A ship carrying $90,000 worth of cargo for a Toronto food bank was hit near Iran
A projectile struck the ship in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday
A cargo ship carrying food that was on its way to Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank was struck by a projectile in the Strait of Hormuz near Iran yesterday. The channel is an important global shipping route but has been closed due to ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
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“Right now, we are purchasing dozens of containers with rice, primarily,” the organization’s CEO, Neil Hetherington, told CTV. “I don’t know the number of containers, but it would probably be in the neighbourhood of a half dozen. You think about that, and you think about the number of meals that would have provided for the city of Toronto.”
Hetherington, who emphasized that the top concern is the safety of those aboard the vessel, estimated that $90,000 worth of product was lost.
“Our concern, obviously, is with the sailors that are [in]. And then we also want to make sure that the individuals who are supposed to get that food get it. We have some redundancy plans in place so that every single person who was promised a meal by the Daily Bread will get that meal.”
Per the Daily Bread’s website, more than one in 10 Torontonians use food banks across the city, a number that has increased significantly since before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
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Carly Lewis is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Wired, Interview Magazine, Pitchfork, Elle, and Maclean’s, where she is a contributing editor. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards and the Digital Publishing Awards. She reports on city life, culture—including what people do online—politics, art and crime. She received the Dave Greber Freelance Writers Award for “The Murder of Ashley Wadsworth,” an investigative feature about a Canadian teenager who was killed by a man she met on social media, published by Maclean’s.
