Story by Amy Juschka
Photos by Chrisopher Bevacqua-Fink

Diane Brown furrows her brow as she serves up plate after plate of steaming lasagna from the stainless steel inserts that hold the day’s lunch special. It’s just past noon at the Carnegie Kitchen and, like most days, a shuffling line of hungry Downtown Eastsiders snakes its way out the cafeteria door, spilling down the historic community centre’s winding tiled staircase. Brown takes the $1.75 from a woman’s outstretched hand and replaces it with a heavy plate of lasagna and fresh greens.

“This has spinach in it,” the woman exclaims after being handed her plate. “There’s no spinach in lasagna!” And in one fluid motion, she fires the plate over the counter and right back at Brown who, mouth agape, staggers backwards in shock.

“That kind of incident doesn’t happen every day,” Brown tells me later, chuckling as we sit down for lunch in the Carnegie’s high-ceilinged cafeteria.

Thirteen years ago, when Brown first began cooking at the Carnegie, the word “vegetable” was practically taboo, and a tantrum over a spinach lasagna was not completely unheard of.

“In the beginning I had a lot of resistance,” she recalls with just a hint of nostalgia in her smile.

“Apparently there was too much lettuce coming out of the kitchen!” She laughs easily, but then becomes serious. “I think the people in this community are really given the worst; the worst housing, the worst food. That’s why I don’t budge on healthy cooking, because it shows them they deserve better.”

The Carnegie Kitchen is one of over 30 free and low-cost food outlets serving the 8,000 or so homeless and low-income residents in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood with the unshakable credentials of Canada’s poorest postal code but is a shining oasis in what is a “food desert”.

Every meal here is served with a crisp green salad, something almost revolutionary in a neighbourhood where vegetables are often tantamount to a few hardened, re-hydrated carrots at the bottom of a cup of soup, or a handful of shriveled peas stirred into overcooked rice.

The almost total reliance on donated food means that most charitable meal providers in the Downtown Eastside have little or no control over what they serve their recipients. Salty soups, white rice and day-old pastries are generally the order of the day—hardly substantial for someone living with HIV, or a person who’s spent the night on a cold sidewalk. Feeding the hungry is no easy feat, and one that charity alone is failing to accomplish. Most food providers in the Downtown Eastside can barely keep up with the neighbourhood’s growing food lines, never mind address the nutritional needs of its troubled population—though it’s not for want of trying.

From the time Canada’s first food bank opened its doors in 1981, the charitable food sector has been using a sewing needle to darn what has gradually become a gaping hole in the country’s social safety net. Nearly 30 years of charitable dependence has lulled Canadians into thinking it’s inevitable that some people shop for groceries while others stand in food lines, and turned what is a fundamental human right—the right to adequate food—into a matter of benevolence.

Food is a right, not a privilege

For those of us who can afford a healthy diet, the term “food insecurity” might invoke images of anxiety-ridden tomatoes and body-conscience watermelons. Yet for the millions of low-income Canadians who literally live hand-to-mouth, food insecurity—the inability to purchase nutritionally adequate food—is a daily battle.

At a national level, Canada is food secure; the majority of Canadians are able to access nutritious food, which we produce, import and supply in abundance. In fact, the country’s food supply is so bountiful that Canada is one of the world’s largest food exporters. In 2006, Canada ranked fifth in the world, with over $27 billion in agricultural and agri-food exports. Yet individual food insecurity does exist, and is most prevalent among economically vulnerable groups like the homeless, the working poor, people on income assistance, seniors and single-parent, female-headed households.

According to HungerCount, Food Banks Canada’s national survey of emergency food programs, 2.7 million Canadians—more than the population of Metro Vancouver—experienced food insecurity at some point during 2008. For those Canadians who can’t afford to put food on their tables, food banks and emergency meal programs are their only resort. In any given month more than 700,000 people, nearly 80,000 of them British Columbians, turn to food banks and over three million meals are served in soup kitchens, emergency shelters and meal programs across the country.

“What we’ve seen is the growth of public acceptance in Canada, that hunger is an issue for charity and not a matter of right,” explains Dr. Graham Riches, emeritus professor of social work at the University of British Columbia. “It’s complicated because obviously there are hungry people and there’s a moral right to feed the hungry, but rights are also political, rights are also legal.”

Riches, who has spent much of his career pushing for the adoption of a rights-based approach to food security, says the proliferation of charitable food services in the Downtown Eastside is a strong indication that the right to food is not being upheld in Canada.

“If you go to the Downtown Eastside, one of the most striking things is that there isn’t really a normally functioning food economy like most of us participate in. It’s what we call a food desert; there are no grocery stores and the local food economy is really made up of charitable food.”

The human right to adequate food is certainly nothing new. Canada ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1976, which recognizes the “fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” and states in Article 11, Section 1 that, “The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family, including adequate food, clothing and housing, and to the continuous improvement of living conditions.”

This is all well and good, explains Riches, but by relegating hunger to the charitable sphere, Canada is failing to “respect, protect and fulfill” the rights laid out in the ICESCR. The failure to comply with our international obligations to the right to food, argues Riches, not only “undermines the rights of citizenship” of Canada’s poor, but the implications go far beyond an empty stomach.

“You go into the Downtown Eastside and think, ‘Oh, it’s the drugs that are killing everyone.’ Well what if it’s not the drugs? What if it’s the poor diet day after day after day that’s slowly killing people? No doctor will sign that on the death certificate but maybe that’s what’s happening.”

A portrait of health in the Downtown Eastside

When Stephanie walks through the door of The Lookout Emergency Aid Society on a rainy Thursday morning, it’s as if a tornado has just spun in. “I’m getting the fuck out of here and moving in with my sister,” she announces, looking around the room manically and rocking from foot to foot.

I’m sitting with two outreach workers in the cramped office of Lookout’s emergency shelter on Alexander Street, where three desks have been crammed into a space the size of a walk-in closet. Stacks of beige file folders haphazardly climb the walls, and two aged computers hum in quiet harmony.

The Lookout is just one of the 50 or so charitable organizations tending to the Downtown Eastside’s ailing population. Life expectancy here is five to 10 years lower than the city’s average—for women and men respectively, and residents are considered senior citizens by the ripe old age of 45. As a result of widespread deinstitutionalization beginning in the 1980s and steadily gaining momentum ever since, mental illness is prevalent throughout the neighbourhood, and addiction and infectious disease continue to plague a community where several thousand, like Stephanie, live with HIV and Hepatitis C.

Stephanie’s hair is a short, muddy brown and her blue, wide-set eyes are lined with black eyeliner, now smudged by the rain. Stephanie has agreed to sit and talk with me, but I can tell by the way she’s fidgeting in her chair and biting at her chipped nail polish that our conversation is not destined to be a long one.

“I’m on disability for my HIV but it’s still not enough money to eat, it’s never enough,” she says, picking listlessly at a handful of soggy Cheezies.

Stephanie grew up in Surrey, but left home as a teen and eventually found herself living on the streets of down- town Vancouver. Like most people in the neighbourhood, Stephanie was drawn to the Downtown Eastside because of its close proximity to most of Vancouver’s social services, including its charitable food providers. For Stephanie, eating means standing in food lines everyday, so like her fellow Downtown Eastsiders, she “shops” around at the various food outlets; wandering from the Dugout on Powell Street for 7 a.m. soup and coffee, to the Harbour Light centre or the Franciscan Sisters of Atonement for lunch, and then the Union Gospel Mission for dinner. It’s a well-beaten path between food providers and it certainly gets tiresome.

“I hate waiting,” says the 21-year- old, swiveling back and forth in her chair. “And when you finally get your meal there’s no nutrition in the food you get; it’s just spoiled meat and white bread—you never see a fresh vegetable.”

Stephanie’s frustration with poor food quality is something that is consistently echoed by both the recipients and the providers of charitable food alike. Though the food providers fail to keep records, spoiled donations are a common topic of discussion throughout the neighbourhood. The outreach workers at the

Lookout shelter, which serves breakfast, lunch and dinner, voiced their concerns over the poor quality of donated food, though they seemed resigned to it.

“Virtually everything we get donated has expired,” explained Heidi Klassen, Stephanie’s outreach worker. “We’ll get called to pick up a donation and the vegetables are literally blue.”

Poor nutritional health is one of the major contributors to sickness in low-income neighbourhoods like the Downtown Eastside, and socio-economic status is among the most important factors associated with health disparities in Canada.

For Stephanie, an unhealthy diet will soon take its toll. The Hepatitis C, which limits her liver’s ability to absorb nutrients, will further rundown her immune system and reduce her body’s ability to respond to HIV-related infections. This means increased hospital visits and additional strain on the public purse.

The general public accounts for $94 billion of Canada’s annual healthcare spending. According to a 2004 study by the Health Disparities Task Group, the poorest 20 per cent of the general public (people like Stephanie) account for 31 per cent of that $94 billion, meaning that should the health status of low-income Canadians be raised, significant savings would be possible.

Though Stephanie’s HIV and Hep C mean she will undoubtedly incur significant health-care costs in the future, proper nutrition could go a long way to reduce those costs by keeping her healthy and out of the hospital.

I’m strong to the finich, ‘cause I eats me spinach

Diane Brown is dressed plainly in jeans and a T-shirt, and her signature navy blue pageboy hat covers her short, curly brown hair. She’s chopping vegetables at the stainless steel island in the centre of the Carnegie’s bright, spacious kitchen. A cacophony of car horns, sirens and yells can be heard through the open window where, two floors below, East Hastings is waking up for the day.

A passionate food advocate, Brown began at the Carnegie where she, along with the rest of the Carnegie Kitchen staff, are well known by the neighbourhood for their tyranny of healthy cooking.

“When I first began cooking here I lived in Shanghai Alley, and when I walked home after my shift, sometimes people would pass me on the street and yell out,

‘What’s for lunch tomorrow?’ I’d tell them and they’d moan and groan and yell, ‘Not again!’ I felt like a school matron or something.”

The lunch rush now over, we sit down in the Carnegie’s half-empty circular cafeteria to talk over the day’s special: beef and pineapple curry with fresh greens. Brown eats her salad with the homemade ranch dressing she whipped up earlier this morning using dill and buttermilk.

Brown loves cooking for the Downtown Eastside, though a good number of Downtown Eastsiders, so accustomed to the neighbourhood’s other food outlets, just can’t seem to accept her penchant for all things fresh and green, and still offer the occasional theatrical scowl at a vegetarian Pad Thai. Serving lunch alongside Brown a few Thursdays a month, I was always amazed by the handful of people that would consistently refuse vegetables, and no amount of playful coaxing on my part could convince them otherwise.

After 13 years, however, Brown is used to the complaints and doesn’t let them sway her. “I love cooking vegetarian because it’s healthy and it’s cheap,” she says. “You can experiment too—I’ve been cooking Ethiopian for our lunch specials lately, and even though everyone complains at first, as long as I can convince them to take one bite I can usually change their minds and open up their world a bit.”

While fiscal creativity and talent in the kitchen mean Brown and her fellow Carnegie cooks can bake a mean spinach pie on a shoe-string budget, what separates the Carnegie from other charitable food outlets is that there is actually a budget for food. At under $5, the Carnegie’s restaurant-quality meals are easily the best bang for your buck in a food-rich city like Vancouver, but for people who can’t even afford that, and for those who are unwilling or unable to volunteer for meal vouchers, the Carnegie might as well be a five-star restaurant.

Living below the poverty line

The province of British Columbia currently provides a single, employable person on income assistance with a support allowance of $7.83 a day for food, clothing, transportation, phone calls and any other expenses that might come up throughout the month. According to a 2008 Downtown Eastside Demographic Study, 60 per cent of SRO residents are on welfare. That means breakfast, lunch and dinner at the Carnegie Kitchen would add up to $6.50 a day, leaving only $1.33 for all other expenses; not even enough for a single bus fare. Though cooking at home would stretch those limited support dollars a bit further, most SROs, which make us half of the neighbourhood’s 10,000 low-income housing units, are void of kitchen facilities, and pest infestations make food storage a futile endeavour.

When the B.C. Liberals came into power in 2001, the number of people receiving income assistance in the province was already on the decline—down 29 per cent from 1995. This, however, failed to appease the newly elected Gordon Campbell, who immediately ushered in an era of welfare reform that has since been denounced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, as “radical and unprecedented in Canada.”

Since 2002, over 107,000 British Columbians have been pushed off the welfare rolls in the name of job creation, though studies now show that rather than returning to the work force, many of these people have wound up on the streets.

Rich Coleman, the Minister of Housing and Social Development, was unavailable for an interview, and though the ministry made repeated assurances that my questions would be, at the very least, answered by email, they never were. Trying to determine accountability at the provincial level was turning out to be a Kafkaesque endeavour.

The Ministry of Labour and Citizens Services, which is responsible for B.C.’s substandard $8 an hour minimum wage, repeatedly brushed off my enquiries, while the Ministry of Health Services told me that any questions related to food security should be directed to the Ministry of Healthy Living and Sport, who in turn told me that their ministry is about health promotion, and that I should call the Attorney General. At the provincial level of government the issue of food security would seem to be an orphan.

“Food is important to everyone”

I pop my head in the Carnegie’s sun-filled kitchen and wave at a flush-cheeked Brown, who rushes over and greets me warmly. Though Brown and the rest of the Carnegie’s dedicated kitchen staff work hard each day to improve people’s lives, the overall health of the community continues to deteriorate because local initiatives, while an important piece of the puzzle, can only go so far without government action. Like Graham Riches, Brown believes that food must be under- stood as a social and political good that is both fundamental to human rights and essential to people’s health, welfare and personal and cultural identity.

“Society’s perception of food really has to change from this idea that any kind of food is acceptable to feed the poor,” she says. “Food is important to everyone, whether they admit it or not.”