When a tariff announcement lands in Ottawa, it sounds like trade policy, but in a kitchen that feeds people with nowhere else to turn, it sounds like the next invoice — and behind every invoice this fall is the name of someone we may not be able to feed this winter. 

I have spent my working life in kitchens, opening my first restaurant in 2007 and my first social impact business in 2013 in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood where the distance between a meal and no meal is counted in coins. Today, our Upward Mobility Kitchens teams in Vancouver and Halifax cook more than 6,500 scratch-made meals a day, and along the way I have bought the food, cooked it, driven it and handed it across a counter, which is how I learned what a cost increase looks like once it stops being a number and becomes a face.  

In August, the United States placed 50 per cent tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods and Ottawa answered with dollar-for-dollar counter-tariffs, in force since September 8, and a $7.5 billion package for businesses and workers that, by rough math, covers about half the hit. On Sept. 29, Washington closed its border to Canadian whey and alcohol outright, which tells me this is a new normal.  

The cost does not stay at the border, because a food system is never just farms and grocery stores. It is the equipment on the farm, the plastic and paper around the product, the truck, the warehouse, the fuel in the tank, the ingredients on the shelf and the people who show up at five in the morning to do the work; when the cost of any one of those rises, it travels down the line until it reaches a person at a checkout doing math in their head, or a community kitchen trying to stretch the same dollar into one more........

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