Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank reported a significant decrease in monthly client visits between January and December last year, suggesting that Canada’s economy is improving after the recession in 2008.

According to an analysis of the food bank’s database, the visits fluctuated throughout the year but showed a decrease between 63,000 clients in January and slightly more than 42,000 clients in December. The food bank uses this dataset to determine how much food is needed to sustain their network of more than 200 agencies in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area.

The monthly totals are determined by the number of people in the household multiplied by the number of times per month they come to the food bank.

“They’re still not at pre-recession levels but they’re closer to that. I think that reflects what you’ll find in a lot of social assistance caseloads,” said Michael Oliphant, director of public affairs for the food bank. “If there’s a recession, they spike. They tend to kind of follow the ebb and flow of the economy.”

Despite the decrease in the number of people using Daily Bread from last January to December, experts say there are still many reasons to be concerned.

Graham Riches is director of the School of Social Work and Family Studies at the University of British Columbia. He said that food purchasing is easily changed if household income is low.

“You can buy more expensive food, less expensive food, you can go hungry,” Riches said.

“There are different ways in which people will ration their food budgets because they are flexible whereas other costs are not.”

In a report released last year, the food bank cited the high cost of living in Canada’s largest city as a significant contributor to the number of clients struggling with food insecurity.

“The cost of living in Toronto used to be much higher than outside of it. So you could get an apartment in Scarborough for much cheaper than it would be right downtown,” Oliphant said about the changing housing prices in the city. “But those housing costs now are really high throughout the whole region.”

Valerie Tarasuk, a professor at the University of Toronto said that food bank numbers can be challenging to interpret in the broader context.

“We’ve got measures of hunger and food insecurity in Canada and they bear little resemblance to the food bank numbers,” Tarasuk said. “So most people who are struggling to put food on the table in a community may never show up at a food bank and there are a lot of reasons for that.”

Some of these reasons are simply a feeling of discomfort with going to a food bank or lacking access to a food bank in one’s neighborhood in the first place.

Oliphant agreed with the realities of these barriers and that the numbers are not always clear indicators of those who are hungry in Canada.

However, he said the numbers can be useful to understand food insecurity and its relationship to the economy in a broader sense.

“We started to see big increases in food bank use in 2007, about a year before the recession hit,” Oliphant said. “There’s a bit of a canary in a coal mine kind of thing with the numbers and where the trends are going, more so than the absolute numbers.”

In the same report, the food bank said that the number of baby boomers who are aging but not yet eligible for senior benefits are a major demographic using the food bank’s services.

Daily Bread Who’s Hungry Report 2013 (Text)
Tarasuk said it is best to approach with caution when determining who is using the food bank from the data.

“I think it’s dangerous to infer anything very much about public policy issue from food bank numbers because they are just a snapshot of a much bigger problem and it’s a pretty blurry snapshot,” Tarasuk said.

Oliphant said Daily Bread Food Bank is expecting a slight decline in client visits this year as the economy continues to stabilize and recover.