The cost of calories: It's expensive to eat healthily
IT’S 8 a.m. and the two youngest in the Golondrina household hop up onto the bar chairs at the brand-new kitchen table for breakfast.
"Two or three, at most," Cassandra Golondrina reminds her boys, Rhys, 9, and Keagan, 11. The boys dump packets of flavoured instant oatmeal into a bowl, soaking the flakes and fine, sugared powder with boiling water.
They drink tea. Keagan grabs a packet of flavoured-popcorn snack, too.
"Would you believe I washed this floor last night?" Golondrina, 38, says leaning against a counter crowded with dishes, clean and dirty.
Golondrina doesn't eat.
The mother of five doesn't eat breakfast or lunch usually, although she will pack a bag of trail mix to keep her going at Red River College, where she is a full-time student. Cigarettes get her through the day.
The family is on social assistance. Money is tight. Sometimes, when food is running low in the Gilbert Park home, Golondrina might skip dinner.
Armholes are cut larger, for ease of movement, layering and baby-carrying. Colors are muted. Style names are plucked from literature — a Marcel (Proust) caftan, a (TS) Eliot top. “She's got a following,” says Cabana's Vose, a fellow Kappa from SMU