Nova Scotians have a hard time affording healthy foods. 120 000 people missing out is a lot, in a province of under a million. For myself, I do all right. I spend probably close to $150 per month. I do eat meat, I do make a habit of choosing unprocessed and inexpensive things, but I don’t scrimp. I’m uncomfortably aware that even my graduate student stipend leaves me with more grocery money than many have.

I ran out of flour on Sunday. I need to buy milk too. 10kg of flour and 2L of milk will cost me almost twenty dollars. Last year, I would have paid half that. The last bag of flour I bought, last summer, cost me six bucks, because it was on sale, down from $8. Milk has gone up too.

Accessibility to grocery stores is another underreported issue. What do you do when you have no car, limited mobility, and the sidewalks outside are covered in ice and snow? Don’t forget that bus fare adds the price of a loaf of bread, or five or ten pounds of potatoes, to the cost of groceries. And, not all transit is accessible, either. I’m not advocating slapping a new grocery store down on every other block, but it’s worth pointing out that the cost of travel or convenience is another barrier to affording groceries. It’s hard to buy in bulk when you can’t haul it home.

Globally, the food crisis is so much worse my mind just overloads and shuts down. I have a hard enough time grasping 120 000 - and most of those 120 000 aren’t actually going hungry. The latest statistic, 100 million people who are hungry now (but weren’t six months ago), is just incomprehensible. How about this? “It’s going to take human life.”

I honestly don’t know what to do.