Hunger.

mp3
#a vastly different childhood
#2019 Hunger-FEED Ontario 170000 # unknown next meal come from.
#a peanut butter sandwich for lunch
#1 to 9 meals 2/3 bread and processed crap.
# Food insecurity and accessibility. #Poverty*#Rent/ utilities/phone / transportation costs eat up
the majority of an already tight budget. If you've got only a few dollars left over to spend on food
every day, what do you buy? Where do you shop? How do you feed your family? We're going to
look at the hard numbers and the real people behind those figures throughout this series. For
some children, processed or fast foods are a rare treat. Growing up, Chris vividly recalls that for
him, it was a choice between dad or no food at all.

[00:02:44] The problem with that is when you go to school and you're hungry or hungry, as it's
more commonly known now, when you're a kid, you're physiologically you're actually not able to
retain information your brain doesn't build. Thoughts and memories the same way as other
people's brains, you know, physical activity during recess or during phys ed. You're not able to
go as fast or not able to to learn as much and to be as strong. And all those things play into the
fact that you're not getting up to your full potential of where you should be.

[00:03:14] When I talk to you right now on this podcast, I can make you feel sad maybe about
my story or maybe I can make you feel inspired because I say, oh, I I'm not living that life
anymore. And I did get through it and other people can get through it. Those are feelings I can
definitely make you feel with my words. I can't make someone feel the weird, sickly nauseated
feeling when you're sad. You're so hungry and you've been hungry for so long. You're not
actually hungry anymore. It's this weird, deep rooted pain that you get almost like a numbing
pain. And it feels so deep, it's hard to describe. It's like your stomach is closing up and you
know that feeling and you get to know it pretty well. Unfortunately.

[00:03:59] According to the twenty nineteen hundred point by Feed Ontario, more than five
hundred thousand people access to Food Bank in Ontario at last count, thirty three percent of
those visits came from children under 18. Growing up in the rural community of Elmira and
north of Waterloo, Chris quickly realized that his family's relationship to food was quite different
from those around him.
[00:04:22] When you're growing up in your kid and you're not eating properly and there are
issues in your house, you know, my dad had a spinal cord injury.

[00:04:30] My mom had schizophrenia, which would not be diagnosed till many years later in
my life. So neither of them were working and they were split up. So food wasn't always or was
rarely rather a consistent thing. So when I was younger and we were living food insecure, I
definitely knew I was hungry. I definitely recognized that other families had very different lives
than I did. We lived in a tiny little apartment and I did have two friends. One of them also live in
an apartment and had a similar upbringing to me and one of them did not. One of them had a
very privileged and wealthy upbringing. His parents were fantastic people worked very hard for
everything they had. But certainly what you would describe is privileged and when you would go
over to their house, say, for the night. It was such a different experience. Right.

[00:05:23] Brad Hale is the director and chaplain of the Elgin Street Mission in Sudbury.
Growing up in poverty in southern Ontario, he foraged food from dumpsters and learned how to
get by with a little help from his friends.

[00:05:35] The other trick would be show up at people's houses right dinnertime. Oh, it's five
o'clock. You remember one time, this family, they're like, oh, did you eat? And I said, What
today? And they thought I was joking, but I was serious. It's like, what today?

[00:05:50] Sustainability is an important topic these days. And for good reason. More
companies are promoting eating local, starting recyclable container programs and are
celebrating imperfect produce. And while some food waste is being diverted, there is still a
significant amount of food that ends up in landfills. And for Brad's family, growing up, this was
an important source of food.

[00:06:11] Yeah, I remember my my aunt worked as a cafeteria lady and some of the
sandwiches that were throat in the garbage, she would get them out of the garbage and bring
into my dad. And then we would have lunch for school and stuff like that where other people
probably would do. He couldn't afford to buy his lunch meat and stuff. And so my aunt was able
to do that. And I remember that as a kid, you know, getting these sandwiches. I was so excited
we got these sandwiches because they're all packaged. But, you know, they're finding out later,
as I got older, they were once ever thrown in the garbage.
[00:06:41] Now I'm a parent.

[00:06:42] So hearing Brad and Chris relive their food insecure childhoods makes me think not
only about how this must have affected them as children, but also about their parents. What's it
like to be in that position and have to explain it to your children?