ALBERTA FARM TO FOOD BANK:
Celebrating Farm-to(Everybody’s)Table BY ELIZABETH CHORNEY-BOOTH
W
hen it comes to making donations to community food banks, most of us think about non-perishable foodstuffs, and fishing cans of beans or soup out of the back of the pantry for holiday food drives or adding donatable packages basics like mac ’n’ cheese and other essentials to our grocery cart at the till. But as welcome as those kinds of donations are, those in need of food also need some fresh produce on their plates, which is where an industrious initiative called Alberta Farm to Food Bank comes in. Alberta Farm to Food Bank is
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spearheaded by Steve Breum, who farms on a property near Pigeon Lake in Central Alberta. In 2018 the farmer looked at his vegetable garden and thought about how the potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and beets he was growing could be used to feed people who may be struggling to get food on their own tables. Knowing that there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 90,000 Albertans accessing food banks throughout the course of a (prepandemic) year, Breum contacted the food banks in Calgary and Edmonton and worked out a partnership so that he could get his vegetable harvest to the
people who needed it most. Since that first brainwave, Alberta Farm to Food Bank has donated more than 100,000 lbs of fresh food to various food charities throughout the province. Breum says that the idea to donate root vegetables stems from the Alberta farm traditions that his family grew up with. With the fragility of supply chain systems being brought into light with the COVID-19 pandemic, more than ever he’s come to embrace and be inspired by the principles that kept generations of Albertan farmers before him fed through the winter, including the tradition of the humble root cellar.
