In New York, the increased demand has been more than many food pantries are able to handle. Over the next month, nearly a quarter of the city's pantries have had to conserve resources by cutting down on the amount of food they put in each recipient's bag.

And while Niagara families struggling to make ends meet are finding it increasingly difficult to put healthy food on the table, that's especially true for people scraping by on social assistance or living on the minimum wage, figures in the Feb. 18 report show.

"This is what a community food centre is," Korytko said. "It's an opportunity to teach people everything from how to grow, to cook properly and nutritionally their food, to be able to share it, to be able to advocate on top of it, to be able to make sure that we can lobby both regionally, provincially and nationally so that people can get good quality food to eat."

In 1998, Janet Poppendieck wrote along the same lines, arguing that food banks came about as a symptom of a failing welfare state and that they take the responsibility of ending hunger away from the government. To Poppendieck, food banks are like a doctor with only a first aid kit: sometimes band-aids just aren't enough for an ailing society.

Even this argument isn't new. In Oscar Wilde's 1891 essay The Soul of Man under Socialism, he famously argued that "the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good."

However, more than 375,000 people go to food banks every month in Ontario because they do not have enough money to buy food, and more than 1.7 million people in Ontario live below the poverty line.

The main evidence presented to the gathering of about 200 people from across the province was Wynne's refusal to raise social assistance rates so people can afford to both eat and pay rent. They are demanding a $100-a-month rate hike as a down payment.

For most people today, growth is happening somewhere else, for someone else. The result is a crescendo of frustration.

Ontario's cost of living would be rising by 2.1 per cent, not the official rate of 1.5 per cent.

This matters to millions of Ontarians - workers with COLA clauses, pensioners, tenants, students, recipients of drug benefits, employment insurance, disability support and social assistance. As of June 1, it will matter to the 535,000 people earning Ontario's minimum wage.

The short answer: Even with the June boost, an employee working full-time for an entire year would still only earn about half the affordable housing wage - the amount of money required to live in a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto.

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