Growing up hungry: a memoir

Growing up with a single mother on welfare, I was often the only kid at school without a lunch. Now I’ve devoted my life to making sure every Torontonian has enough to eat

My mother immigrated to Toronto from St. Kitts in 1972. Four years later, she had my older brother, and I was born six years after that, in 1982. She raised us in a three-bedroom house near Lansdowne and Bloor, which she bought with a small inheritance from her father, plus her earnings from her job as a nursing home aide. The house was directly across the street from the TTC garage—what I used to call “where the buses go to sleep”—and next door to a smelly factory that processed cow, pork and fish parts into gelatin.

When I was a child, my mother worked at three different nursing homes, pulling 20-hour days. By the ’90s, the physical and mental toll had left her unable to work, and we relied on welfare. Our electricity, heat and hot water were off for large chunks of my childhood. We had to do our homework before sundown or by candlelight. To bathe, we’d heat water in the backyard on a broken charcoal barbecue and pour it over ourselves in the tub. After we unpacked groceries, my mom would tell us to go easy on the food because she didn’t know when she’d have money to buy more.

I went to Lord Lansdowne Junior Public School, at Spadina and Bloor, and there were some days when I didn’t have a lunch. In Grade 6, when we were allowed to leave the playground at lunch, many kids would get money from their parents to go buy food. Of course, we didn’t have much money, so I would go on long walks alone to hide the fact that I didn’t have anything to eat.

Poverty makes people work hard. I did well in school and earned a scholarship that paid for my first few years of tuition at York University, where I studied political science and public administration and governance. I wanted to give back to kids who were poor like I’d been, so I spent 10 years working with community organizations, often directly with people experiencing homelessness. Then, in 2017, I joined FoodShare Toronto, a non-profit organization devoted to improving Torontonians’ access to affordable, high-quality fresh food.

At FoodShare, we set up Good Food Markets, selling wholesale produce in communities across the city. We create school meal programs with institutions like the TDSB and TCDSB—we even developed one at Lord Lansdowne, the school I attended as a kid. And we offer community garden training and schoolyard farming projects. To support our work, we sell Good Food Boxes filled with one to two weeks’ worth of fresh fruit and vegetables for as little as $16.

When I started at FoodShare, I toured several schools and community centres and saw that most of the people accessing

“When you’re Black, you’re at greater risk of everything that sucks”

our programs were Black or Brown. I know there’s diversity in this city, but I thought to myself, Why are you more likely to have to rely on food charity if you have darker skin?

It’s impossible to ignore the correlations between food insecurity and race. Last year, FoodShare teamed up with Proof, a U of T research team that investigates food insecurity in Canada. We found that Black people are 3.56 times more likely to be food insecure than White people in Canada, and that 36 per cent of Black kids live in food-insecure households, compared to just 12 per cent of White kids. At FoodShare, we know that our work can’t just be about making food accessible. It has to be about dismantling the systems that lead to food insecurity in the first place—things like racism and colonialism.

Canadians have this idea that racism doesn’t exist here, or that it’s not as bad as it is in the U.S. We have to be critical of that narrative. If we’d collected race-based data and used it to develop a health-equity approach to the Covid pandemic, for example, we would have lost fewer Brown and Black lives. There is so much more we could do if we admitted that Black and Indigenous folks are at greater risk of everything that sucks.

Look at Regis Korchinski-Paquet, the 29-yearold Black woman who died during an encounter with police in May. The weekend after her death, I attended a demonstration in her honour, where kids marched with their parents and grandparents and carried homemade signs displaying their anger and disappointment. When it was over, I arranged for FoodShare to deliver Good Food Boxes to support anyone who went to the march and was self-isolating. In just over a week, we raised $125,000 to fund the initiative. I believe the current period of protest presents opportunities for meaningful change, but I also recognize that there are forces making that difficult, whether it’s the people who benefit from the existing systems or the people who continue to tokenize us.

The opportunity to work at an organization like FoodShare is important to me. Not only because I grew up materially poor and in a food-insecure household, but because food insecurity is a crisis in this country. I don’t understand how politicians can sleep at night, knowing that they could end the suffering associated with poverty and food insecurity tomorrow and choose not to. I’ve lived the urgency of this need. It’s absolutely unnecessary that anyone else should. —As told to Andrea Yu