Pre-school children walk by the Cool Aid Outreach Mobile Health unit as it treats the homeless community along Pandora Ave. in Victoria, B.C., in March, 2024.Chad Hipolito/The Globe and Mail
Everyone is struggling with rising food prices. So, imagine if you had to serve 1,000 meals a day with a budget of about $3 per meal.
That’s the challenge Chef Paul Stewart faces every day at Cool Aid, a Victoria social services agency.
“Food insecurity is a huge problem,” he says. “So we have to get creative.”
Mr. Stewart oversees three kitchens – four if you count the spanking new one sitting empty due to lack of funding – that provide meals for a varied group of clients living in Cool Aid’s supportive housing projects, from retirees living on an inadequate fixed income to those in addiction recovery, along with others in temporary shelters for people living with homelessness.
(Cool Aid, which began as a youth hostel in 1968, is now a world leader in supportive housing, and has 20 sites in the Victoria region.)
A housing remedy for Canada’s hard-hit ERs
Each meal must consist of a meat protein, vegetable(s), a starch like potatoes or rice, juice, and a dessert. Beyond the basic requirements, Mr. Stewart tries to provide fresh, local, seasonal food to his clients, along with a bit of joy.
“Food isn’t just nourishment, it’s community and connection,” he says. “Many of our clients have never experienced those.”
Community and connection are also how the chef is able to scrape together enough food to feed his charges.
All told, the Cool Aid chef has about $1-million a year to produce more than 300,000 meals.
In the social services field, there is such a dizzying variety of programs that every unit in every building is potentially funded differently. For example, a retiree in supportive housing will have a $120 monthly food allocation, while a shelter resident will have a budget of $0 for food.
So, Mr. Stewart pools all the money and begs, borrows and steals to create menus that are as extensive, healthy and edible as possible.
One of the main sources for the kitchens is food rescue. In Victoria, Mustard Seed Street Church operates a giant Food Security Distribution Centre, where discarded food from grocery stores, which once went to landfill, now goes to feed the poor.
The organization collects more than 10,000 pounds of food daily which is then shared with about 70 groups that belong to the Food Share Network.
Every Thursday, workers from Cool Aid fill up a van with food from the distribution centre, about 30,000 pounds a year in total.
Mr. Stewart then shapes the weekly menus based largely on what fresh produce is available.
He also taps into programs like Farmbucks, run by The South Island FarmHub, to provide local produce to food programs. Cool Aid also rents a small plot of land on the outskirts of Victoria, where the plan is to grow fresh food with the help of volunteer farmers.
The chef also has to buy food, which he does in bulk. Much of the cooking is done in bulk too, but he stresses that “we don’t run soup kitchens, our cooks really care.”
Chef Stewart has deep culinary roots. His late mother, Anita Stewart, was a renowned Canadian cookbook author and food activist who founded Food Day Canada.
Mr. Stewart himself started working as a dishwasher as a teen, and after formal training, spent more than 20 years as a chef, much of it in high-end restaurants.
But he says he “got tired of feeding the rich” and, in 2017, joined Cool Aid. “Now I cook for people who are grateful.”
During that time, the organization’s food budget hasn’t increased, but its clientele has. Yet, government funding, much of it from B.C. Housing, remains frozen.
“You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you, but the reality is we just don’t have enough money to feed people. All the focus is on housing, and food is an afterthought,” a frustrated Mr. Stewart says. “But I understand they’re under pressure too.”
A striking example is at Crosstown, a new housing project, where a state-of-the-art industrial kitchen was built. The plan was to train workers in food preparation while providing food to residents, and opening a social enterprise café.
But priorities changed, so it sits empty.
Nevertheless, Mr. Stewart says he’s proud of the work he and his team do, especially the cooks, who are “the heartbeat of the operation,” working 12-hour shifts.
“Our job is not just to feed people, but to give a bit of respite to their hard lives,” the chef says. “A plate of food is often the only nice thing that happens to them that day.”