Who deserves to eat?

The cost of conditional compassion

It used to be that some things were said sotto voce. Heads leaned in. Voices lowered. There were glances around the room to see who might be listening.

Now they arrive in headlines carried by national newspapers.

Neither is okay. I guess it’s just that the latter feels a bit more shocking.

On Dec. 10, the National Post released an op-ed titled, “When your food bank donations subsidize fraud and video games.” The article is not particularly insightful. What makes it worth paying attention to is how easily it suggests that hunger must be policed and generosity requires surveillance. In an outside voice, the author claims shame might be the necessary “force field that keeps charity services intact.” Never mind justice or fairness.

And if a national newspaper is printing this kind of drivel, I can’t help but worry about how many people are buying into the rhetoric.

I serve a congregation who runs a food justice ministry. Nourish East End offers monthly community dinners and hosts a weekly market-style food bank. We also make sure to tell our neighbours and political leaders that we’d like to be out of business.

Nourish is affiliated with Daily Bread Food Bank, which has recently released their annual “Who’s Hungry?” report.

The numbers are alarming. This year, Toronto food banks saw over 4.1 million client visits. This is 636,000 more than the year before and a 340-percent increase since 2019. More than one in 10 Torontonians rely on food banks to feed themselves. Other studies have been conducted across the country with similar findings — food insecurity is at crisis levels.

We know this. We know this. The data is overwhelming.

In its article, the National Post briefly mentions data, but then wanders off into the outrage economy of social media, returning with a handful of stories meant to stand in for a generation’s worth of research. A few videos. A person who bought a gaming console and, at another point in time, accessed a food bank. These moments are presented as proof of an entire system that’s supposedly gone soft when, apparently, we must stay hard to be taken seriously.

But the real barriers food-bank clients encounter are not mysterious. Housing costs have risen. Wages have lagged. Social supports don’t cover the basics. More people are unable to make the math work at the end of the month.

And yet, the author says food banks have been “working to make themselves more exploitable.”

It is an odd burden to place on food banks, asking them to become better gatekeepers. Less generous. More suspicious. As if the crisis of food insecurity were the result of our openness rather than the predictable outcome of policy decisions made far from our rickety shelves of canned beans.

It’s true — at Nourish East End, the energy of staff and volunteers is not spent on becoming less “exploitable.” It is spent on becoming more relational. Staff and volunteers are learning names and recognizing individual needs. They are cultivating a place where asking for help does not require a performance of desperation. In many cases clients and volunteers are one and the same.

I assure you, we are not simply naïve. This version of care is wholistic and attentive. People who return week after week are not invisible, and neither are those who come once, embarrassed and unsure.

We feed people. We do it amid rising food costs and decreasing amounts of food available from Daily Bread.

No, food banks are not the cause of the crisis we responding to.

But to claim we have made ourselves “exploitable” is a convenient deflection. It allows those who might actually have the power to influence resource allocation to appear concerned about those who are both hungry and “deserving” while leaving the underlying structural failures untouched. This kind of thinking shifts responsibility from systems to volunteers and from collective obligation to moral judgement.

Food banks were never meant to fix the issues that created the crisis of food insecurity.

We certainly should not be asked to apologize for refusing to make shame the price of survival.

The article avoids explicit slurs, but it still traffics in the familiar script of scapegoating.¹

Ideally, we’d care to enforce our cultural expectation of self-reliance. The inconvenient fact is that the shame and stigma we’ve all been trained to feel is the force field that keeps charity services intact. Take that away and, well, people aren’t going to want to give if they think they’re supporting non-citizens looking to offset their gaming console spending.
-Jamie Sarkonak, “When your food bank donations subsidize fraud and video games”

Self-sufficiency is largely a myth. No one is truly self-sufficient. Not the retiree whose income is offset up by government programs. Not the professional whose success rests on education, healthcare, roads and many more forms of collective infrastructure. We are all, always, a product of more than only ourselves.

Yet in Western, highly individualistic societies, the fantasy persists — and it does powerful work. It teaches us that needing help is a personal failure rather than a predictable outcome of exploitive economic systems. And it insists that shame is the appropriate response to receiving. The article presumes that non-citizens who access food banks come to Canada without the same work ethic and moral compass that “Old Stock” Canadians have.

It makes no sense to paint every newcomer food-bank client with the same brush. However, for those arriving in Canada from more collectivist cultures, the myth of self-sufficiency can feel unfamiliar. In many societies, shared food is not a sign of failure but of belonging. You eat because you are part of the community. No moral audition required.

Seen through this lens, the absence of shame is not evidence of exploitation. It is an entirely different value system — one that doesn’t let neighbours go hungry simply to preserve the fiction that everyone should manage on their own.

I explored the idea of poverty and shame through Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in this February 2019 episode of the Living Presence Podcast.

In the Christian tradition I belong to, shame is a wound to be tended, not a pain to be coached. Jesus does not rely on shame to teach people how to live. When confronted with hunger, Jesus’ response is bread and abundance. Feed first, ask questions (maybe) later.

Over and over again, our sacred texts reject the logic of scarcity. Manna in the wilderness falls without regard for merit. Loaves and fishes multiply without a screening questionnaire. In Matthew 25, Jesus doesn’t ask whether the hungry deserve food, but whether those with enough notice their need. It is Jesus’ need too.

If charity requires humiliation to function, then what we are actually valuing is power and control. There is nothing generous about that. Those who believe dignity must be rationed may want to question which story they are being formed by — and whether it deserves their allegiance.

I don’t wonder whether food banks are being exploited. I know they are — by governments that have normalized hunger and downloaded the work of care onto volunteers and donors.

I am interested in exploring Why are we more afraid of someone getting extra than someone going hungry?

That fear has the power to form government policy. It’s also how a society can preach about those accessing support and stay quiet about the structures that keep people poor in the first place.

I’d like to think a measure of society is not how well it safeguards its vegetables, but how willing it is to take care of its people — without demanding a moral receipt. When help becomes humiliating, people disappear because they can no longer bear the cost of asking.

Which sounds a bit like this…

The easiest way to prevent food bank “abuse” is not tighter rules, but living in a country that has decided people should not be hungry.

We will always need to make decisions about how to allocate resources. But we also must decide what kind of people we’re going to be when we do it. We can tell ourselves a story where compassion is risky, or we can tell a truer story: we belong to one another.

And then act accordingly.

Because in this story, feeding each other is just an ordinary act of faithfulness. 🐦

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join me in the comments…

What do you think is the deeper fear underneath our obsession with “food bank abuse”?

What did you learn about need and dignity in your family or your church growing up?

1. In the National Post article, the author claims 34% of newcomers who have lived in Canada for less than 10 years are utilizing food banks. In actuality, the Food Banks Canada report cited states 34% of food-bank clients are newcomers to Canada. There’s a huge difference.