Tyee Solutions Society

Working odd hours, Vancouver’s survival sex workers often miss the city’s free meals. Enter this roaming delivery service.
By Colleen Kimmett. First published on The Tyee, 11 May 2012.

Jennifer Allan, founder of Jen's Kitchen, with volunteer James Oickle. Photo by Colleen Kimmett.

A woman sits in a doorway, feet apart and leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, posed like an athlete taking a break on the bench. She’s had an injury.

“I had a date who bumped me on the head really hard,” she tells us, rubbing her scalp with one hand. “I feel like I’m brain-dead.”

A tuna sandwich is what we have to offer. It seems an inadequate response to her predicament; regardless she gratefully accepts it, along with a juice box and a piece of homemade banana bread.

For someone living in poverty in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, getting enough to eat can be a full-time job. There are numerous agencies providing free meals, but many only do so once a day or once a week. For survival sex workers who keep atypical hours, it can be even more difficult.

For the past seven years, Jennifer Allan has been trying to fill this gap with Jen’s Kitchen, an advocacy, outreach and food relief service for women in Vancouver’s survival sex trade.

Each Tuesday night, she and a team of volunteers — usually three to six people — roam the streets and alleys of the Downtown Eastside handing out sandwiches, snacks and juice boxes to any working woman who wants one.

‘There’s a lot of love in food’

On the night I accompany Allan, we are joined by Elisa, Courtney and Brent, members of a regular bible study group at Tenth Avenue Alliance Church who volunteer with Jen’s Kitchen once a month.

We meet up at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House to prepare the sandwiches, which are typically tuna. Allan avoids peanut butter. “It’s poverty food,” she tells me, something the people down here get enough of already. Tuna is a bit more gourmet, she says, and certainly higher in protein.

While we chop up lettuce, smoked tofu, carrots and tomatoes to toss in with the canned fish, Courtney tells me that she stumbled across Jen’s Kitchen on a blog. She and her fellow volunteers hadn’t been looking to do outreach work specifically around food, she tells me.

“We were thinking love,” says Courtney. “But there’s a lot of love in food.”

Jen’s Kitchen started with a dozen tuna sandwiches that Allan prepared in her West End apartment. That was seven and a half years ago. Allan estimates she has spent about $30,000 of her own money — or about $80 per week — on food for Jen’s Kitchen during that time.

Her roster of volunteers is about 100 total, and includes individuals and groups from various organizations like churches, the Salvation Army, and even members of the Vancouver Police Department Vice Unit. They help her make the sandwiches and hand them out. Volunteers occasionally pitch in for ingredients as well; the group from 10th Avenue United bring a snack to hand out but often bread and tuna as well.

We work the corners and alleys before heading to a seedy hotel — Allan calls it a brothel — on Hastings. “How many girls?” she asks a large man standing at the door. Ten. She counts out the appropriate number of sandwiches, snacks and juice boxes and stacks them in the man’s arms. He is buzzed in. It’s a place where sex workers bring their johns, Allan explains, and a room costs $20 an hour.

Feeling out of place

When Allan first came to Vancouver 12 years ago, she was homeless. “I had five cents to my name, I was severely alcoholic and crack addicted, and the survival sex trade was my work at the time,” she says matter-of-factly. “That’s what I did for a living.”

The money she made on street corners would allow her to buy some groceries, or pizza. Allan says she avoided church soup kitchens because she felt out of place there.

“Of course, a lot of the churches have an open door policy,” she says. “But when you’re a survival sex worker and you’re in your high-heeled boots and your short miniskirt and a revealing top, that whole welcoming thing seems to change.”

Allan says by noon she was typically starving (“breakfast is a luxury down here,” she adds), and lied to get into a centre for pregnant women that served meals. When they found out she wasn’t actually pregnant, she wasn’t allowed back. She also tried going to a drop-in for mentally ill people — but wasn’t mentally ill enough, she says laughing.

“It’s interesting how all these feeding places had all these categories you had to fit into, and if you didn’t fit into it you didn’t eat that day. Unless you wanted to sit on the street corner.”

There are a few places that cater to all women, and exclusively women. The Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre, for example, serves a hot meal in the afternoon seven days a week and has started doing breakfast on Tuesdays and Thursdays. According to fund development coordinator Fiona York, the centre serves approximately 300 women every day.

There’s also Atira Women’s Resource Society, which operates approximately 400 subsidized units in the city for women who are “by and large supporting themselves with survival sex work,” says CEO Janice Abbott.

Abbott says there are “unique, gender related barriers” for all women trying to access food in the Downtown Eastside. When food lineups or food programs are co-ed they seem to disproportionately become male, she says, which can be intimidating for women who have experienced violence at the hands of a man. Sometimes women avoid those places altogether.

When asked if survival sex workers might have a harder time accessing food because of the hours they work, Abbott says “absolutely.”

“Women who are out and about in the evening, if their main activity occurs after a typical working day, then there are less programs period, available. Also, the risk to them increases after dark.”

Defending DTES women

Karen Cooper, a professor at Corpus Christi College, has spent the past two years researching the correlation between availability of food in single occupancy residences (SROs) like the ones Atira runs and the number of calls to police, fire and ambulance. As part of her research, she and her associates have interviewed hundreds of SRO residents — including survival sex workers.

“The hardest story I heard over and over again is that even if there were meals in their residences, often they’re out working during the dinner hour — that’s when a lot of people come into the Downtown Eastside to find prostitutes,” says Cooper.

“They would be working over dinner, would work later into the night, realize they were too hungry to sleep and go out and turn another trick to afford some food. It took me a while to realize that what they were trying to tell me is that that’s when they’re more likely to get hurt.”

Allan views her role as not just to feed women, but also to fight for their rights. On a typical Tuesday night, once all the sandwiches are gone, Jen’s Kitchen becomes Vancouver Cop Watch.

On Hastings Street, Allan spots three officers talking to a young woman. “Get out your cameras!” Allan says. I pull out my Canon and the others hesitantly withdraw their cellphones. We stand and watch the exchange, which ends with no arrest, and then follow the officers down the street.

The role of Cop Watch, Allan explains, is to follow beat officers around and observe and take photographs of their actions, ensuring that the people’s civil liberties are upheld and to intervene when they aren’t. Most of the police around here, she says, know her by now.

Allan feels the attitude from police is that everyone living in poverty in the Downtown Eastside is a criminal. She acknowledges that some of them are. There are drugs, there is robbery. If anything, she says, she wants the Downtown Eastside enforcement beat to send a message to sexual predators that “our women and girls down here are not for them to pick up and hurt.”

“But that,” she says, “doesn’t seem to happen.”

What to accept, what to hand out. How the city’s vast distribution centre works to feed folks and keep food out of landfills.
By Colleen Kimmett. First published on The Tyee, 26 April 2012.

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank warehouse on Prior Street. Approximately 5 million pounds of food moves through here every year. All photos by Colleen Kimmett.

I feel very, very small inside the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.

Dwarfed by long rows of shelving units that reach up to the warehouse ceiling, there are so many boxes and labels and colours and signs that the eye can’t seem to settle on any one thing.

My tour guides, Doug Aason, director of community investment, and Craig Edwards, director of warehouse and transportation (and acting executive director), turn my attention to the large industrial scale adjacent to the warehouse loading dock. Everything that comes in or out is weighed on that scale — and last year, the warehouse received 4,840,971, pounds of food.

Aason tells me they used to receive a lot more product that would come and go without ever leaving the floor of the warehouse. Spoiled vegetables. Dented cans. Expired tofu. But the food bank has made a concerted effort to educate donors about what’s acceptable and what’s not, says Aason, and they say it’s working.

“We’ve got a lot of support from fantastic donors,” says Edwards. “Right now we’re the best we’ve ever been.”

The mission

The Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society’s headquarters and warehouse in East Vancouver is the distribution centre that serves 15 food bank depots in Vancouver, New Westminster, Burnaby and North Vancouver. Along with these depots, which serve 9,000 individuals in total, the GVFB provides food to more than 100 meal-providing members agencies, like missions, drop-in centres, shelters and community kitchens.

In the inventory planning office, a large whiteboard mounted on the wall shows columns and figures that represent everything in the warehouse, and everything that isn’t.

The GVFB works with a nutritionist to do menu planning, says Edwards, and they plan a month in advance. The numbers in red represent everything they need: protein, starch and fibre. Whatever has not been donated is purchased to fill gaps, which are inevitably in the protein and fibre categories.

Edwards shows me an example of an order form for New Westminster food bank, which serves 975 members total, according to the form.

This week, a single person would receive a jar of peanut butter (that’s the protein), a box of Kraft Dinner (under the starch category), a tetra pack of soup, two snacks, one baked good, two miscellaneous beverages, a pound of potatoes, one vegetable (fresh or canned), one fruit (fresh or canned), and a half dozen eggs.

“We try and do a protein, starch, we try and include some fibre, we have filler items, we either do a fruit and veg, or we do a canned fruit,” says Craig.

The filler items are snacks. They have a in stock 220,000 individual items under the snack category this month, by far the most of anything on the board. (Miscellaneous beverages is the second most voluminous category, with 34,578 items, then baked goods at 20,144 items and dry soup at 20,072 items.) Most of what’s in the warehouse -– all those shelves stocked with all those boxes -– are snacks. They receive a lot of snacks, says Edwards, although over the past few years they’ve tried to just get healthy snacks. Granola bars or “anything with peanut butter or some protein levels,” he says.

The food bank sometimes receives items with virtually no nutritional value — “candy and crap” says Aason, which are sometimes tossed, and sometimes used as “filler items.” It’s not stuff that they want, but the junk food is part and parcel with reclamation.

In the grocery world, reclamation used to be an individual from a company — whether it was Pepsi or Kellogs or Kraft — going to grocery stores and collecting their company’s unsold product so that it could be written off.

Eventually reclamation companies — like Allied, for example, whose clients include Safeway and Sobeys — stepped in to provide this service. These companies are contracted to pick up all unsalable goods from grocery stores at once. Then it all goes to a warehouse where it’s scanned through a system that itemizes what came from where, before everything is donated to a food bank.

I ask Aason if they couldn’t be more choosy about the items they receive through reclamation programs. It’s something they’ve thought about and discussed, he tells me.

“The problem with that is then the reclamation companies will identify with other charities where they can take the food. We wouldn’t want to jeopardize the good percentage of great food that we get — canned goods.”

The food bank would rather absorb the cost of disposing bad food they don’t want to give out, rather than forgo the stuff they do want.

“[The] phenomenally large amount of good, great food actually, that we get far outweighs the cost of having to dispose of the other stuff,” says Aason.

Go to the website of the food bank and there its mission statement is declared to be providing food to those in need. However, Edwards cites a different purpose.

“The main angle of the food bank, has been for the past five years, and will continue to be, keeping food from our landfills in one way or the other.”

Partnering with industry players

Whose interest is that mission really serving?, wonders Graham Riches, a professor emeritus at UBC’s School of Social Work who has been following the proliferation of food banks since the early 1980s.

In the early days, food banks were largely community-, church- and even union-based operations that “were acting on a moral imperative to feed the hungry because assistance benefits weren’t adequate.”

Over time, says Riches, food banks have become more institutionalized, and more closely linked with the food manufacturing industry.

Food Banks Canada’s annual Hunger Count*, a snapshot of food bank usage across the country based on surveys, incorporates information from 4,188 food programs (both members and non-members of the association).

The picture it paints is daunting. Demand — while it leveled off this year after a spike during the 2008 recession — shows no sign of decreasing, and food banks struggle to keep up. According to the survey, 35 per cent of food banks ran out of food during the survey period and 55 per cent needed to cut back on the amount of food provided to each household.

While industry players like Kraft Canada help Food Banks Canada financially, through fundraising campaigns, Food Banks Canada has put forth policy proposals to return the favour to the food manufacturing sector as well.

Like a charitable tax incentive plan (Jan. 2012), which proposes to “allow food manufacturers, importers, distributors and retailers to deduct from taxable income the production cost of food donated to food banks, plus one-half of the unrealized appreciation (with a maximum deduction of twice the production cost).”

This would effectively create a financial incentive to donate food instead of disposing of it.

But Riches says this raises two concerns for him. The first is that it will remove from supermarkets products that would normally be marked down in price. The second is that it’s unethical for corporations to be receiving market value tax breaks for donating product that is unsalable anyway.

“You’ve got food corporations, who you could say are partly responsible for serving a lot of food that is not very healthy, not very nutritious food, and food being wasted,” says Riches. “But instead of being taken to the dump, it’s recycled into the community.”

Purchasing power

Concerns about “the ongoing poor nutritional quality of the food being distributed” was one of the reasons why the Unitarian Church of Vancouver (UCV) decided to stop serving as a food bank depot in 2009, after 30 years of operation.

In an emailed statement to The Tyee, Reverend Steven Epperson of UCV listed the other reasons:

“Negative environmental impact of an inefficient warehousing and distribution system.

“A burgeoning number of ‘clients’ — at best, our depot could serve about sixty families; the number had swelled to 120+; the site and volunteers were being overwhelmed.

“Inequitable distribution of food to clients on-site by non-UCV, long-term volunteers supplied by the Food Bank Society.

“Most important — food is a right; it should not be considered or dealt with as a charity which, in fact, is the inherent nature of food banks and the nature of the relationship that obtains between those who contribute to them and dispense food on the one hand, and those who receive it on the other. Provincial and federal policy should be created in such a way that ensures that those in need of food assistance receive it in a manner consistent with food as a right, not a provisional, charitable hand out (e.g. living wage and/or food stamp legislation).”

In response, Edwards stated in an email that the GVFB has, and is, making efforts around the area of nutrition “to ensure we are able to provide clients with the healthiest food choices possible.”

“In addition to the local produce we purchase, we are also working with local nutritionists to make the most of our resources while caring for our community. While we appreciate all the donations we receive, moving forward you will also see the request for healthier choices in the items being donated by the public. We are committed to helping in the realm of education by formally asking for healthier variations of the food we receive.”

According to its latest financial statements, in 2011 the GVFB spent $880,939 directly on food, up from $703,675 the year before.

It’s one of the largest purchasers of eggs in the province, buying more than 9,000 dozen every week. They also purchase between 10,000 and 16,000 pounds of potatoes per week from Heppell’s farm in Surrey, and regularly receive about the same volume of organic apples from a farmer in the Okanagan.

And the food bank already sustains a host of programming that is focused on many of the same goals and priorities and other agencies focused on the right to food are prioritizing, points out Aason.

For example, from 2010 to 2011, the food bank nearly doubled its budget (from $6, 876 to $12,025) for Fresh Choice kitchens program, which runs instructional meal programs at community service centres around the Greater Vancouver area. It also delivers food to over 100 agencies — places like missions, drop-in centres, soup kitchens and shelters — which serve more than 16,000 people every week.

According to Aason, the food bank is looking to take a more active role in the community, working to build capacity within it.

The GVFB also has operational capacity — trucks, warehouse and cold storage space — that is beyond many of the small organizations it serves, and it has established relationships with farmers, says Aason. What if they could purchase fruits and vegetables on behalf of organizations that couldn’t otherwise afford it?

“We’re now in a position, financially, where we can sustain a bad year,” says Aason. “We think it’s a great opportunity to show some leadership.

“What I say is, let’s work together.”

*Corrected at 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 26. This article originally stated that Kraft Canada funded the 2011 Hunger Count survey. According to Food Banks Canada, The Hunger Count survey is not directly funded by any specific donor.

Hungry people must be fed. But critics say framing food as charity takes the root issues off government’s plate.
By Colleen Kimmett. First published on The Tyee, 25 April 2012.

Paul Taylor, once reliant on food banks, says hunger cannot be solved by charity. Photo by Colleen Kimmett.

Paul Taylor grew up using food banks. He served on the board of directors for Toronto’s Daily Bread food bank, one of the largest in the country. And when the CBC hosted its 25th annual funding drive for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank last December, he and some colleagues walked over to give the public broadcaster a thank-you card, along with an important message.

“We wanted to say thank you, but the CBC could better leverage their reach,” he tells me over tea at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House, where he serves as executive director. “We wanted to ask that they listen. What low-income people are really after is justice and the ability to have enough money to buy their own food.”

Since taking the position nine months ago, Taylor has been vocal in his criticism of the role of food banks in our society, a role he believes allows government to shirk its responsibilities under the declaration of human rights.

Longtime advocate for the homeless Judy Graves called Taylor “one of the most exciting things to happen to Vancouver.”

“Holy crow, does he get it,” says Graves. “He gets it in the big picture and gets in the small picture, and he’s definitely the wave of the future.”

Taylor is quick to acknowledge, and he respects, the moral imperative that people feel to help out in whatever way they can. But hunger is not an issue for charity, he says, and he and others at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House are “not here to convince people of deservedness.”

“Food,” says Taylor, “is a fundamental human right.”

How food became charity

It’s true that Canada signed and ratified the UN Declaration of Human Rights in 1967 — and other international agreements following — that guarantee the right to food.

But it’s not entrenched in our constitution, our domestic law. The right to food is particularly problematic in the Canadian context, because social rights, like welfare for example, are provincial responsibilities.

“It’s the old problem of Canadian federalism,” says Graham Riches, professor emeritus at UBC’s School of Social Work. “It becomes messy in terms of whose government is really responsible for this.”

Graham was one of the first academics looking at food banks from a social justice perspective. In 1986 he published Food Banks and the Welfare Crisis, linking the proliferation of food banks throughout the 1980s to the recession of that era, followed by the rise of neo-liberalism and the erosion of the social welfare system.

Riches agrees that there is clearly a moral imperative to feed hungry people. But food banks
“enable us to sort of look the other way,” he argues.

“What they’ve done over the last 30 years is socially constructed the issue of food as a matter of charity, and not a political question.”

When I raise these points with Doug Aason, the director of community investment for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, he tells me that he “totally, totally understands where detractors are coming from.”

But for him, this argument is a philosophical one. “[Taylor] is philosophically opposed to the food bank’s existence because as long as the food bank exists, the government will never be forced to look at the real reasons people come to food banks,” says Aason.

He rhymes off those reasons: lack of a living wage; lack of affordable daycare; lack of affordable housing. “The single parents that come to us have to work two or three jobs to sustain themselves.”

And he points out that the food bank preaches this message when it visits schools, businesses and corporations to solicit donations.

The national association that represents food banks across the country, Food Banks Canada, has an ethical foodbanking code to “strive to make the public aware of the existence of hunger, and of the factors that contribute to it,” and to “recognize that food banks are not a viable long-term response to hunger, and devote part of their activities to food assistance.”

But despite this, reliance on food banks continues to rise.

Need fed by government ‘inaction’: Brar

At the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House on a Monday afternoon, every demographic is represented. There are young men, moms with babies and toddlers in tow, and senior citizens.

It’s busy but calm, and there’s room for everyone to find a seat at the round tables on either side of the room. I’m here to sit in on an editorial meeting of a new food-themed ‘zine that house members have launched.

The inaugural issue came out last month, and among the service pieces — recipes, and a B.C. seasonal vegetable chart — are articles that tackle the chewy political issues that people in this neighbourhood are keenly aware of.

There was an interview with Mark Brand of Save-On-Meats, a first-person essay about free food lines in the Downtown Eastside (which regularly feature “cakes, muffins, brownies and doughnuts” and other highly-processed stuff, writes author Ludvik Skalicky) and an account of a visit that NDP MLA Jagrup Brar paid to the house in January.

That month, Brar lived on $610 — the amount a single person on welfare receives per month — to draw attention to the inadequacy of B.C.’s welfare rates. After deducting $375, the amount for a room in an SRO (which typically cost more like $450) he had $235, or about $7.58 per day to cover all other necessities, including food. By the end of the month he had oatmeal, some bread and a box of Mr. Noodles left in his cupboard, and planned to volunteer in exchange for lunches and wait in food lines for his dinners.

“I respect the work Paul Taylor is doing on the right to food issue,” Brar told The Tyee. Food banks are the outcome, he says, of the failure of society to deal with growing inequality in B.C.

“We have 137,000 children living in poverty in this rich province, what we call the best place on the earth to live. Over 90,000 people use a food bank every month and one-third of them are children. What we need to do as a government is the key question.”

Brar is calling for a comprehensive poverty eradication plan with clear targets and timelines, and says he is working with his caucus to develop such a plan.

“Until we have that, the food banks are playing their role. Because of the gap, the inaction of the government, the community is stepping in and food banks are doing their best.”

Serving food with philosophy

Along with providing food, the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House also informs members about the political and policy climate in which it operates.

Its operating philosophy, which is posted on a large bulletin board alongside recipes for chickpea salad and roasted brussel sprouts, describes a place that “mirrors the entirety of our community: in its beauty and its harshness, its poetry and its frustration. We are activist, reformist and non-violent, critical of the poverty mentality and its handmaiden the charity model…”

The right-to-food philosophy also states its intention to avoid “refined sugars, processed foods, gluten, non-stick cookware, silicone, aluminum… and Eurocentric menus.”

“The philosophy is really important,” says Jenna Robbins, program lead for the community drop-in and right-to-food initiatives. It gives her clear parameters about what donated food they’ll accept — “it’s not a personal decision,” says Robbins — but also makes things more difficult because it’s harder to get the food they want.

While the neighbourhood house might be philosophically opposed to the existence of food banks, they do rely on the Greater Vancouver Food Bank for donations — although they are choosy about what they’ll accept.

Canned beans, toilet paper, feminine hygiene products, coffee, tea, sugar, spices, flour and brown rice are acceptable, says Robbins. Any heavily processed foods containing chemical additives, preservatives, or ingredients they can’t pronounce, are not.

Other partners include Discovery Organics, which donates organic produce, and Superior Tofu, which donates soy milk.

Robbins works with a monthly food budget of $1,000, which covers about half the volume of food served in that period. Much of it is spent at Sunrise Grocery, a bustling Chinese market on Powell Street and one of the few places to buy fresh produce in the Downtown Eastside. (Without dollars to spend, Taylor points out, people who live in the Downtown Eastside have no say in the kinds of businesses and services they want there.)

Healthy snacks like carrot sticks or bananas are available at every program the house runs — “we don’t want to assume that everyone has eaten,” says Robbins — and there are drop-in meals every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

In February, it had the busiest drop-in meal in its history: 170 people came through the door to get something to eat. Demand for good food is clearly not going anywhere, but despite the challenges, Taylor is optimistic about what’s happening in Vancouver.

He points to organizations like the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, the Carnegie Community Action Project, the Kitchen Tables Project and the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House as examples of organizations changing the dialogue around charity.

“The charity model is more ingrained in Toronto,” he says. “The fact that there are mechanisms in Vancouver to move away from that, this excites me.”

Why Calvary Baptist opted to nurture quality of experience over quantity fed.
By Colleen Kimmett. First published on The Tyee, 12 April 2012.

Geordan Hankinson: Felt the 'charity model' was disempowering people the church sought to serve. Photo: Colleen Kimmett.

There isn’t an official seating plan at Calvary Baptist Church’s weekly Thursday night supper, but the seniors usually end up at the same table.

“My father was born in 1910,” declares one elderly man with thick glasses and grey hair poking out from under his ballcap.

“My mother was born in 1900,” responds his neighbour. “And my father was born in 1898.”


The dinner conversation winds around to news of the day, which includes the elimination of the penny, and a bizarre story in which millions of loonies and toonies were spilled across a northern Ontario highway after a Brinks truck crashed. And, of course, the food. There is a new cook tonight, and on the menu is Indian butter chicken with turmeric rice and a robust salad of romaine, tomato, cucumber, carrot and feta cheese and a homemade oil and vinegar dressing. A serving dish of each is placed on each of the five tables, which seat about eight people each. The dining room din quiets down as everyone digs in.

The serene dinner scene in this church basement is a far cry from what it was this time last year: 150 people lined up out the door, chaos in the dining hall and, sometimes, verbal or physical fights.

This shift has taken place over the course of the past year. It was a calculated move that has been controversial, both inside and outside of the organization. And, although it may seem strange that a church would want to distance itself from the entrenched idea of charity, that’s exactly what Calvary is trying to do.

A ‘paradigm shift’ away from ‘free’

I heard about Calvary from Jonathan Bird, executive director of the City Gate Leadership Forum, a non-profit focused on the role of Christian organizations and churches “in fostering vibrant, sustainable cities.”

The overarching goal of the Christian Community Food Network is to get other faith-based organizations on board with what Bird describes as a “paradigm shift” away from ad hoc food charity towards a sustainable local food system.

Faith-based organizations are “aligned with food security idea of sustainability,” says Bird. It’s important that churches support community gardening and local food, that they offer high-quality nutrition and acknowledge that organic is best, that it matters what happens to food scraps. “Our bodies are our temples,” he says.

The goal of the network is also to open up a dialogue about moving away from “free” and supporting local enterprise at the same time. They want to get people involved in a different ways of providing meals, and make connections with the food being grown.

According to Bird, the meal program at Calvary started with a single dinner in 1997, organized by two women in the neighbourhood who had been helped by the church and wanted to give back.

Nine months later, it had become a weekly event modeled after the Out of the Cold program in Toronto. Guests were encouraged to take part in meal preparation and cleanup, and it quickly earned a reputation for being safe, low-key and comfortable environment where good food was served. Pretty soon, the numbers were overwhelming.

“We had no idea there was as much need as there turned out to be,” says Bird. “Torpedoed” by their own success, they eventually became the very thing they said they’d wanted to be the alternative to.

‘It was crazy’

“A fairly typical soup kitchen,” is how Geordan Hankinson describes it. Hankinson, a 24-year-old sociology student, came to Calvary in 2008 as its community meal coordinator. At that time, the church was serving 120 to 150 people every Thursday and had a roster of 200 volunteers who would rotate in and out.

“Lineups in the dining room, lineups down the hall,” he says. “The only way to feed that number of people was to have them go through a food lineup. It was crazy.”

Adam Smith, who has been coming regularly to Calvary Baptist for meals, and now as a volunteer, concurs. Nobody liked the lineups he says, and things could get uncomfortable. Just a few people under the influence of drugs or alcohol could show up and “suck the air out of things,” says Smith. “You know, like at a school dance, when trouble shows up and ruins things for everybody?”

It became a necessity, he says, to concentrate on the quality of relationships instead of on the quantity of people.

Hankinson started reading about food security, looking at the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House and the Kitchen Tables project. He came to believe that, while the church was meeting a need, it was also, in a way, disempowering people.

He wrote up a position paper and gave it to the board of the church. “It was a bit of a difficult sell,” he says. “The board was very entrenched in the charity model.”

Along with Bird, and Karen Giesbrecht of City Gate’s Christian Community Food Network, Hankinson got about 50 of the regular soup kitchen visitors in a room and asked them about the meal program. He says he was surprised at how honest and candid everyone was. The general consensus was, that they needed the food, but felt the lineups were humiliating.

The church gave its Thursday night dinner guests one month’s notice and a list of alternative free or low-cost food sources in the city, and in April 2011, put its meal program on hiatus. Guests were given the option of taking part in a 12-week community kitchen program instead.

From July to mid-September, about 12 people met every Tuesday to “cook, sit, eat and brainstorm” says Hankinson, about what they wanted the program to be.

The group put together policies and procedures. Now, when someone comes for a meal, they either pay $2 or sign up to help. The jobs that were done by volunteers are now handled people who take part in the meal.

Hankinson says about eight to 10 people pay regularly for the meal, another 30 or 40 sign up for a job.

“This way, people have to work together as peers,” says Hankinson. “We’ve gotten rid of volunteer and guest distinctions. We’ve flipped that power dynamic. We don’t have these people from a middle class background serving these other poor people.”

‘I’ve gotten a lot of flak’

The shift has been difficult for Calvary, and somewhat controversial within the wider charity food sector in Vancouver.

“I’ve gotten a lot of flak for it,” admits Hankinson. When he presented what they were doing at a summer 2011 meeting of food service providers in the city, some people were quite critical of the new model, including Judy Graves, a longtime activist on the downtown eastside and the city of Vancouver’s advocate for the homeless.

“I have a great deal of concern,” Graves tells me over coffee at the JJ Bean in Woodwards building. “There’s very little food available to people who are very poor or who have no money in the Commercial Drive area.

“I can understand what they’re doing. I can see the value of building community and serving food at the same time. But I know many of the people in the streets in Commercial Drive are not capable of the level of personal organization that it takes. And if we’ve dropped the number of people who eat by about 100 people, where are those 100 people getting their food?”

Hankinson can’t answer that for certain. He does feel that making this change at the church was an admission that, maybe they weren’t really doing the greatest thing. Being stuck in a circuit, were they really helping or were they part of a band-aid solution?

“I wonder if we had created a dependency,” he says, “distorted people’s thinking that food is free, rather than inviting them to participate and to share in those costs that are associated with ‘free food.’”

‘A more responsible crowd’

Calvary currently spends about $150 on food for each meal, about half what it was when they were serving 150 people per week. Where the church has achieved savings in the amount of money spent on food, it has also committed to paying the people who cook. Four regulars have been trained in Food Safe and take turns cooking once a month, for which they are paid $80.

I meet one of the new cooks, Rian Vita, in the kitchen a couple of hours before the meal is to be served. He’s chopping onions to the sounds of ZZ Top spinning on a portable CD player.

Vita tells me he’s 35, has been in Vancouver since his late twenties, but grew up in Calgary. He has been coming here regularly for meals for two years, and says the new model makes it a “much more relaxing place to be.”

“Charging two dollars or having to do a chore kind of puts you in with a more responsible crowd,” he says.

Vita doesn’t entertain notions of becoming a career cook, but likes doing this for his community. A little bit of extra money is nice, too. “I’m not the most employable person in the world,” he says. “Like, the only thing I really did for 10 years is work in music and video stores, and now there’s no such thing anymore. So I have to learn how to do something else.”

I ask him what he things of this shift in the church’s conception of charity food — and the word charity itself. Does it offend him, I wonder?

“Not anymore,” he says. “I don’t think it ever did. The way they describe it is, well, just free meals. You can get a whole list of them. Vancouver’s really good for that. I’m not sure about the quality of some of these meals. This is probably the best one I’ve seen out of the ones that I’ve been to.”

The CCFN identified has identified and mapped 97 food assets within the Christian community — meals, gardens or cooking programs — between Vancouver and Langley.

In Vancouver proper, Vancouver Coastal Health has identified 112 locations where free or low-cost meals are provided, which includes both non-secular and faith-based organizations (see map below).

A map of free and low-cost meals in Vancouver, compiled by Vancouver Coastal Health as of 2011. Click here for a larger version.

Still, most in this sector are quick to point out that the solution to hunger is not free meals, but rather a living wage and a route out of poverty. Smith tells me he’s been homeless in the past, and during that time he says he felt he could either concentrate on his health, or finding a job. He chose his health.

“If you work,” he says, “you’re not able to stand in line that day for your lunch, let alone supper.”

“I think trying to live on the streets and work is next to impossible.”