Food Crisis on the Streets of Victoria

Tonight we received word that one of two soup kitchens that feeds homeless and low-income people in this city will be closing for ten days. Also closing for the same amount of time will be a drop-in centre that gives people a warm place to hang-out as well as coffee, donuts, bread and PB.
This is happening because the agency has built a new facility, and requires the time to shift operations over.
It couldn’t have happened at a worse time, in my mind. For the past month, the city’s library workers have been locked out, and the city’s homeless population has been locked out of an unofficial drop-in centre. (This is what all libraries are in North America, a warm, safe, enlightening place to escape the cold and danger of the streets.)
The city’s homeless population has been growing. Out of 80,000 people in the city, 1,500 are homeless. That number continues to grow, as pre-olympic gentrification pushes people out of Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. To say we have a crisis is an understatement, yet it doesn’t get treated with anywhere near the proper level of priority in this or any other city.
Even before news that the soup kitchen (which serves 300 hot meals a day) would be closing, we’d known that there is a food crisis in our city. Hell, there’s a food crisis all over the world. I’m talking not just the amount of food, but the quality.
White bread, pasta, hormone-injected meat. North America has a demented idea of proper diet, and we feed the worst of this slop to our most vulnerable brothers and sisters. It’s not the fault of the generous people (mostly seniors) who donate their time and resources to cook these meals and serve them. Our culture has denied us a proper understanding of health and diet. We all seem to be killing ourselves with starch, sugar, processed food, preservatives and fatty crap.
The fault lies with the system that refuses to understand the level of crisis that people on the street face. I’m not going to get into the debate about why people end up on the street, or end up too poor to buy food. It can happen to anyone, and does. Thousands in this city scrape by on nothing, and food banks only provide two days of food, once a month. Again, it’s sugary, starchy, fatty crap, and it’s killing us slowly.
First they feed us crap. Then they take it away for ten days.
A group of well-meaning citizens are going to the city council meeting tomorrow night in a futile effort to talk to the brick wall.
Some of us have tired of waiting for our elected officials to take responsibility. Over 100 people died on the streets of this city last year. Very few people care what we eat or where we sleep. Those that do have not been able to convince people in power to deal with this.
If we want to deal with this crisis, we need to take matters into our own hands.
This is a call-out to anyone in Victoria, BC who can help Food Not Bombs fill this gap for the ten days. We need food, we need volunteers, we need a place to cook, cooking gear and dishes.
Email saveferalhumanhabitat (at) yahoo.com if you can help.
If you don’t live in Victoria, there’s a food crisis going on in your city too. Start or join Food Not Bombs, volunteer at a soup kitchen, donate food to whoever wants to cook or serve it, offer your church kitchen or commercial kitchens to people willing to cook for the hungry. Do something, please.
People are hungry RIGHT NOW, and chances are, when they do find food, it will slowly kill them. Think about this. We treat murderers and rapists in prison better than we do our most vulnerable. What does that say about us?