Children make up 33% of food bank visits in Canada. Here’s how a Sask. bank is helping

One Saskatchewan food bank is hoping an accessible cooking class will help parents teach kids how to make affordable meals. Allison Bamford reports.

Despite community efforts to feed the city’s youngest residents, the percentage of children using the Saskatoon Food Bank hasn’t declined in the last 18 years that Laurie O’Connor has worked there.

About 40 per cent of the food bank’s requests for hampers are made on behalf of children, according to O’Connor, the food bank’s executive director.

“That number really hasn’t fluctuated much in those two decades. So whether or not we can respond to the need hasn’t made that big of an impact on child poverty,” she told CTV News.

The number of children using the food bank coincides with the province’s high rate of child poverty.

Saskatchewan has the highest rate of child poverty out of any province in the country, according to a recent report from Campaign 2000.

Roughly 78,000 Saskatchewan children under the age of 18 – about 27 per cent – were living in poverty in 2023. The national rate was 18.3 per cent.

O’Connor says child poverty rates in the province have been considered high, since she began her role.

“Try as we might, all of the things that we’re doing at the community level, I’m sure folks are really thankful for, but I think it’s a systemic change that has to be made,” O’Connor said.

A Food Banks Canada report shows there were 2.1 million visits to food banks in 2025. About 33 per cent, or 712,000 visits, were children.

O’Connor says food banks across the country have been calling for similar solutions to food insecurity: affordable housing, improvements to social assistance and higher wages.

“The price of food has gone up, stayed high and stayed stubbornly high. That’s where folks are struggling and why they’re turning to food banks,” she said.

The Saskatoon Food Bank offers nutritional programs and cooking classes to help families tackle food insecurity. The classes provide meals but can also teach people how to cook with items provided in food bank hampers.

“One of the common requests that we get in those classes is how can I make a meal that my family will enjoy and that I can make on a budget?” said program facilitator Graham MacDonald.

People living in poverty can have a “damaging relationship with food,” MacDonald said, which is why his classes aim to get folks excited about eating what they cook.

“There is a marked increase in disordered eating amongst people who experience food insecurity, and especially with kids, those effects can last their entire lifetime,” he said.

MacDonald says the cooking skills taught in his classes, are secondary to learning how to have a healthy relationship with food.

“You can just see the relief in people’s shoulders when you tell them that actually they’re doing a great job feeding their kids,” he said.