food in

B.C. The pilot program takes surplus produce and turns it into new, nutritious, and delicious dishes and products, then distributes it to GVFB members and sells it to the public via buying partners.

The goal is to reduce the amount of excess food in the local system and offer members fresh foods by repurposing produce or finding new uses for it when it would otherwise go to waste. (Think surplus or brown bananas used in a healthy banana bread.)

All of the food is produced by the Potluck Café Society at a licensed and certified cooking facility at Commissary Connect’s entrepreneur-focused commercial kitchen in South Vancouver. The society hires residents of the Downtown Eastside, who commonly face barriers to employment.

Celebrated local chef Karen Barnaby developed a recipe for the Goodly-branded soup, which will be distributed via the food bank and for sale to the public later this year.

The program came about, in part, as a result of a $1-million grant to the GVFB by the Walmart Foundation.