After a head-scratching decline in use during pandemic, Dryden Food Bank now seeing 'large influx' of families

Pointing to an office-turned-storage space at the only food bank in Dryden, Ont., Allen Huckabay said the room was completely filled "right to the door" earlier in the year.

Now, there are just a couple of rows of boxes with canned goods. 

It's just one of the food storage rooms in the small building — there's a larger, fuller storage room in the back with a small walk-in freezer, and a room lined with fridges — so Huckabay says he isn't too worried at the moment.

The declining food stocks are just an example of the cyclical nature of donations to food banks, he adds.

"Summertime is usually a low time in giving," said the food bank manager. "But I've always said, hunger never takes the summer off. People are still hungry, so they're still coming."

Huckabay says he's sure there will be an increase in donations to the food bank as the school year starts again, community food drives pick up and the "peak months" of November and December approach.

But there's something else that has left the food bank manager puzzled: a recent increase in the number of families asking for help in the city of 8,000.

"In Dryden, we didn't see a big uptick in usage of the food bank [when the pandemic hit]. If anything, we saw more of a decline, which made us scratch our heads a bit."

At the outset of the pandemic, Huckabay said a number of families that regularly access the food bank actually stopped coming in for a while.

It's a trend that has been seen at many food banks right across the country, according to a 2020 report from Food Banks Canada on the impact of COVID-19. 

The organization surveyed more than 1,300 agencies and found that many saw an initial surge in demand during the early weeks of the pandemic.

But once emergency income benefits, like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), started kicking in, 53 per cent of the food banks surveyed reported a decrease in overall usage between March 2020 and June 2020.

Like the majority of other food banks surveyed, Huckabay attributed the declining demand to the creation of the emergency government programming to support families. But since the New Year, many of those programs have either ended or seen reductions, he added.

"Now [many of the families that stopped using the food bank are] back again, but we've also seen a large influx of new clients coming to access the food bank this year."

Huckabay estimates they're serving 100 more families per month as compared to the beginning of the pandemic.

Community members and businesses in Dryden and the surrounding area have always come through with donations of non-perishable items when they're desperately needed, Huckabay said, but he worries about what the food bank would do if they lose any of the community grants they rely on to purchase fresh, healthy foods.

"Being able to make sure that we keep quality food on our shelves is always in the forefront of our minds, and we've been very thankful for some of the programs, like from the Northwestern Health Unit, to help us through this time," Huckabay said. 

"My concern always is if that money were ever to dry up … how would we keep our shelves full?"

Listen to the full interview on CBC's Superior Morning here: