Struggling to afford rent, groceries, more hungry Montrealers turn to dumpster divers for food - Action News
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Montreal

Struggling to afford rent, groceries, more hungry Montrealers turn to dumpster divers for food

Strapped for cash and alarmed by food waste, people line up for discarded bread and produce to feed themselves.

By dumpster diving youre redistributing the wealth, dumpster diver says

A man poses with food in front of a van.
Guillaume Girard dumpster dives almost every day and distributes the food multiple times a week. Girard also collects surplus food from food banks, produce cultivated from community gardens, and bread bakeries wont sell at the end of the day. (Joe Bongiorno/CBC)

One by one, the people from the crowd unload stacks of boxes from a white van. Across the street, a bustling trio of volunteers positions the boxes teeming with produce on a church lawn. Tonight's harvest serves up tomatoes, lettuce, grapes and squash.

Guillaume Girard, the man who is feeding the crowd, says the turnout tonight in Montreal's Petite-Patrie neighbourhood is more than 50 people. A few weeks ago, he says 100 showed up.On other nights, they meet in front of the abandoned, graffitied Esposito grocery store in the neighbourhood of Saint-Michel, a few blocks away.

Standing by a shopping cart filled to the brim with baguettes, Girard holds up a flashlight in the dark. "One sliced loaf and one bakery loaf each," he says, and the queue of people moves forward, each makingtherounds, filling a grocery bag. Some ask for a second go.

There are distributions almost every day of the week, depending on what he and his volunteers can muster. Some of the food is collected from bakeries at the end of the day. Some of the fruits and vegetables are what food banks were set todiscard.

The other main source of food is no secret: Montreal's dumpsters.

In recent months, the queues have only gotten longer with lots of new arrivals foreign students, asylum seekers, even refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine, he said.

"Rent takes up a lot of people's money, so there's not much left over for groceries," said Girard. "The big rise in costs started in the pandemic and it hasn't stopped."

Vegetables sit in a contaner.
Guillaume Girard says perfectly good food is discarded everyday and what he is able to gather is just a 'drop in the ocean.' (Submitted by Guillaume Girard)

Recycled harvest

Girard dumpster dives daily. For the past 15 years he has been sourcingfood from dumpsters all over the city and sharing the spoils, from Pointe-Claire to Repentigny,fromLaval to Montreal's South Shore.

Mostly nocturnal, he prefers to collect the discarded harvest at night. Dpanneurs, pharmacies and grocery stores are best, he says, adding he avoids restaurants which unlike the other stores, don't wrap the food they throw out, leaving it exposed to the elements.

Seeing how the food system overproduces and discards perfectly good food while people go hungry is what got him searching through the city's trash for what could be salvaged, he said.

"By dumpster divingyou're redistributing the wealth," said Girard. "I sometimes get quantities of food that are really industrial several tonnes."

On Monday, while families gather around the supper table for Thanksgiving feasts and some food aid organizations like food banks close their doors, Girard may return tothe streetsharing thebounty.

"A lot of people counton us," he said.

Two people are outside carrying food.
Jeffery and Cindy Shaw have been coming for the free food for the past three months. Jeff recently lost his job and Cindy, a double amputee since 2019, is unable to work. 'We cant make it,' said Shaw. (Joe Bongiorno/CBC)

'Living is a luxury'

Cindy Shaw, a double amputee, rode her electric wheelchair all the way from the borough of Anjou to get some food. She and her son, Jeffery, have been coming for the last three months and they've come several times this week.

Unable to work because of her medical condition, Shaw says she is having a harder and harder time stretching her welfare cheques.

"We can't make it," said Shaw. "Everyone needs to eat. I'm on disability, and we don't get much from the government. [With] the prices of rent now, the money that they give us to live on is not much, just to get by and pay the bills. Living is a luxury."

Holding back tears, Jeffery says he recently lost his job at a glass factory.

A person hands food to another person.
By day, Gigi Kerboud works in a long-term care home. By night, she spends her time doling out discarded food to people struggling to feed themselves. (Joe Bongiorno/CBC)

"We have to resort to scraps, whatever the stores don't want to sell anymore," he said.

Eating food from the dumpster was a lot for him to stomach at first, but he says it no longer bothers him.

"It gives food that's going into landfills a second chance," he said. "There's food that's in the garbage that can feed a family of two."

An orderly in a long-term care home, Gigi Kerboud came straight after her shift to help dole out food.

"It's extraordinary giving to others for free for nothing in return. It's very humane. I love seeing people smile, happy with what they are receiving," she said.

"Before it was mostly unhoused people, now it's more families and students."

A man stands outisde.
'We haven't necessarily progressed much from the Middle Ages if all we're doing to tackle food insecurity for the people in the lowest incomes is to give them the scraps that nobody else wants,' says Wade Thorhaug, executive director at Food Secure Canada. (Angela Hill/CBC)

Food system disconnect

A poverty report released last month by Food Banks Canada found thatnearly 15 per cent of Quebecers are food insecure. While that number is lower than in other provinces,Quebecers spend 12.4 per cent of their household income on food, among the highest rates in the country. At the same time, food prices there have shot up by 9.3 per cent over the past year, the second highest in Canada.

Wade Thorhaug, executive director of Food Secure Canada, says 2022 was one of the most difficult years in terms of food security in recent years, with 2023 possibly shaping up to be even worse.

"I think to me it highlights a huge disconnect in how we structure our food system," said Thorhaug. "We should push retailers to have a system for distributing these surplus foods, but we don't. There's no responsibility for retailers to do anything but throw these things in the garbage."

Waste aside, people need to have money in their pockets to buy food, something that is now beyond many Canadians. He says a universal basic income would go a long way towardgiving people the means to feed themselves as current income support policies are too convolutedand narrowly focused, leaving many food-insecure people without access to aid.

"We haven't necessarily progressed much from the Middle Ages if all we're doing to tackle food insecurity for the people in the lowest incomes is to give them the scraps that nobody else wants."

According to a June 2022 Recyc-Qubec report using data from 2019, 1.2 million tonnes of edible food or 16 per cent of food entering the bio-food system is lost or wasted in the province.

Boxes of food are set up on the lawn of a church.
Montrealers finding it hard to make ends meet show up for an informal system of distributing food. Some of it comes from dumpsters, some from food banks, who will pass on food that they can no longer use. (Joe Bongiorno/CBC)

A 2019 report by Second Harvest, a food rescue organization, found that 58 per cent of all food produced in Canada is lost or wasted.

On Thursday, federalIndustry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne said the country's five largest grocery chains Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart delivered plans to stabilize food prices to the federal government that include more discounts, price freezes and price-matching campaigns.

The Competition Bureau reported in June that Canada's grocery sector lacks competition and is dominated by Loblaw, Sobeys and Metro. It called on the government to encourage new market entrants to bring down prices.

In August, the price of food purchased from stores increased by 6.9 per cent compared to last year. While that's substantially higher than the overall inflation rate of fourper cent, it's down from a recent high of more than 11 per cent.

Earlier this year, a parliamentary committee investigating grocery store giants for alleged price-gouging said Ottawa should consider hitting the companies with a windfall tax on excess profits if the Competition Bureau finds they were profiting excessively from food inflation.

WATCH | University of Ottawastudents dumpster dive for ingredients:

Fed up with pricey groceries, they dumpster dive for their ingredients

2 years ago
Duration 3:44
Jade Hongerlood, Elizabeth Shevchenko, Jasmin Cartier and Grace Poland have been dumpster diving together since the fall to save money and fight food waste.