Weak links in the food chain

Stores, at least, were well stocked to start. People clearly were not.

And maybe, just maybe, the general public got an inkling of what food insecurity might feel like.

Food insecurity is a simple concept: it’s when you either don’t have the money you need to buy food, or when food simply isn’t available.

The actual dictionary definition of food insecurity reads like this: “the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.”

As grocery stores reopened in St. John’s on Tuesday for the first time since the state of emergency was put into place last Friday, hundreds of people lined up for the opportunity to buy food.

Now, in all likelihood, most of those people were not to the point where they had absolutely nothing left at home to choose from.

Sure, they might have been hauling out staledated cans of tinned tomatoes and the dusty already-opened bags of red lentils they tried once and didn’t much care for, but chances are that a good percentage of the people in those grocery store lines could have cobbled something together for dinner out of the backs of their cupboards or the frost-bitten bottoms of their freezers.

That’s certainly not the case for everyone in this province. There are people living day to day, week to week, who don’t have the option to fill their kitchens before a storm, people who depend on food banks and who live cheque to cheque — some of whom will be facing even smaller cheques after the loss of pay for cancelled workdays after the storm.

Car payments and rent will still have to be paid — there’s no discount on those — so sometimes, belt-tightening is actually literal: the result of less to eat.

Feeling just the slightest pinch of what it might be like to be facing an empty fridge and cupboards might be a valuable reminder to the rest of us of how lucky we usually are, and how much thought has to go into helping those who face food shortages regularly, during that time when they’re waiting for the next cheque to come into their household.

And it’s also a good reminder of something else as well.

We live far out on the end of the food supply chain — much of what we eat depends on clear sailing through the Gulf of St. Lawrence (either on Marine Atlantic or private vessels) and on our roads being open for trucks.

Think about it: the difference between business as usual and hundreds lining up at grocery store doors was a meagre three days. After we had prepped for a major storm we knew was coming, Saturday, Sunday and Monday were all it took to exhaust supplies in our homes.

Insecure, indeed.