A Predictable Emergency is based on research The Stop conducted with graduate students from the University of Toronto in February 2015. We surveyed 211 people who use our Food Bank (14% of our total membership) to understand how much money they have to spend on food, and what they do once their three-day food hamper runs out.

The results speak to desperately low incomes and persistent food insecurity for people using food banks in Canada.

The Stop has been running a food bank for over 30 years. With help from students at the University of Toronto's School of Public Policy, we recently asked community members about our emergency response. We provide healthy food, but our monthly hampers last three days. We wanted to know what happens the other 27 days. The results speak to that uncomfortable juxtaposition, because for the more than 840,000 Canadians using food banks monthly, this is a predictable emergency.

Most significant in the results was the staggering low income and normalization of food insecurity. Eighty per cent of people surveyed reported an annual income below $20,000, and 12 per cent had no money ever for food. The monthly average spent was $167, which, according to Toronto Public Health, is enough to feed a nine-year-old child. Just.

Poverty is migrating outward in Canada's largest city, with an annual food-bank tally showing soaring need in Toronto's inner suburbs such as Scarborough and Etobicoke.

In total, 896,900 people visited a food bank across Toronto in the year to March, a 1.4-per-cent increase from a year earlier and a level still 12 per cent higher than during the recession, according to the annual count by the Daily Bread Food Bank.

The geography of hunger is shifting. Demand at food banks is subsiding in the city core, down 16 per cent since 2008, while in the inner suburbs of North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke, demand has risen 45 per cent in the past seven years.

An alarming new study that has London public health officials calling on the province to raise social assistance rates shows the average family of four in London is spending $56.03 more per month on groceries than it did only a year ago.

The hike - most dramatic in the produce and meat departments - is being felt in households across London, but it's having the greatest effect on those already struggling to make ends meet.

In the Bizarro world we've created, where selling illness to fund charity is totally normal, the fact that Food Banks Canada has elected to partner with 7-11 and sell "Name Your Price Day" large sized Slurpees to raise money to fight food insecurity won't bat many eyelashes.

There's no doubt that the practice of junkfood fundraising with sugar-sweetened beverages (where I'm betting a huge percentage of those taking advantage of 7-11's Name Your Price larges will be children) will one day end, but that day won't come until the general public recognizes just how backwards these cause-washing initiatives are in the context of health.

Our most basic needs are physiological - air, water, food, shelter and clothing - followed by safety, belongingness and love, esteem, self-actualization and self-transcendence. Without meeting basic physiological needs, we cannot survive. So the first responsibility of governments is to ensure everyone's basic needs are met.

Many of our basic needs are enshrined in the UN Declaration on Human Rights. Article 25 states: "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing." Note that the word is "everyone," not some, most or nearly everyone.

Canada's food-bank shelves have been running empty for 35 years. Yes, restock them, but don't expect hunger to go away. Even Food Banks Canada says it will not.

Sadly, compassionate appeals to food donors allow the community, business and our politicians to believe that food charity is the answer to hunger. Nothing is further from the truth.

Food-bank usage underestimates the scale of the national crisis: four million food-insecure Canadians, of whom 60 per cent are working poor. Only one in four of the food-insecure use food banks and many who do remain hungry.

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