Our Final Thought of 2023: Please Give to Food Banks

As our readers know, we like to stay in our lane at Cantech Letter. We do one thing well and that’s bring you expert opinions on innovation sector stocks.

But the last thing we post in 2023 won’t have anything to do with that.

A few years ago my wife and I began making a regular donation to the local food bank, which came about when it was doing one of its drives for donors. We decided the least we could do was to help out our new neighbours as we had just moved to a new province. One year, we donated some turkeys at Christmas. Another year, Cantech Letter, through our Facebook page, teamed with J-Roc, Trailer Park Boys’ resident rapper to raise tens of thousands of dollars for food banks.

Lately, we have been doing something different and it works just as well. We order up a bunch of peanut butter, cans of tuna and oatmeal from Costco and we head down to the community fridge in intervals and donate that.

Over the past couple years, we learned something from this face-to-face: it’s really tough out there. Go to the grocery store and look at the price of chicken –look at the price of anything– and sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. People are having a really hard time with inflation. I mean really hard. At the community fridge we donate to it is impossible to tell who is dropping off and who is picking up. It’s often pretty empty when we get there.

The numbers are kind of staggering right now. According to Feed Ontario, visits to food banks in that province increased by 36 per cent between April 2022 and March 2023. There are now nearly six million people in Ontario using them. This is Canada. We can do better than that. Here’s a website that will help you find a food bank in your area. 

The reason I wanted to end the year with this message is that food bank and community fridge donations tend to have times when they are swamped with donations and times when people tend to forget about them. We just went through the former and we are heading into the latter. The first week of January would be a great time to gather up and donate some of the most needed items at Food Banks, which include baby formula, canned soup and pasta sauce. And of course, if you have found a stock idea at Cantech Letter that made you some money in 2023, cash is always the best donation to a food bank.

Wishing you a prosperous 2024.

-Nick Waddell