Despite economic recovery, use of food banks at near-record levels

More than 700,000 Canadians turn to food banks every month, and many of them are employed or from two-parent households

Food bank use is at near-record levels and will only come down if there’s an increase in affordable housing, says Food Banks Canada. More than 700,000 Canadians turn to food banks every month because they have “to choose between paying rent or buying food,” said Katherine Schmidt, the organization’s executive director. “At the root of

Investing in the future

Pedro Medrano Rojas, acting assistant executive director, partnership and governance services of the World Food Program (WFP), offers a sobering observation on the Millennium Goal commitment to reduce by half the number of malnourished people in the world by 2015. “We’re not going to make it,” he says as he begins an interview. In fact,


Recipe Swap: Operation Donation

If you’re a Farmers’ Almanac reader, you’ll have heard of the ‘Wolf moon’ of January and February’s ‘Hunger moon.’ Aboriginal people gave these names to the months of winter because there wasn’t much food around. The heavy snow of February made hunting very difficult. A different sort of ‘hunger moon’ hangs over those with empty


UN declared 2013 International Year of the Quinoa

It’s a highly nutritious grain and a cool-climate crop that could have played a more important role feeding a hungry world, had rice, wheat and corn not predominated. But in 2013 quinoa, (pronounced KEEN-wah), dubbed one of the “lost crops of the Incas,” or “poor man’s crop” could begin a comeback after centuries of relative




Letters — for 2012-10-11 00:00:00

Government actions to blame Regarding the Sept. 6 story “Latest feed crisis may be too much for the battered hog sector, I believe there is another very important factor that should not be disregarded. For every action, there is and will be, an opposite and equal reaction. The final straw, in this most recent case,


Syria needs to import more grain milan / reuters / Syria, hit by a civil unrest, needs to raise cereals import by about a third in the current marketing year after its local grain output 10 per cent dropped in 2011, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said March 14. “Continued civil unrest

How-To Workshops Were Popular Last Year

The Assiniboine Regional Health Authority (ARHA) is offering workshops again this spring to help more people learn gardening basics. This is a second year the health authority is hosting the spring workshops at health centres across Westman, bringing in speakers to talk about starting and tending a backyard garden. A series of garden workshops last