Tausi Insider

Pam Farrell started Grow Community Food Literacy Centre, a charity that provides nutritional food to low-income families and information on food literacy. CARLOS MARQUEZ/Handout The organizer: Pam Farrell The pitch: Founding Grow The reason: To help address food literacy. Pam Farrell was in the midst of a postgraduate degree in education a couple of years ago when she began exploring the concept of food literacy. “It kind of intrigued me,” Ms. Farrell, 45, recalled from Calgary. “Because I’ve heard of it before, but I never really knew what it meant.” She started researching ways to improve the understanding of how sociocultural factors affect and influence food literacy. And soon her topic became much more than an academic pursuit. In 2019, Ms. Farrell launched Grow Community Food Literacy Centre in her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont., where she has been an elementary-school teacher. “I witnessed some of the inequities in the food system,” she said. “What students brought to school ...

People pay for their items at a grocery store in Toronto, on Nov. 22, 2022. CARLOS OSORIO/Reuters Jim Dandy reads the grocery store flyers every week. It’s a habit the 79-year-old retiree picked up in childhood and continued while raising three children during law school. “I learned the importance of saving five cents, and that has stuck with me,” Dandy said in an interview from his home in Niagara Falls, Ont. Grocery prices were up 11 per cent in December compared with a year ago, Statistics Canada said this week. Overall, grocery prices were up 9.8 per cent in 2022 compared with a year earlier – the fastest pace since 1981. As shoppers grapple with spiralling food costs, some are turning for the first time to tips and tricks long used by older Canadians. Dandy, a septuagenarian who lived through the skyrocketing inflation of the early 1980s, has advice to offer consumers who may be worried about food prices for the first time. His top tip is to read grocery store flyers regularly t...