Community market a small oasis in Malvern's food desert

by Steve Kupferman | Toronto.openfile.ca | Monday, July 11, 2011

"This is very much a community where people don't really know their neighbours a lot," said Alex Dow, manager of Malvern Action for Neighbourhood Change, who, at age 28, has lived in Malvern for most of his life. "If you have a job or go to school, you get in your car or get on the bus, go do your thing, get back at the end of the day, have dinner with your family, and that's kind of your experience of the neighbourhood."

We were standing in a field between the Nike Malvern Sports Complex and the Malvern branch of Toronto Public Library, two of the north-Scarborough neighbourhood's major community gathering points, where Dow and about 15 resident volunteers are hoping to add a third: the Malvern Community Market.

The temporary market, on its opening day, July 8 (it will recur on three more days this summer), consisted of a few folding tables with baskets of fruits and vegetables, situated underneath a blue canopy. It had been financed with a City grant, and was stocked with goods purchased from FoodShare, a local nonprofit that works on food security issues. Next to the market were other tables peddling information from other Malvern community organizations. Dow hopes to add more vendors in the future.

Small though it may be at the moment, the market is just a facet of a larger push to bring community and food security to Toronto's 13 priority neighbourhoods, of which Malvern is one.

Action for Neighbourhood Change, Dow's employer, is funded by the United Way Toronto for the express purpose of sparking resident-led projects in the 13 neighbourhoods. It's one of the programs advocates point to when the wisdom of priority neighbourhood designations is questioned, as it recently was by city council's Community Development and Recreation Committee.

Food is an issue in Malvern for the same reasons it's an issue in all priority neighbourhoods: there are relatively few supermarkets that are walking distance from the places where people live. In Malvern's case, a single No Frills is the only centrally located food-shopping option.

A 2010 study by the Martin Prosperity Institute determined that 49 percent of Toronto's population lives more than one kilometre away from a major grocery store, so this is not an issue confined to just a few areas of the city. But in a place like Malvern, where expressways link apartment buildings to strip malls, the scarcity of food shopping options is worrisome. Low-income residents without cars may find it especially difficult to shop as frequently as they'd like.

ANC offices in other priority neighbourhoods have created community markets to some success. Thorncliffe Park has one that's been in operation for three years. Kingston-Galloway's has been running for five. Another popular way of tackling food and community-togetherness issues, says Dow, has been community gardening. ANC Malvern just opened one such garden, and is in the process of creating three more, with money from the City, United Way Toronto, and private sources.

"Food has kind of been a real success story in some of the [priority] neighbourhoods," said Dow.

Aurora Felix, a Malvern Community Market volunteer who has lived in a nearby townhouse for 20 years, is hopeful that the market and other projects like it will improve her access to fresh foods. "What would be nice is if we could actually find Ontario-grown fruits and veggies," she said. Some of the produce on sale at the booth did have stickers identifying it as Ontario-grown. The goods were also deliberately inexpensive by supermarket standards.

Even so, the market's baskets of eggplants ($0.85/lb), tomatoes ($0.50 each), radishes ($1.00/bunch), and apples ($0.10 each) lay mostly untouched for an hour or so, until a South Asian woman arrived from the direction of the apartment complex across the street. She filled a basket with food.

Was the price okay? "Yeah," she said. "Not bad."

The Malvern Community Market will recur three more times this summer, between 4 and 8 p.m.: once on Friday, July 15; once on Friday, August 12th; and once on Friday, August 19th.

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