Until April 14th, you can support the Kapuskasing Food Bank while shopping for your own groceries at Independent Grocer.
Food bank chairman Rick Bartlett says you can buy a pre-assembled bag that will go into a bin at the store, buy what you think the food bank needs, or donate cash.
The most pressing need right now is for perishable or frozen food. However, the food bank is only open Thursday afternoons, so it could spoil. Bartlett says a couple regular donors will alert him on a Wednesday that they’re going to drop something off.
“For example,” he explains, “if hamburger meat’s on special, they’ll buy $20 worth of hamburger meat, drop it off and then we’ll have that for our clients come Thursday at noon time.”
Demand for food from the food bank is increasing a lot lately. Bartlett says it didn’t jump as he expected at the beginning of the pandemic, but like Moonbeam, Cochrane and Timmins, it has skyrocketed the past couple of months.
“Ours didn’t increase in the North to other degrees that other places did, and now we’re all going up dramatically,” he states.
Bartlett’s best guess is that’s because food prices are going up… and government financial aid tied to COVID-19 isn’t available anymore.
Here’s our complete interview:
