Toronto is a city of opportunity, but not for everyone. That’s why chef Rodney Bowers has proposed a meal token program to help the underprivileged in his neighbourhood. The deal? Buy a token from his restaurant, Hey!, and donate it. It can then be returned for a high-quality, nutritious sandwich. But not everyone supports the idea.
Herein, two perspectives on the issue of feeding the needy in Toronto.
For program:
Chef Rodney Bowers, owner of Hey! and Hey Meatball!, wants to start a meal token program in Parkdale
I’m not in the business of running a soup kitchen; I’m just a guy that’s in a neighbourhood on the edge of gentrification — Parkdale. Every day, I look outside of my window and there are people who are in need of reasonable food who cannot afford proper nutrition.
That’s just the reality of it.
We’re hoping to sell tokens out of my restaurant Hey!, and what they will represent is essentially that you’re able to come in and exchange that for a sandwich. It’s probably going to be about $2.
The thing is, when you pass someone on the street, it’s harder to give them money if you’re afraid of them, they seem like they’re on drugs or smell like alcohol. You know it, I know it, and even I’m guilty of passing by that person. We thought, it’s easier to give tokens out because you know that person is not going to go and buy those things.
And it’s not just for people on the street. We have an elderly demographic in the neighbourhood, a lot of people that are on social assistance and some that are living on a pension and have no income.
There is a fine line between what people in the streets are going to accept and what people walking down the street are going to give to people. Sometimes you want to give them food, but how many people are going to accept that? People on the streets have their backs up. They’re beaten down.
People who think it’s patronizing to give tokens have never lived on the street, they’ve never been poor, they’ve never been someone with a mental illness. It’s easy to stand on a platform and criticize how we hand stuff out. But if you always look at the big picture, how do you start at the roots of the problem?
Hopefully, because Toronto is so big, maybe somebody in the east end might want to start something over there. Hopefully it could catch on.
Against program:
Jonah Schein, MPP for Davenport and former food bank co-ordinator, thinks charity isn’t the answer
If a program wants to do something to give back to the community, I’m sure people would do it in a way that would contain some dignity. But ultimately, people don’t enjoy receiving charity.
I think a token program is a component of people trying to pitch in for a public system that’s broken.
We live in an inequitable city and in an inequitable province. Some people make a lot of money and some people are struggling to put food on the table, and that’s the problem.
It’s a fairly large number of people who don’t have access to good nutritious food in the city.
It is the government that has fallen down on this. We’ve breached the social contract that ensures people have access to food.
For example, you don’t beg for health care in this country. That’s part of the social contract, so you don’t feel stigmatized when you go in to get your health care.
Is a token program patronizing? I think it’s humiliating to live in such close proximity to such abundance and yet still have to beg for food. It is equally dehumanizing to rely on charity.
People see this poverty when they walk down the street, they see people asking for money and food, and they want to do something about that. We’ve had a charitable response emerge in the last 20 years. What this rise mirrors is the way that we as a society have stepped away from providing support to people.
Though charitable responses to food and security are well-intentioned by people who provide them, they are inadequate to meet the needs of the people where the government should be stepping in.
What we should be looking for instead is creating good jobs in the province. We should get people back to work, invest in an economy for the 21st century and agree to take care of each other.