Feeding the Electric City: Can Peterborough Solve Hunger Before Winter Hits?

September in Peterborough carries a certain unease. The nights are cooler, the shadows longer, and while most of the city is stocking up for back-to-school or haggling over end-of-summer barbecues, the people living on the edge are counting coats and calories. Food banks in Peterborough are seeing over 10,000 visits a month now, a staggering climb from just a few years ago, and still the demand shows no signs of slowing. If you stand outside the Brock Mission you don’t need a spreadsheet to tell you how bad it’s gotten—lineups tell the story in blunt, unmissable detail. Hunger isn’t abstract here. It’s names you know, faces you recognize, kids too polite to say they’re starving.

Into this breach step the grassroots crews, folks like Food Not Bombs, who spend Monday nights turning what the rest of us call leftovers into hot meals handed out in Confederation Park. They do it without funding, without much ceremony, and without a lot of patience for politics. They’re joined by church basements, neighbourhood pantries, and pop-up community fridges—the guerrilla food network that keeps people alive when the safety net frays. These are not fringe efforts anymore. In Peterborough, they’re the difference between going to bed hungry or not.

Compare Peterborough to cities like Kingston or Guelph, and the pattern is the same: smaller Ontario communities once thought immune to “big city problems” are now reporting record food bank use. The difference is scale. Toronto and Ottawa get headlines, but here in mid-sized Ontario, it’s quieter, more desperate, and more easily ignored. Food insecurity doesn’t make the local news unless someone freezes outside City Hall. Yet in percentage terms, Peterborough is getting slammed just as hard as its urban cousins, and in some ways harder—because resources are thinner and housing costs have exploded just the same.

So what’s City Hall doing while volunteers bang pots and churches turn into kitchens? The city has lined up a patchwork of programs: Ontario Works to get a bit of cash to people who qualify, food calendars so the hungry can figure out where to eat on a Tuesday night, partnerships with groups like Meals on Wheels, and emergency responses when storms hit—hot food trucks, warming centres, and temporary shelters. They’ve even given a nod to grassroots players like Food Not Bombs in their listings, which is a small victory for the underground. Bigger-picture efforts include the Peterborough Food Action Network, which tries to coordinate agencies and hammer out long-term strategies, and the Future of Food and Farming group, which talks about making the local food system sustainable in the years to come. The city has streamlined housing waitlists too, because everyone knows hunger and rent are joined at the hip. And when Community Care Peterborough rolls out those $8.75 hot Meals on Wheels, it’s done under a partnership umbrella that City Hall helps to keep in place.

Is it enough? Not by a long shot. Food insecurity here is a symptom, not the disease, and without serious moves on income and housing, the demand for charity casseroles will keep climbing. The grassroots groups are carrying more weight than any city office, because they have to. They’re not asking for studies, they’re feeding people. If Peterborough is going to dig itself out, it’ll take more than pamphlets and policy—it’ll take treating hunger like the five-alarm fire it already is. Until then, the reality remains bleak: as the weather gets colder, the lineups get longer, and the stopgaps get thinner. This is what food insecurity looks like in a city of 85,000.