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Food banks in Toronto were visited 4.1 million times between April 2024 and March 2025, according to the Daily Bread Food Bank’s annual Who’s Hungry report. This is an increase of 18 per cent since last year. Food banks saw a 340 per cent increase in daily use between 2019 and 2025.
The issue hits hard at the GTA’s college and university students, who make up 11 per cent of those reportedly using food banks since the pandemic, the report states.
Lea Jiang has spent the past three summers volunteering and working for student community gardens and nonprofits at the University of Toronto (U of T). She’s worked for the Food Systems Lab, a sustainability initiative at U of T, while also volunteering for Dig In!, the school’s student-run collective.
After harvesting the fruits and vegetables planted months prior, the student groups worked in tandem and hosted free food stands, offering their crops to students and passersby alike.
“We did that because, well, food insecurity is a huge issue in the city, but also, student food insecurity was a huge problem,” said Jiang.
Food Share Toronto is a food justice nonprofit organization advocating for the right to food. Serving over 70,000 customers throughout Toronto in 2023 with the help of volunteers, they attempt to increase access to affordable food by challenging the systemic barriers that keep people from accessing the food they need to thrive.
“It’s not a food issue, it’s a poverty and social inequality issue,” says Andrea Thompson, director of fundraising and communication for Food Share Toronto.
The nonprofit hosts markets which allow the community to give their unwanted food scraps for credit. “[We] have them wait and trade them in for vouchers, and they’re able to buy their fresh produce [at the market] with those vouchers,” said Thompson.
The Daily Bread Food Bank’s annual report found that 23 per cent of food bank users were students of some kind. Of those, 40 per cent were already existing food bank clients, while 60 per cent were new clients who began utilizing the food bank for the first time in the past 12 months.
Food that typically gets wasted because of cosmetic differences are saved by Toronto Metropolitan University’s food bank, the Good Food Centre, says coordinator Rob Howard.
“You might pull up a weird carrot with three sorts of carrots sticking out of it,” said Howard. “They won’t sell that because it doesn’t look like a nice carrot.”
The Daily Bread Food Bank found that of the 1,891 clients surveyed, 82 per cent of respondents did not have enough food to eat in the past year. Despite this, there’s no direct mention addressing food insecurity in the 2025 federal budget, something noted by experts and critics alike. According to Second Harvest Canada’s The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste: the roadmap, a 2024 guide created to reduce food waste in Canada, 46.5 per cent of all food in Canada is wasted, and of this food, 41.7 per cent of it could be redirected to support Canadians.
“A lot [of the food that] goes into the trash doesn’t have to,” said Howard. “If we understood more about that, if we were willing to accept food that isn’t cosmetically perfect, I think we could eliminate a lot of food waste.”
While volunteering with community gardens, Jiang noticed students were hesitant to take the fresh crops and even began pleading with them to. “It was a bit disheartening because a lot of people would reject it because it was free,” said Jiang. “I think there’s a sentiment on campus that you shouldn’t take free things, or ‘I should leave this for someone else,’ and I would have to beg people to take them home.”
“I’d [say], ‘it’s organic, we grew it, and it’s grown on campus,’” she said. “‘We harvested literally an hour ago, this is the freshest food you’re going to find, and it’s free!”
Otter.ai was used in the making of this piece.
