Jacks don’t announce their presence with colourful petals. Their fanciful green blossoms meld into the riot of green in the springtime woods, making their discovery all the more satisfying.

Among the reasons I loved this wildflower was its name. “Jack in the Pulpit” bestowed a personality on the plant that fired my imagination. The name also invited close inspection of the unique flower – “Jack” sermonizing under the sheltering overhang of his pulpit.

As I grew older I found out more about my cherished Jacks. I discovered that the large Jacks are usually “Jills”, female plants that produce brilliant red fruit in the summer.

More interesting was the discovery that these Jills can become Jacks and then Jills again. These plants can switch genders throughout their lives in response to growing conditions.

Jack in the Pulpit grows from corms similar to those of crocus. Another one of its common names, Indian turnip, suggests that these may be edible. And in fact, native people did consume the corms, but – and this is a very important but – only after roasting them or drying them for months.

Such treatment neutralized the oxalic acid crystals that are distributed throughout the plant, reaching dangerously concentrated levels in the corm. The crystals readily pierce soft tissues in the mouth causing an extreme burning sensation.

I’ve grown Jack in the Pulpits for years and they self-seed modestly. Each year baby Jacks surprise me by appearing in unexpected places, stirring fond memories of long ago springs.

By Anne, current client of the Food Support Program

May 10, 2012

It has been so encouraging reading the experiences of the various participants in this challenge.

Can you imagine doing this week in and week out for an extended period of time and with children?

It feels great to have someone listen and understand the challenges facing those that are attempting to overcome the obstacles in their lives, whatever they might be, and doing it with something like food security hanging over your head at every turn. For many of us, we are alone in this battle and do not want to constantly dwell on the fact that we are unable to properly feed ourselves. Your sense of self-worth is diminished and like one of the participants expressed, there truly is a sense of social isolation. Really, in this day and age and in this seemingly wealthy community, who would think that there are families that don’t have enough to eat?! I would love to go grocery shopping one day when I don’t have to “stick” to my $35.00 for the MONTH (which includes items such as toilet paper, laundry detergent, toiletries, and other non-edible yet expensive and necessary purchases)…what a treat it would be to purchase whatever I needed! Stocking up on pantry items is a struggle but it also provides some of those options for creating a meal that is both enjoyable and nutritious.

We are inundated with ads for Swiss Chalet, McDonald’s, Pizza etc. on a daily basis…I hate to admit it, but, since I am unable to afford the luxury of indulging even periodically, I have a strange craving for these items. It’s gotten to the point that I have “re-created” these treats at home (sometimes it’s even better than the “real” thing!). I recently volunteered to be an extra in a TV show shoot locally because they were going to feed us… it’s strange how being hungry can motivate you to do something that you would otherwise not do.

You know, I don’t want to wax poetic, but I am unable to get my hair done anywhere except in my own home (I’m not bad at it either!) or take a vacation or go for a drive in the country or visit friends that live out of town or a multitude of other activities that once I too used to take for granted. Yet I am thankful for my home and relative health and caring people that I come into contact with. I want to be able to give back in some small way…whatever that might be.

This certainly has been an exercise for all of us to learn from. I know I have. It’s a vicious circle that begins with taking care of yourself from a nutritional and emotional standpoint in order to be able to take care of your other needs in life such as job security and family.

I wish all of you the best going forward and hope that this project has changed lives in our community for the better.

The Food Box Challenge is all about raising awareness. Caledon Community Services has set a target of 5,000 visits to the daily blog all participants are posting on the CCS Food Box Challenge website. Please take a moment and give it a look.

Last night brought us an illustration of something that must be all too common in food bank households. I was passing through the kitchen. There on the counter lay the last remnants of the little hunk of cheese we had for the week. It’s our big treat and we’ve been behaving like it was gold, savouring tiny pieces.

Without thinking, I popped the remainder into my mouth and it was gone.

Upon discovering this, Brandy was less than pleased. She expressed her displeasure verbally, then followed up with an email, waiting in my inbox this morning. Here’s what it said: “Jeff is a piggy. He ate all the cheese when he knew it was all we had left. $%!)head.”

A minor event, from which we will recover, but it made me think about how much tension there must be within families when there isn’t enough food, how easily a seemingly little thing like that can set off a Lord-of-the-Flies like devolution.

Today the Food Box Challenge participants met for a wrap-up lunch. It was all delicious, but I noticed that the thing I went for first wasn’t the cookies or the sandwiches. It was the raw vegetables. Even if my mind hasn’t been especially missing them, apparently my stomach was.

Also on the fresh and green front, my Food Box Challenge colleague Karen Hutchinson arrived with a gift for me: a baggie filled with freshly picked and washed dandelion leaves. I ate them. After my complaining earlier in the week that I wasn’t ready to go there, now I must also eat those words – dandelions are actually pretty good. (The secret, she tells me, is to pick from plants that have grown in the shade).

My main feeling at the end of this experience is guilt. Now I’ll go back to my wanton grazing, while 400,000 actual food bank clients in Ontario will face another week of the same, and another after that. Still, I do think my attitude has shifted. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought much about food before, other than how it tastes. As Brandy put it, we’ve both arrived at “a more visceral, tummy-rumbling empathy.”

The Food Box Challenge is all about raising awareness. Caledon Community Services has set a target of 5,000 visits to the daily blog all participants are posting on the CCS Food Box Challenge website. Please take a moment and give it a look.

Not just any guest either. Sharon Gaskell is the founder and unpaid, hands-on director of the non-profit Starthrower Foundation. She’s also one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever known.

Starthrower sponsors and assists teens and young adults to get an education in some of the poorest corners of Haiti. Sharon spends most of the year there, coming home to Orangeville for only a few weeks each spring and fall.

Our dinner wasn’t fancy: $1.90 worth of chicken pieces, a can of mushroom soup for sauce, some brown rice and a can of peas. Total cost for three meals: less than four dollars. By Sharon’s standards, though, it was a minor feast. She describes her Haitian diet like this: “Will dinner tonight be rice and beans, or beans and rice?”

Even at that, at least Sharon isn’t worried about where her next meal is coming from, unlike those around her. Starthrower operates a food distribution program for its students, doling out enough rice and beans for an individual for two days. Frequently, that small portion gets taken home and shared with the family. “Sometimes, up to ten or fifteen people eat from that,” she says. “In Canada we think it’s awful if someone only eats once or twice a day. In Haiti it’s common for people to only be eating once or twice a week.”

The starkness of that reality sinks even deeper when she adds “People in Canada don’t understand the difference between relative poverty and absolute poverty. In Haiti there are no food banks. There is no safety net.”

The thing that stays with me is, it’s not a competition. Hunger is an insidious disease inflicting humanity. It’s no better or worse, be it in Caledon East or Port-au-Prince. The difference is, in Canada we have the means and the ability to do something about it. We need only ask: do we have the will?

Sharon’s operation in Haiti offers another lesson. Quite literally come hell or high water, every morning her kids get up, dust themselves off and go to school. Despite the crushing circumstances, they do that because it provides the most important thing of all: hope. If only I could donate that in a can, banked and ready when one of my neighbours needs it.

There are the fortunate, the less fortunate and the least fortunate. Today, I’ve never been more aware of which category I’m in.

This comic depiction of Starthrower's purpose in Haiti holds a powerful message for us here at home too.

The Food Box Challenge is all about raising awareness. Caledon Community Services has set a target of 5,000 visits to the daily blog all participants are posting on the CCS Food Box Challenge website. Please take a moment and give it a look.

Maybe I caught my wife Brandy at a weak moment, like just after her fifth computer-related ‘how-do-I’ question of the day for example, but she agreed to participate in the Food Box Challenge along with me. That means we got to double the food amounts and actually, it looks as though we’ll have some left over at the end of the week.

We didn’t double everything. There’s no way we could go through two bags of rice, two packages of pasta, or two containers of peanut butter, so we only got one of each. We also thought it would be cheating to double the specialty items from the pantry – margarine, vinegar and the like, so we’re keeping that to the five allotted for one person as well.

Where it really made a difference, though, was with the eight dollars of “your choice” items we were each allowed. The grocery bill for our two-person household is virtually always more than a hundred dollars a week. Yet with only sixteen dollars, we were able to get meat, some vegetables, even an 88 cent box of cookies. That would have been impossible with only eight dollars, because every cent would have been required for ‘must-haves’ like milk and bread.

Even with that double allotment, at the mid-point in the week our little pile of food is rapidly dwindling. More than half the bread and milk is gone, the canned goods are significantly diminished, a good chuck of the pasta is no more. Of course, for us there’s light at the end of the tunnel – two more days and it’s over. For people who live like this week-in and week-out, I can only imagine the stress involved in endlessly fretting over making it until the next hamper. For those with children, it must be absolutely gut-wrenching.

It’s not simply a question of having enough, either. What do you do when everything except the pasta is gone? Eat plain macaroni three times a day? Feed your child nothing but kidney beans? Good luck with that. I suspect there comes a point where people choose to go hungry, just because they can’t face another plate of the same bland meal they’ve been eating for days.

Then there are those who don’t even have that luxury. If you’re homeless or living in your car, you have no place to cook the food in the first place. If you don’t know how to cook, or have a disability, a bag of raw rice can easily be too big a hill to climb.

Our meagre groceries at the start of the week, seen here, are disappearing fast.

The Food Box Challenge is all about raising awareness. Caledon Community Services has set a target of 5,000 visits to the daily blog all participants are posting on the CCS Food Box Challenge website. Please take a moment and give it a look.

While I admire the effort involved in that, I began to feel she was taking the whole local lunch thing just a tad too far when, at our Monday launch event, she said “Can we forage? It’s dandelion season. They’re young and fresh right now. We should be taking advantage of that.”

I’m all for supporting the cause, and call me a food snob if you will, but somehow I’m just not ready to go there. Who knows, though? Maybe by the end of a week without fresh greens I’ll be thinking those little yellow rascals on the front lawn are starting to look pretty tasty.

Also at yesterday’s launch, CCS executive director Monty Laskin sketched out the agency’s plans for some big changes to how Caledon’s food bank operates. Later this year they will be moving to a 3,600 square foot building in Bolton which will provide space for a refrigerator and freezer, allowing the program to include fresh produce. More important, the new facility will be home to an array of programs that extend well beyond the traditional food bank model, including employment skills training, nutrition classes, family cooking classes, senior’s jarring activities, partnerships with farmers and food sales overseen by a youth enterprise. The initiative will be run by the community. As a result, CCS is looking for 25 new volunteers to serve in a variety of capacities – everything from sitting on committees to sorting food. If you’re interested, contact Kim D’Eri, CCS Manager, Poverty Reduction Partnerships at 905.584.2300 Ext. 202 or email kderi@ccs4u.org.

The Food Box Challenge is all about raising awareness. Caledon Community Services has set a target of 5,000 visits to the daily blog all participants are posting on the CCS Food Box Challenge website. Please take a moment and give it a look.

Did you know there are 19 slices in a loaf of Dempster’s whole wheat bread? Was news to me. Was also news that the usual, bakery-made multi-grain bread my wife Brandy likes has only 13 slices, not counting the useless crusty end bits, too thick for the toaster and too small for a sandwich, which around here get thrown in the compost without a second thought. But when one loaf has to last a week, suddenly we’re paying attention. One slice each for five mornings of breakfast adds up to ten. Eight slices for each of us to have a couple of sandwiches for lunch. Poof! It’s gone.

Between us, we had $16.00 to spend on “discretionary” items. Thanks to Brandy’s relentless scouring of sale flyers, and the grand opening specials at a new grocery store in town, we managed to fit quite a bit into that tiny amount. Yesterday, we could be found in the produce section, debating at length how we might spend the twelve cents we had left over. One cob of corn?

So the first thing I’ve learned is how much effort it takes to live within such limited options. And even then, in a way we’ve cheated. How many food bank clients could afford the gas to drive to four different grocery stores, hunting down that 79 cent cucumber?

Poverty is hard work.

For profiles of all the participants and to read their daily blog about the experience, visit the CCS Food Box Challenge website. 

Photo: Participants at the official kick off of the CCS Food Box Challenge, from left to right: Jeff Rollings, Brandy Robinson; Allan Thompson, Regional Councillor; Bill Rea, Caledon Citizen Editor; Layla Panjeta, CCS Care Coordinator; Marco Cesarone, Manager of Zehrs Bolton; Dr. Ryan French, Inside Out Chiropractic; Richard Paterak, CCS Board member/Regional Councillor; Karen Hutchinson, Executive Director of Eat Local/Farmer; Matthew Strader, Caledon Enterprise Reporter and Father Larry Leger, CCS Board member/Holy Family Catholic Church.

May 7 to 11 is Hunger Awareness Week in Canada. The campaign was created to promote understanding about what life is like when food is out of reach. As part of this event, Caledon Community Services is holding a food box challenge. Participants like me will spend the week living on the same diet that a food bank client typically receives. I’ll be posting a daily blog about the experience on the In The Hills website.

Here’s what I’ll have to live on for the week:

• 1 – 1lb bag of pasta of my choice
• 2 cans of beans (Choice of chick peas, pork and beans, kidney beans or lentils)  540 ml each
• 2 cans of soup (Usually tomato, mushroom or chicken noodle) 284 ml each
• 1 box of macaroni & cheese
• 1 package of rice (Uncle Ben’s/No Name)
• 1 can of spaghetti sauce
• 1 can of vegetables 398 ml
• 1 can of meat (175 g)
• 1 specialty item:  box of cereal, jar of peanut butter, jar of jam or pancake mix
• $8.00 – my choice (must be spent in a grocery store, not a restaurant)
• In addition, I can choose up to 5 items out of the pantry such as flour, sugar, oils, coffee, etc. but I need to keep track of the quantity of these items used

As my wife Brandy and I are both participating, we can double some of the amounts. We’re buying all the food ourselves so don’t worry; we’re not using food bank resources.

Our specialty item will be peanut butter, and the pantry items we’ve selected are sugar, oil, coffee, tea and vinegar. The sixteen dollar shopping spree will go toward a small amount of ground beef and chicken, as well as a couple of staples which are notably missing from the list: milk and bread. Depending on how well we do at finding items on sale, we hope to add yogurt.

You too can take part in Hunger Awareness Week, and help make a positive impact on hunger in this community and across the country. There are three ways to do that:

Give it up – Challenge yourself to give up lunches or a food staple for the week

Give a Shout – Show your support via Facebook, Twitter or blogging

Give it out – Donate food, funds or time to your local food bank

For more information about hunger awareness week, visit hungerawarenessweek.ca.

For more on hunger in Headwaters, see my story “Empty Plates,” from the Autumn, 2011 issue of In The Hills.

The Toronto Star provided the answer the next morning. Eastern Canada is currently being invaded by a pretty little butterfly called the red admiral. These wayfarers migrate every spring into Ontario from the United States.

They produce two or three generations here and then in the fall, like monarch butterflies, retreat southward to warmer climes.

The difference this year is not only their early arrival – usually this northward migration is more a May phenomenon than April – but their astonishing numbers. The Star suggested that twenty times more admirals than normal are moving into the province.

I don’t know where this estimate comes from – some years these butterflies are abundant, other years rather uncommon – but it is clear that this invasion is exceptional.

Like all butterflies, red admirals are graced with an uncanny ability to find their larval food plants. Plant stinging nettle and they will come. Now stinging nettle is a rather nasty plant – brush against its minute acid tipped spines and your skin will instantly develop painful itching.

However, I’ve grown it for years without incident. I place it off the beaten path and remember to remove its flowering stalks each year so it doesn’t seed itself elsewhere in my yard – or in my neighbour’s!

The usual butterfly flowers offer a more benign way to attract admirals. Red admirals also have a weakness for rotting fruit.

Whether you provide nettle or not, do take a moment this spring to admire the admirals. They are subtly lovely and they often sit long enough for photography. Let’s enjoy this unexpected natural abundance.