Health: Hunger in a City of Plenty
Originally published in The Local. Read the full text here
As a child in Barranquilla, a northern port city in Colombia, Elka Aranzalez grew up around people and food. Her father, a criminal lawyer, had eight siblings, and there were enough soccer players in her extended family to field two teams in the local amateur league. Meals were lively, extravagant events. Aranzalez’s favourite dish was bocachico, a river fish that could be fried whole or stuffed with vegetables and grilled until tender.
Every summer, crowds of people — relatives, as well as clients and employees of her father’s firm — would descend on the family cottage, located a few kilometres from town on the Caribbean Sea. The guests would spend their afternoons swimming or visiting the nearby beachside amusement park. Then they’d file into the house, refreshed and sunburned, to eat fried plantains and sancocho, a meaty stew, and knock back glasses of Chivas Regal.
While the family cook handled meal preparation, Aranzalez was in charge of hospitality. When she was a teenager, it was her job to shepherd guests into the dining room, manage the kitchen, and ensure food was properly timed. “My father would say, ‘You need to talk directly. You need to talk with power,’” she recalls. “It was training I would never get at university.”
While Aranzalez fondly recalls those summertime events, there are other life experiences she prefers not to revisit. She will not divulge, for instance, the reasons why, in 2002, three years after receiving her law degree from the Universidad Libre in Barranquilla, she left Colombia to seek refugee status in Canada. She also hesitates to talk about the man she married in 2003 and divorced in 2007, except to note that he was a skilled cook. “It was one of the reasons I fell in love,” she says.
She does, however, reflect on how moving to Canada changed her relationship to food and community. The food culture seemed both rich and impoverished. She recalls being awed by the range of products at the grocery stores — “There were varieties of fruits and vegetables I had never seen before,” she says — but at other times, her experiences were disappointing: fruit was less flavourful and yogurt more watery than what she’d eaten back home. In 2006, she experienced a phenomenon that is surprisingly common in this country: hunger.
The technical term for what Aranzalez went through is “food insecurity,” a problem that affects one in eight Canadian households and ranges in intensity from marginal to severe. A marginally food-insecure person will worry about not being able to put food on the table; a severely food-insecure person will economize by skipping meals. In Toronto, 12.6 percent of households experience food insecurity, a number that is roughly on par with the provincial average. Children, however, are particularly vulnerable: 17 percent of Ontarians below age 18 live in food-insecure homes.
From September 2006 to August 2007, a time in which Aranzalez was severely food insecure, she was separated from her husband and raising her three-year-old daughter, Juliana, in an apartment near Lawrence Avenue and Allen Road. She visited her local food bank, which gave her bi-monthly emergency supplies and prevented her from starving. That’s about all it did, though. The experience was joyless and lonely. “Beside the lack of food,” she says, “there was something else I was missing: culture.”
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.