Food Bank Adventures: Is Even the Parkdale Food Bank Becoming Gentrified?

            On Saturday morning my back and my left thigh were still sore from the bike accident I’d had the day before. A guy carrying a dog stepped in front of my bike on Bloor Street but when I clenched my brakes I lost my balance and fell off my bike. My back ached through yoga, although it didn’t affect my flexibility. Once I started standing and playing guitar however, most of the pain went away.

            I made the tenth video recording of my daily song practice. I made a few mistakes but I’m getting more comfortable performing for the camera and I think a few of the songs came through okay. I’ve got room on my computer to upload one more session and then I'll either have to edit the videos or make space to record more.

            I went to the food bank around 9:45 and for the third week in a row my spot was the blue heart at the end. The guy in front of me was a big guy who's been a food bank regular for a long time and in front of him was Beth.

            Beth was complaining that the distance between the hearts was wrong because it was two and a half meters. I pulled out my tape measure and found that the distance between the tail of the heart in front of mine and the tail of my heart is two meters and six and a half centimetres. She said it was illegal because it’s more than two meters. I tried to tell her that they don’t care if we are further apart than two meters, they just don't want us to be less. Beth was unphased by my logic and insisted that they were being "evil".

            Beth suddenly took off her mask for the first time and said that the masks are unhealthy. I quoted Jon Stewart commenting recently that no one complains if their surgeon is wearing a surgical mask and asks them to take it off to be healthier while operating on them. She said she thinks surgeons should wear respirators. I suppose that would be better protection if one is operating on someone with a virus.

            Beth said that people have been fined for not social distancing but I didn’t think they really had. I see now that she was right but so was I. I don't think that one person standing too close to someone is going to get a ticket but when large groups of people are hanging out together and ignoring the rules the tickets are issued. As of the first week in May there had been 594 tickets handed out in Toronto.

            Beth said she used to volunteer at the food bank but she got fired because she didn’t steal. She told us that she suggested to them at the time that there should be a day set aside for volunteers to get their food and that they should line up outside and have the boxes brought up to them like everybody else. From what I've always understood the volunteers get their allotment of food before the food bank opens. I don’t know how closely the volunteers’ shopping is supervised but there seems to be a general belief among the clients that it's a free for all and the volunteers take all the best stuff for themselves.

            Marlena has always been the main volunteer working at street level, sending the clients downstairs before the pandemic and distributing the food upstairs since it began. Beth claimed that Marlena told her that she wants all of the food banks to be closed down. I find that hard to believe, since she wouldn’t be volunteering there if she didn't think it was worthwhile. Beth also asserted that the reason that Marlena works outside is because they want her out and that the next step is to fire her. That seemed like an absurd thing to believe, since Marlena has always had that position ever since the food bank moved from King Street three years ago. It seems to me that Marlena’s job is the best one a volunteer could have at this facility. It’s the one that I would choose if I were to volunteer there.

            It was around 10:15 and it occurred to me, after all this talk about Marlena that that I hadn’t seen her or any other volunteers yet. They had usually come out to hand out some food items or at least to look at the line-up by this time.

            At 10:30 two young men of about college age, who I didn’t recognize at all, came out, one with a cart and the other with a clipboard. They worked together and one took down the name and birth date of each client just before the other handed them a box. Neither of them looked like Parkdalians and since I didn’t see any of the regular volunteers from the neighbourhood the presence of these guys seemed weird and gave me the feeling that the Parkdale food bank had been gentrified and taken over by outsiders.

            When I received my box I was told that there were vegetables at the front by the door.

            As usual I didn’t keep most of what I was given.

            I took two 71 gram bags of mountain blend coffee from Club Coffee, a company which started in Toronto in 1906; a 170 gram bag of fudge dipped Oreo thin bites; two cans of tuna; and a tin of cream of chicken soup.

The only imported product was a 370 ml carton of Cirio crushed tomatoes with onion and garlic. The tomatoes were a year and two months past their best before date.  Cirio was named in a lawsuit in 2017 that came about after a farm labourer in the tomato fields at the heel of Italy died of a heart attack. It was asserted that he could have survived if he had been allowed medical help. The workers labour twelve hours a day, seven days a week without breaks but with no visits from health care professionals. While Cirio does not employ the labourers it was charged in the suit that the company profits from the poor conditions under which the labourers, some legal immigrants and some illegal, work.

I got the usual three eggs, a half litre carton of 2% milk, and two small yogourts, one lemon and one lime.

I put the bag of noodles, the bag of dinner rolls, the pack of what seemed to be vegan ground beef, the can of tomato soup, the tin of stewed tomatoes, the box of sugared cereal, the gravy cubes and probably a few other items that I can’t remember back in the box and gave most everything to Beth. The only thing she didn’t take were the gravy cubes and the noodles. A woman nearby however took those off my hands.

Over by the door was a box of bags containing two bananas, two apples and two yellow peppers. Next to that was a box of young coconuts. I shook a few and picked the one with the most liquid inside. The guy behind me was very excited because he’d never had a coconut before. he asked me if there was water inside that he could drink and I told him they have milk that he could even use to make ice cream.

When I went unlock my bike Beth was still packing her cart. It didn’t look like she was going to have room for everything and she said she’d have to carry the cereal in her hand. She gave me her can of organic chickpeas, which was good because I hadn't gotten any beans in my box.

As I was riding away I saw the guy who usually helps Marlena hand out food, sitting across the street and watching what was going on with a brooding expression. I wondered what was happening inside the food bank.

             I took my food back to my place. My second floor neighbour Benji was pacing in front of our building and looked like he was guarding the place. I asked if everything was in order. He said he was just stretching his legs. I told him to make sure he stretches both legs so that one wouldn't be longer than the other. He commented that he had nothing to do and all day to do it and so I suggested that he take half the day off so he doesn’t have to work so hard at doing nothing.

            After putting my food away I rode down to Freshco to take some money out of the bank machine, then I rode to No Frills. I bought seven bags of grapes, two half pints of raspberries, a wedge of two year old cheddar, mouthwash, hair conditioner, Murphy Oil Soap, a can of dark coffee, some Greek yogourt, some skyr and a bag of natural potato chips. At the checkout I had to remind the cashier that I was supposed to get $10 back.

            For lunch I had a cheese, cucumber and lettuce sandwich with ranch dressing.

            In the afternoon I skipped my exercises to work on my journal.

            I uploaded the video I’d shot that morning but didn’t have time to look at it.

            I had an egg over easy and toast with a beer for dinner while watching “Meeting in Paris", which is the eighteenth episode of the 1957-1958 Alfred Hitchcock produced TV series, "Suspicion”.

            In the story, Peter Lockwood is a very successful oil man who has come to Paris for a funeral. One day while leaving his Paris office he finds his ex-wife Clare sitting in his convertible. He has never gotten over Clare and he invites her to lunch. She says she needs his help because her husband, Eugene Stengler is in trouble and needs to get back to the States as soon as possible. Peter says he will help her but after they part he is approached by a Major Denbrow of the US military. He says that Stengler is a traitor selling US secrets. Peter tries to bring Eugene the freighter tickets to his room but he had run just a few minutes before. Peter finds Clare and she explains that Eugene left because he saw that Peter was being followed. She says that she is staying and Eugene is leaving. He is being pursued by black marketeers that mean to kill him. Peter arranges for someone to take Eugene the tickets to his new location and then he once again is approached by Denbrow. The major convinces Peter that Stengler is a traitor and so he rats him out. Thinking that her husband is safe Clare goes back into the arms of Peter but then it is reported that Eugene has been found dead. Peter explains to Clare that Eugene was a traitor and he takes her to see Denbrow so he can corroborate this to her. But at US military headquarters in Paris it turns out that the real Major Denbrow is not the person with whom Peter had met earlier. Clare is horrified and runs out. That’s the strange end to the story. It made me wonder if Elliot West’s original story also ended that way.

            Clare was played by Jane Greer, who is descended from John Donne. Her mother entered her in and she won baby beauty contests. She had palsy at the age of fifteen and it partially paralyzed her face. The facial exercises that she practiced helped her achieve a versatility of expression that aided her acting career. As a teenager she sang with big bands. One of her first films was the 1945 movie “Dick Tracy”. She is best known for her role in the film noir, “Out of the Past". Howard Hughes was obsessed with her and she married Rudee Valee to escape but Hughes fought to ruin her marriage so she would return to him.