How food programs in Toronto adapted to shutdowns

When Toronto locked down last spring, Jenelle Regnier-Davies worried that more vulnerable people would struggle to get adequate nutrition. She’d been working as a program manager for Second Harvest, an organization that helps restaurants, grocery stores and other food suppliers donate excess food before it expires. Around 40 per cent of the organizations that had been receiving Second Harvest food closed their doors, including seniors’ programs, transition housing programs, and homework clubs. 

Around the same time that Regnier-Davies had to step down from her role, due to a lack of childcare and school closures, she was accepted into Ryerson’s doctoral program in environmental applied science and management. She saw an opportunity to examine the ways in which the pandemic was affecting food security, and what supports and policies might mitigate food insecurity in future emergencies.

Regnier-Davies chose to pursue her PhD at Ryerson because she wanted to work with its Centre for Studies in Food Security. Her supervisors, Sara Edge, professor in geography and environmental studies, and Mustafa Koç, a professor in sociology, “are both very interested in bringing research into practice, and very driven by social justice.” She wanted “to represent the interests and needs of the people doing this work on the ground, because they’re far too busy to do that for themselves,” she says.

Regnier-Davies noticed that emergency food distributors, like food banks, were invited to city hall emergency planning meetings, but other food security organizations weren’t part of the conversation. “The city said community gardens and farmer’s markets couldn’t run,” she says. Due to a number of logistical, capacity challenges and access barriers at the onset of the crisis, “there was nobody at the city level representing those interests.” 

Other organizations that provided skills training, like community kitchens, were also shut down, in some cases because they didn’t have access to personal protective equipment. Through interviews with those who worked for and benefitted from these programs, Regnier-Davies’s research will look at the wide impacts of their closures, and inform the work of city-based collaborators seeking to strengthen future emergency food security preparedness planning.

Edge points out food security “was a huge, serious problem even before COVID-19 hit” with one in five Toronto residents experiencing some form of food insecurity, which could include an inability to source culturally appropriate foods, follow specialized diet requirements or meet daily nutritional needs.

As people lose their incomes and support programs shut down, the food programs that continued to operate during the pandemic had to find ways to deliver healthy and culturally appropriate foods to even more clients. In Toronto, the Daily Food Bank reported a 200 per cent increase (external link)  in demand in October. “After the pandemic hit, that demand has only skyrocketed,” says Edge.

While there have been numerous pressures, Regnier-Davies also recognizes that many organizations pivoted services in innovative and successful ways. MLSE and supporting corporate partners channeled funds to transform the suddenly empty Scotiabank Arena and Bell BMO Field into massive kitchens. Using food sourced by Second Harvest, the kitchens have been producing up to 13,000 meals a day.

The Boys and Girls Club of East Scarborough pivoted to food distribution. “They provided hot meals for seniors who couldn’t cook for themselves but they also put together meal kits for families that had the capacity to cook, but just needed the ingredients, so they weren’t just doing a blanket food distribution, they were thinking about the specific needs of the people in the community,” says Regnier-Davies. In addition to examining the negative impacts of the pandemic, Regnier-Davies will analyze best practices for food organizations in future crises.

Regnier-Davies’ research and advocacy fit in well with the goals of Ryerson’s Centre for Studies in Food Security, says Edge. The 23 members of the centre, including Edge and Regnier-Davies, hail from a range of departments, from politics to nutrition to sociology, enabling a systems approach to understanding food insecurity. “By bridging gaps between knowledge held at that local, lived-experience level, with expertise at the institutional level, the centre can identify recommendations and advocate for policy change that will help create more equitably structured food access systems.”