Food survey in St. John's suggests residents have challenges accessing groceries

A recent food assessment completedin St. John's found 90 per cent of people surveyedare not satisfied with the food they can obtain in the city.

It also shows 67 per cent of BIPOC or Black, Indigenous or people of colour respondents have difficulty finding their cultural foods, while access to grocery stores and transportation to get food are ongoing issues.

The report was presented to St. John'scity council's committee of the whole Wednesday.

Sarah Crocker, program co-ordinator with Food First N.L. and lead on the food assessment, says the idea of the survey was to delve into the city's complex food issues.

"In the last year or two years we've had a lot of emergency issues, but we know there's a lot of room for collaboration and co-ordination to see food embedded in the City of St. John'sdifferent strategies, programs and policies," Crocker told CBC Radio's St. John's Morning Show.

The survey was done in February and received more than 800 responses.

Because people included their postal codes with their responses, Crocker said, the group was able to matchthose areas to the specific wards represented by city councillorsto look at the differences and compare things on a neighbourhood level.

"Being able to look at the city as a whole was really interesting, but then when we broke it down by ward, different issues emerged," she said.

Crocker saidit was unsurprising to find that 75 per cent of respondents use their personal vehicles for grocery runs. But drilling deeper into the data, Crocker said in Ward 2 the downtown and central area of the city only 60 per cent said the same, with more people saying they walked, biked or took the bus.

In Ward 5, the west end of the city and the Goulds neighbourhood, 86 per cent indicated they used their own vehicle.

"Nobody indicated they were able to walk or bike to buy food," Crocker said.

She said the survey puts a "food lens" on some of the things the City of St. John's is doing, which can help move sustainable public policy forward. She added it also provides areas for community groups and businesses to take action.

The top priority from respondents to address these accessibility issues, regardless of household income or age, was income solutions.

"People really understood that access to food is about money, and so increasing wages, changing social assistance rates, doing work on any way that we can look at increasing income or decreasing the cost of living and equalizing, that was the No. 1 priority," Crocker said.

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