Ritzy South Granville: a food desert

This article is second in a three-part series exploring Vancouver's food security strategies and its progress in becoming the "greenest city" by 2020. This map shows the availability of food in Vancouver neighbourhoods. If we've missed your neighbourhood grocer, leave a comment to let us know and we'll add it.

Map by Aleksandra Sagan

Red dot = Community garden
Fork and knife = Farmers market
Yellow basket = Grocery store selling local produce
Green apple and bottle = Chain grocery store

More than half of Vancouver’s 40 major grocery stores stand in the city’s affluent north-west neighbourhoods, leaving the south-east with the short end of the stick when it comes to access to fresh groceries. However, even in areas where grocery stores seem abundant, food deserts—long stretches without affordable food access—still exist. While some local community groups are working to fill the void, many are fighting social stigma and trying to pressure the city into helping.
 
South Granville—the strip between West Broadway and West 16th Avenue—is one of Vancouver’s ritzy shopping districts. High-fashion stores line the street and customers can easily spend a few hundred dollars on knife sets at Williams-Sonoma. One grocery store serves the local population.

“There used to be a series of little green grocers, and butchers and bakers and there’s nothing there anymore. The only grocery store is Meinhardt, which is extremely expensive,” says Spring Gillard. She volunteers with the Westside Food Security Collaborative. “There’s a large pocket of low income seniors living in that area and they can’t afford to shop at Meinhardt’s.”

People consider the west side wealthy, but the area also houses many vulnerable populations for food insecurity, including seniors and recent immigrants, according to a food security report on the area.

About two years ago, Gillard’s group received a call from a poor senior. A 63-year-old woman asked for help after not eating for three days, she says, which urged the network into action. Members wrote grant proposals and used the funds to run summer pocket markets and a food recovery program. Once the money ran out, the programs stopped. The group has only received two grants, says Gillard, despite having applied for many more.

“We tend to get passed over because of the affluent stigma,” she says.

Members feel discouraged after being repeatedly turned down for grants, she says, and without resources, not much has changed in South Granville’s food desert. There’s still just once grocery store.

Janine de la Salle works as HB Lanarc’s director of food systems planning. The firm helps develop food policy. She thinks past and present city councils have made progress by creating the food policy council and Greenest City 2020 plan.

However, she says the ideas come from community organizations and grassroots groups, who are responsible for pressuring government to represent the ideas they are passionate about—that’s how food policy becomes a government issue.

“I think it’s a fallacy to think that government’s going to solve everything for us. They’re not and it’s not really their job,” she says. “Developing more sustainable food and agriculture systems will take community, government, industry, developing firms... It’s going to need all those different people and all those different perspectives to actually make something on the ground that works.”

Gillard agrees.

“It’s really all of us together tackling this program," she says. “We can’t just expect the government’s going to solve it. It has to happen at all levels.”