Our Food, Our Responsibility

Our grocery carts overflow with ultra-processed food, our pharmacies dispense billions in pills for preventable diseases, our local farms and producers are struggling to survive—and global multinationals are profiting handsomely from all of it.

One in four Quebecers is food insecure. While some people go to bed hungry, others are throwing away massive quantities of perfectly good food. Retailers throw out containers full of food, farms leave harvests in the field because the economics don’t pencil out, people discard both foods that have not been touched and foods that have been lovingly prepared. We don’t have a food shortage. I think we have a profound failure of distribution, priorities, and values.

The Cost of Convenience

We buy pre-sliced apples wrapped in individual plastic bags. We import food from thousands of kilometres without counting the true environmental and human cost of producing it. Somewhere along the way, we lost the thread—the knowledge of how to grow, preserve and share food—and replaced it with convenience. All it’s gotten us is sicker, more dependent, and far less resilient. And when the next disruption comes—drought, supply chain failure, economic collapse—that fragility will cost us dearly.

We Are All Responsible

The question of who is responsible for feeding us is not a simple one. Government? Farmers? Neighbours? Local organizations? The honest answer is all of us. Food security is not someone else’s problem to solve.

“I want to live in a community where seeds are shared as freely as conversation, where no one goes hungry while a neighbour’s garden overflows…”, I’ve heard recently. So start where you are. Grow something, buy directly from a local farm, learn to preserve, to ferment, to cook from scratch. Share your seeds, your plants, your knowledge and your harvest with the people around you. Forage wild edibles like mushrooms and the thousands of apple trees lining our rural roads, let a neighbour’s garden abundance become someone else’s dinner. Feed an elder. Teach a child by using what you have. Be creative. These are not small acts—they are the building blocks of a resilient community.

Dana Cooper