How FoodShare Toronto Approaches Food Justice and the Right to Food

FoodShare Toronto starts from a single premise: food is a right, not a privilege. The organization describes itself as a food justice organization that advocates for the right to food and challenges the barriers standing in the way of food justice in Toronto. That framing shapes everything else — how it measures its work, who it works with, and what it publicly takes a position on.

Food as a right, not charity

The homepage leads with the statement "Food is a Right," repeated as the central message. FoodShare Toronto advocates for the right to food and challenges the barriers to achieving food justice. This is a rights-based approach rather than a needs-based or charity model: the goal is not simply to hand out food, but to remove what prevents people from feeding themselves.

The organization states it is "committed to a Toronto where everyone can feed themselves, their loved ones and their communities with dignity and joy." Dignity and joy are named explicitly alongside access — the framing is about how people get food, not just whether they get it.

An equity lens applied to food security

FoodShare Toronto says it uses an equity lens to seek justice and food security for everyone. In practice, that means evaluating its own work against whether it drives at dismantling sites of exploitation within the food system and the food movement — not only within the communities it serves.

Two commitments follow from this:

• Self-evaluation as a justice practice. Being a food justice organization, in FoodShare's words, means aligning and evaluating its work to ensure it dismantles exploitation in the food system and the food movement itself.
• Access on people's own terms. Whether the work is supporting urban farms, subsidizing local produce markets, or coordinating community kitchens, FoodShare describes all of it as being about "folks accessing food on their own terms."

That last phrase is the clearest statement of how the equity lens translates into programs: the organization positions itself as enabling community-led access rather than prescribing what people should eat or how they should get it.

What the 2025 numbers show

FoodShare publishes impact figures for 2025 on its homepage. These give a concrete sense of scale:

The mix matters. Workshops and supported community initiatives outnumber a single distribution figure, which is consistent with an approach built around markets, learning, food growing, and community capacity rather than food distribution alone.

Body liberation and fat acceptance

FoodShare Toronto has published a Body Liberation and Fat Acceptance Statement. As a food justice organization that believes in body liberation and fat acceptance, it states it does not support fatphobia. The statement challenges the idea that foods are "good" or "bad," or that people are good or bad for eating certain foods, and asserts that all bodies have the right to exist as they are.

This connects directly to the right-to-food framing. If food is a right, then moralizing about which foods or bodies are acceptable works against that right — which is why the organization treats anti-fatphobia as part of its food justice position rather than a separate issue.

How to engage with the work

The homepage points to several entry points for people who want to get involved:

• Advocacy. FoodShare invites people to find ways to get involved in advocacy efforts around food justice in Toronto through its "Take Action" path.
• Learning. It offers a podcast; one episode features land and water defender and health activist Judy Da Silva speaking with host Sheldomar Elliott about wins her community has achieved in protecting Asubpeeschoseewagong First Nation territory (Grassy Narrows First Nation) and the threats they continue to face.
• Monthly giving. FoodShare asks supporters to become monthly donors, framing donations as redistributing funds to push back against oppressive systems.
• Impact reports. It publishes historical impact reports and a latest report covering markets, learning, food growing, and more.

If you want to understand the organization's approach in depth, the published impact reports and the body liberation statement are the two documents that most directly lay out its positions.