FOOD COSTS
Pandemic pushing family budgets to the limit
When it comes to feeding her family, Sarah Gourdine is a cautious and frugal shopper, scouring the flyers, jumping at discount offers and bargains and making choices based on the best prices and value. That hunt is getting harder. “Food prices were already changing drastically, but it seems that, since COVID, prices have really kicked up,” she said. “Especially fruits and vegetables — (prices) are sky-high,” she adds, and that includes even in-season produce.
With her husband employed in the health-care sector and her working from home as a customer service rep, Gourdine felt her family, which includes sons aged 14 and 21, both students, was on its way into the middle class.
And then came the pandemic. “We were almost there,” the Windsor woman says wistfully.
Local unemployment, business restrictions and even closures and food bank use have all gone up during the pandemic, and so too, have food prices. Gourdine's observations are backed up by food experts, and they warn that the trend in food price hikes will continue through 2021.
“It's not a mirage — prices are going up, food inflation has outpaced the inflation rate,” said Sylvain Charlebois, senior director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
An expert on food distribution, security and safety, Charlebois, also known as The Food Professor, said the general inflation rate in the Canadian economy has been below 0.3 per cent, but the food inflation rate in 2020 is 10 times that amount, in the range of three to four per cent.
That's after a year in which a local store survey by the Windsor-essex County Health Unit pegged the additional cost of groceries for a family of four in 2019 at 8.8 per cent above the previous year, far outstripping any wage gains of those workers lucky enough to have gotten one.
And the true inflationary hit on food prices due to COVID-19 has yet to hit consumers.
“We expect the effects on prices to kick in next year, as a result of COVID directly,” said Charlebois, an expert on food distribution, security and safety. “I expect a lot of families will be concerned.”
What shoppers like Gourdine are seeing now — Charlebois describes it as the “real difference” triggering the recent rise in grocery bills — is not so much added costs associated with COVID-19 but the shrinking access to retail store discounts. Grocery stores are trying to avoid price hikes by reducing the amount of foods they offer at bargain prices.
“I'm terrified — I think it's going to get worse,” Gourdine said of the negative economic impact of the pandemic on both her family and on her community.
“We try to keep up, but it's chaotic — nothing is normal anymore,” said Gourdine. Her family is striving to “make it work,” she said, but other bills are not always being paid in full as those food prices — an average household's second-largest cost, according to the health unit — keep climbing.
Gourdine said she swallowed her pride this summer and visited a food bank for the first time. “We just didn't have enough grocery money.” She hasn't been back, but finds it “extremely reassuring” knowing there's an emergency source to help put food on the table.
More and more people are lining up at local food banks to help feed their families and make ends meet.
“It's huge — I just see the numbers continuing to go up,” said June Muir, president of the Windsor Essex Food Bank Association. “We're seeing a lot of first-time users.”
In the first six months of the pandemic, the food bank association's 15 members saw almost 6,500 new visitors between mid-march and the end of September, with almost 86,000 Windsor-essex residents lining up for such handouts to help put food on the table.
Among the new users, the number for those forced onto employment insurance more than doubled during that period.
Recently unemployed and finding the local job situation “horrible” in her line of work, Christi Chauvin has been forced to make the occasional trip to the food bank this year. She was a manager with Things Engraved at Tecumseh Mall when the company announced in January it was immediately closing down its 73 retail stores in malls across Canada.
COVID-19 struck right after that and, despite her years of customer service experience in sales, telemarketing and at call centres, she worries it's her age that might be a big reason she hasn't been getting beyond the job interview stage.
“The adults are competing with the children for the same jobs — when you have three dozen competing for the same job, and one's 50 and one's 21 ... oh, what I'd do to be 21 again,” said Chauvin, who is 50.
After exhausting her employment insurance — which gave her less than the CERB program Ottawa set up in the spring in response to COVID — she's now on the government's CRB benefits (CRB took over from CERB in the fall) that pay her $900 every two weeks. She uses that to cover her rent and then put aside money for hydro, gas, phone and other essentials. What's left, she said, goes to food, and she has also noticed the steadily climbing prices.
“A roof over your head and food in your belly — you get enough to exist, but not to live,” Chauvin said of her current income level and her desire to find employment.
“The cost of everything is going up, up, up.”
Like Gourdine, Chauvin said she's buying a lot less fresh fruit and vegetables, and she gives the example of the high price of a head of lettuce to explain why she's not making salads but using the equivalent expenditure to instead purchase cheaper processed foods that stretch out her available food budget.
Prices for fresh vegetables jumped 9.5 per cent in October, compared to the same month a year ago, according to Statistics Canada, with higher food prices blamed for Canada's annual inflation rate taking an unexpected jump in October.
“We have this narrative (in Windsor-essex) of incomes that are not that high, of housing costs going up and food costs going up,” said Frazier Fathers, the local United Way's director of continuous improvement and advocacy. “There are people on that threshold, about to fall into low-income.”
That's bad news for a city already boasting one of the highest child