Some Thunder Bay families struggling to afford healthy food

Superior Morning4:09Too Expensive To Eat

The cost of eating well. Catherine Schwartz Mendez talks about the results of the latest nutritious food basket survey conducted by the Thunder Bay District Health UNit.It's getting more difficult for people on lower incomes to eat a healthy diet.

The Thunder Bay District Health Unit says the cost of a basket of nutritious food went up 10 per cent over the last year.

Thunder Bay resident Cynthia Sutton isn’t surprised by the news.

“You could get a bag of oranges before for $3.99 and I've seen them up as high as $6.48 this year."

Sutton's family of four lives on a single modest income, but she acknowledges there are others who are much worse off.

Health unit spokesperson Catherine Schwartz-Mendez agrees.

"For a family of four living on social assistance, it was just over $200  that they'd have left, after paying rent and food, and that would have to cover everything else that a family of four would need to buy in a month."

Schwartz Mendez said any unexpected expense forces a low-income family to cut its food budget to the bone.

Sutton said she can relate.

"Do we have as much milk in our cereal as we want to? You just got to really stop and think about these things.”

Schwartz-Mendez said the province needs to look at raising social assistance rates and the minimum wage.

Raising awareness

The health unit has been doing the Nutritious Food Basket Survey for about 15 years.

"What we do is we go to six stores — five in the city and one in our district communities — and we price out 67 basic food items [such as] fresh produce staples, rice, potatoes, meat,” Schwartz-Mendez said.

The list doesn't include non-food items like toilet paper or detergent.

The Health Unit uses the data to work out how much money a low-income family will have left each month after paying for rent and food. This is the money they'd have left to pay for everything from hydro and phone bills to the cost of school supplies, coin laundry, toiletries, cleaning supplies and other incidentals.

Here are some stats from their survey released this week:

• A single man on Ontario Works would be left with a debt of $167.30.
• A single mother on Ontario Works with an 8-year-old daughter and 14-year-old boy would have $457.21 left over.
• A family of four on Ontario Works, including an 8-year-old daughter and 14-year-old boy would have $231.38 left over.
• A single man on the Ontario Disability Support Program would have  $173.30 left over.
• A single woman, age 70, on Old Age Security / Guaranteed Income Supplement would have $587.56 left over.
• Nutritious food basket prices in Thunder Bay were $27 higher than the provincial average.

"I'd like to raise awareness that [for] people living on low incomes it really is hard to afford to eat healthy, even though that's what we're recommending,” Schwartz-Mendez said.

Sutton said she she’s noticed the price of some fresh meats has gone up a lot, while “the non-essentials — the junk food — has stayed pretty much the same."

She said she struggles with the reality that many nutritious foods are priced out reach for some.

"The system's flawed. You have all these fast food restaurants that have $1.39 burgers and you have junk food. Kraft Dinner's 50 cents a box, the no name brand, of course. And you have the good foods that are so high priced. It doesn't make sense,” she said.

“And then they say it's a burden on the health system because there's so many people like myself who are obese and have all these different health issues. But the problem is the food that's most readily accessible is the stuff the worse for you."