It’s our most essential need, but more than 12 per cent of Toronto area households experience “marginal, moderate or severe food insecurity.”

Anan Lololi finds that unfathomable in such a prosperous nation.

“With all that money around, no child in this city, this country, should go to school hungry,” said the executive director of Afri-can FoodBasket.

“That is real food injustice. That is criminal.”

In this year’s Toronto’s Vital Signs Report Nick Saul, president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, calls for action.

“We need to repair our broken food system and build one that nurtures health, community, skills and equity,” he says.

“Toronto is a city of food, yet every day, thousands go hungry because they are poor.

“We need to work together to address the root causes of poverty and hunger in our city, and to recognize the power food has to build healthier, more connected communities.”

While income is the single biggest barrier to healthy food, other factors influence food availability and choice, the Vital Signs report says. The availability of food is not an adequate measure if it isn’t fresh, affordable and culturally appropriate, for example.

According to the report, severe food insecurity means that food bought for the household runs out and there is no money to buy more.

It also includes feeling hungry, cutting the size of meals, and/or losing weight, because there isn’t enough money for food.

People who feel insecure about their food also depend on a narrow range of low-cost food items to feed children, and, in nearly half of households, do not feed kids enough.

Lololi, erstwhile bass player with reggae band Truths & Rights, co-founded Afri-can in 1995 to address the nutritional, health, and employment needs of the economically and socially vulnerable, particularly in the black community.

The organization runs two Ujamma Farms plots, one at Black Creek Community Farm near Jane-Finch and one at McVean Farm in Brampton. The farms get fresh, organic vegetables to its constituents through food banks and farmers markets. Along with vegetables such as spinach, kale, carrots and arugula, Afri-can also delivers African and Caribbean specialties, such as callaloo, sorrel and scotch bonnet peppers, which are not typically grown in Ontario.

Engaging his community to grow fresh, culturally specific foods while addressing the food insecurity that hits marginalized communities harder than most has become a powerful tool in supporting physical and emotional health, said Lololi.

But he said he has encountered resistance he believes is steeped in historical trauma.

“There’s a negative attitude toward growing food and farming by Africans in the Diaspora and on the continent,” he says. “And, from my conversations and analysis, I think it’s a psychological thing. People tell their children ‘You’re not going to do that kind of slavery work, you not going to study agriculture.’

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“Growing up in Guyana, all the black folks aspiring to get education were pushed to be teachers, civil servants, army, police — anything else. but agriculture.

“That work has a bad history, but we’ve got to embrace it and move forward, because we have to feed ourselves and be food secure.

“People have to know how to grow food and want to grow food.”

Over the past 17 years, more than 30 community gardens have been created in culturally diverse and priority Toronto neighbourhoods with the support of Afri-Can FoodBasket’s Community Food Animation program.

Each garden requires the involvement of more than 40 to 50 families and produces 300 lbs. to 500 lbs. of fresh produce each year.

The Vital Ideas grant awarded to Afri-Can FoodBasket will help the organization research, evaluate and communicate the Community Food Animation initiative’s best practices to help replicate the program’s successes with eight to 10 new gardening initiatives in 2014, ultimately serving up to 120 additional participants.

The organization maintains a focus on youth, recruiting young people to the farms to learn planting, weeding, harvesting and then to sell to and serve customers at the farmers’ market.

“They don’t know what their food looks like before McDonalds or before the grocery store,” said volunteer co-ordinator Mwanajuma Extavour. “We get a lot of positive response from young people, but retaining their interest is much more difficult, because it’s very hard work and it requires a level of focus that I think a lot of young people, unfortunately, they’re not given those challenges today . . . and that’s actually to be removed from any technological device for an extended period of time and to focus on a process and the self discovery and natural therapy that comes along with it.

“For some, the feeling of satisfaction and gratification takes a lot longer.

“People that maybe have a lot of stress at their job might see the value right away; ‘let me go get away and spend an afternoon weeding.’

“But it’s harder for youth to see that, because they don’t see the results right away.”