Zohreh Gervais thought she might be losing her mind. She could’ve sworn she’d purchased a two-pound bag of baby carrots and a half-litre tub of hummus from Costco the previous day. But as she put lunches together for herself and her two sons, they were nowhere to be found in the fridge.
“Did we forget them in the car?” she asked her younger son, Zach, who was then 11 years old.
“Théo probably ate it all,” Zach replied, referring to his older brother, who at the time was 15. Impossible, Gervais thought. The jumbo packs were meant to last all three of them a week. Maybe, she rationalized, Théo had taken them to his room as a snack and forgotten to bring them downstairs. She asked him if he’d seen them. “I ate them all,” he said.
There is hunger and then there is teenage boy hunger.
Researchers at Dalhousie University who prepare the annual Food Price Report recently identified 14- to 18-year-old boys as the most expensive demographic to feed in Canada. They estimated that in 2025, it would cost $4,809.98 to feed the average boy in this age range, compared to $3,997.09 for their female peers.
There are many reasons for it: The profound physiological changes boys go through at this age that demand more calories, the way much of their socialization centres around food, and the fitness and nutrition ecosystem on social media that pushes macros and powdered supplements.
The Globe and Mail spent time with three teen boys in Canada to understand what this hunger surge looks like: The second dinners, the six-egg omelettes, the protein shakes, the midnight snacks and the UberEats delivery fees.
The math of feeding Théo confounds Gervais. A dish meant to serve eight people is demolished in a single sitting. When she doubles a recipe in hopes that she can skip a night of cooking, the extra portions end up devoured as part of an after-dinner snack. Sometimes when they have guests over, she’ll have to tell Théo, “You can’t have six pieces of chicken, you have to leave some for other people.”
In the last two years, Gervais has had to adjust the way she shops, cooks and even stores food at home. It used to be that a $200 grocery delivery – supplemented by a monthly $500 trip to Costco – would last her a full week. These days, she has to do a second order on Wednesdays.
School-day breakfasts are rushed most mornings – a protein bar, yogurt and granola. But on weekends, Théo will make himself four slices of toast and four to six eggs. If he’s still hungry, he’ll rustle up whatever’s edible in the fridge – on a morning this spring, that was leftover clam chowder.
Gervais’s fridge is full today, but even when it is not, Théo snacks on what he finds in the pantry: tinned fish, crackers and baking ingredients.Gindalee Ouskun/The Globe and Mail
Gervais has taken to labelling certain groceries as off-limits to her sons or hiding them: Expensive cheeses, the bulk bag of chocolate chips she uses for baking, cartons of her favourite guava juice.
For Théo’s 16th birthday, Gervais grilled up steaks for the family and Théo ate three. Another time, she prepared a quiche for dinner and she and Zach each had a slice. She took Zach to piano lessons, came home, and the entire rest of the quiche – a portion which contained eight eggs – had been eaten by Théo. “I don’t know if he gets full at this point,” she said in an interview.
At an Indian buffet he went to recently, Théo loaded up a plate with a heaping portion of rice, naan and various curries and inhaled it in just a few minutes so he could fill up a second. “I try to eat as much as I can quickly, so I don’t feel full,” he explained, flashing me a sheepish grin, his braces glinting. “I felt like I couldn’t walk for a bit after that.”
Théo, now 6-foot-3, had surpassed his mother’s height before he was finished elementary school. On average, boys gain height fastest at 13.5.Gindalee Ouskun/The Globe and Mail
Much of Théo’s hunger is driven by the massive growth boys undergo during this time in their lives. Their bones are lengthening, lean muscle mass is increasing and organs are expanding. “Peak height velocity” is how pediatricians describe the period when growth in height is fastest, and for boys it hits around age 13.5, on average. In their most rapid window of growth, they’re sprouting about 9.5 centimetres per year.
Théo had reached his mother’s height by the time he was 11. Now 16 and six feet, three inches tall, his mother is eye level with his chest.
Gervais shares custody of the boys with their father, and they stay with her on alternate weeks in a stately oxblood house in Winnipeg’s River Heights neighbourhood. Gervais herself eats very little meat the weeks the boys aren’t with her and has tried to offer more plant-based meals at home – but often faces protest from Théo, who is always asking for steak or chicken.
Théo’s cardio regimen includes morning runs and cycling. He does weightlifting at the gym several times a week.Gindalee Ouskun/The Globe and Mail
In the last year, he – like so many teen boys – has been fixated on his protein intake. Gervais has run the numbers to prove that chickpeas and quinoa contain a significant amount of protein. “You just have to eat more of it,” she tells him.
Théo has the height and the wingspan to dominate a basketball court, but has taken a break from the sport he used to play to focus on classical guitar and pumping iron.
He’s at the gym at least three times a week weightlifting for about an hour; he also runs and bikes. Many of these workouts are followed with a protein shake.
The protein powder she’s okay with, but Gervais has been steadfast in her refusal to purchase creatine, an amino acid compound, for Théo. She thinks it’s unnecessary and worries about potential health risks.
University of Toronto researchers conducted a survey in 2022 of about 2,700 Canadians ages 16 to 30 and found that 82.5 per cent of boys and young men used protein powders and shakes, and 50.3 per cent used creatine.
On social media, fitness influencers extoll the virtues of creatine: How it helps them gain weight, build muscle mass quickly and increases their endurance. Even if you don’t follow these accounts, if you’re a teenage boy, the algorithm will often send them to you as suggested content – and Gervais has seen this on her son’s phone.
Théo is ravenous after his workouts, but he’s also ravenous when playing video games with friends. He wakes up ravenous. With all the organ and bone growth under way in his body, he’s burning a significant number of calories even while resting.
His prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for self-regulation, is still developing, so he’s often craving foods high in fat, sugar and salt.
In Théo’s fantasy of grocery shopping for himself, he loads up the cart with pepperoni sticks and instant ramen – the latter one of his go-tos for a late-night snack. Some nights he’ll eat a packet at about 10 p.m. with two eggs; other times he’ll prepare a box of macaroni and cheese for himself. And when the pantry is empty, he’ll settle for a family-sized portion of baby carrots and hummus.
This fall, Peter Napier will begin his postsecondary education at one of the most prestigious engineering programs in the country, but on a Wednesday evening at his family’s dinner table in Halifax, he made a gross miscalculation about how much filling one can put in a homemade burrito.
The lanky 18-year-old, whose head is crowned with black curls, heaped rice, chicken, guacamole, tomatoes, lettuce, peppers and salsa onto a flour tortilla. Like a woman struggling to fasten her favourite pair of jeans over her swelling belly as she enters her second trimester, Napier could not pull the two edges of tortilla over this mountain of filling.
“That’s really two tortillas, you might want to split it,” his mother, Maria Migas, said. “That’s a big honkin’ burrito.”
Napier, soon to enter the engineering program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., savours outings for pizza or burgers with his Halifax friends, knowing he’ll be far away from most this fall.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
This was dinner one for Napier, which is usually eaten with his family at the dining table. The location of dinner two varies. Sometimes it’s three slices of sourdough bread with peanut butter eaten in the kitchen by the light of his iPhone flashlight after his parents (whose room is beside the kitchen) are in bed. Sometimes it’s a medium pizza consumed on the couch (“Hey, should we order a pizza?” he asked his parents as they watched a hockey game at 10 p.m. this past spring and then proceeded to eat most of it himself). Sometimes it’s a Junior Chicken sandwich and medium fries from McDonald’s, eaten with his friends in whichever parent’s car they’ve borrowed for an evening joyride.
In his final year of high school, before his friends scattered to summer vacations and then off to different postsecondary journeys, these outings carried an extra emotional weight.
This past April, Napier met me for lunch at a boutique grocery store downtown that sells made-to-order sandwiches, soups and salads. He ordered a club sandwich with a bottle of spring water and the most popular protein shake on the market: a bottle of chocolate Fairlife Core Power. I was surprised he wasn’t ordering more and he confessed he couldn’t resist joining his friends on one of their ritual lunchtime excursions to McDonald’s, where Napier had ordered a 10-pack of chicken nuggets.
“But don’t worry, I’m already hungry,” he told me, grinning.
His high school, Citadel, is just a short walk from dozens of fast food restaurants in downtown Halifax. Every day at 11:55 a.m. when the bell buzzes, hundreds of students spill onto the sidewalk for lunch. Some follow their friends into Fresh Slice Pizza and order $3.25 slices of pepperoni, others tap their cards at the ordering kiosk at McDonald’s.
Fast-food restaurants are important spaces for teen boys. After Peter and his friends got their licenses, they began going out regularly in the evenings for second dinners and to socialize.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
These outings are fuelled by hunger, yes, but also the pure adolescent need to create inside jokes, to then retell those inside jokes ad nauseam, to dissect a friend’s social media post or last night’s Raptors game. In high school, fast food restaurants become popular third spaces for teens. After Napier and his friends got their licenses, driving to those spots in the evening – even if they were less than a kilometre away – only added to the thrill.
He pulled out his phone and scrolled through his banking app to show me – somewhat self-mockingly – how almost every transaction he’s made in the last year has been a food purchase. One month, for example, he dropped $452.79 on candy, McDonald’s, sandwiches, burgers, Indian and Lebanese food, as well as a handful of meals from delivery apps.
For so much of his life, basketball was the thing Napier’s life orbited around. His older brother played, his dad coached. This past year, Napier was co-captain of the varsity basketball team at his high school which involved playing every day. For the first 45 minutes after a game, when the adrenaline is still pumping through him, he can’t eat.
“But then once the 45 minutes is up, I can eat for days,” he told me. After burning a basketball game’s worth of calories, he can consume double what he normally does: Three Costco stuffed peppers, two heaping plates of spaghetti and meatballs, multiple servings of whatever his mom made for dinner plus the leftovers she was planning to pack away in Tupperware for the next day.
This fall, Napier will begin his undergrad in the engineering program at Queen’s University and his time and attention will shift from basketball to academics. He’s leaving his home and his parents and most of his friends.
“It’s weird to think that I might not be playing next year,” he said. “It’s kind of like my identity a little bit.”
For Dondre Sim, pushing his cart through a cavernous grocery warehouse is like opening presents on Christmas morning, like putting a new blade on a razor. “Every time I have to go to Costco, it’s the thrill of my day,” he said.
To escape a complicated family situation, Sim moved out of his family home into a bachelor apartment in his grade 12 year. He’s responsible for everything, including feeding himself. Roughly every month, a friend takes him to Costco, where he buys $200 to $250 worth of groceries.
Sim, now 18, is hyper-organized on these trips: He gets five vegetables, four protein sources and three types of fruit and then a few snacks. His carbohydrate of choice is jasmine rice and he’s still working through one of the two 18-kilo bags he bought on sale in late December.
Like a legion of suburban momfluencers on TikTok, Sim takes great care to wash, chop and store his vegetables as soon as he gets home to maximize their shelf life, and he portions out the huge trays of chicken and beef into Ziplocs and puts them in the freezer so he has enough protein to last until his next Costco run.
Every potential purchase is subject to a series of questions: How much is in the pack, how many different ways can it be cooked, how will it taste, how will it be seasoned? Beef cubes are versatile, tasty and can be purchased in large quantities, so they usually go in his cart. Shrimp, while delicious, is expensive and usually on sold in small bags and is therefore “a rip-off.”
Sim, whose income comes from social assistance and a restaurant job, has to put his grocery money to efficient use as he juggles work, studies and life on his own.Kaja Tirrul/The Globe and Mail
Life is hectic: In May, when we spoke, Sim was taking an hour-long bus to get from his apartment in downtown Ottawa to his high school in the Nepean area to the west. He had to stay on top of cooking, cleaning, laundry and doing his homework. Many days after school he went to the gym. And twice a week he worked a shift at a nearby ramen restaurant.
Sim, who is Cambodian, is tall and thin with curly black hair and an eyebrow ring. On a weekday evening in the late spring, he stood over a pot that was on a hot plate (his apartment didn’t come with a stove) where he was browning chunks of beef with a homemade curry paste of galangal, lemongrass, turmeric, garlic and lime leaves to make salaw machu kroeung, a Cambodian soup.
Growing up, he watched his parents make a lot of rice-based meals and the first thing he learned to prepare for himself was rice, eggs and soy sauce with cucumbers on the side. His skills have improved considerably since then: He regularly makes stir-fries, noodles and soups. He used to make Thai curries using jarred curry paste from Loblaws but he found them too salty so he switched to making them from scratch in the food processor his girlfriend bought him.
He can’t stand fast food, so on lunch breaks when his friends would go to McDonald’s, he detoured to the nearest supermarket. His friends’ meal combos came to $16, but for $2 less, he’d buy a whole rotisserie chicken. What was a last-minute dinner saviour for the harried parents of young kids was a single-person lunch for Sim. Sometimes he’d have a quarter of the bird leftover and would take it home to use for meal prep the next day.
Many of Sim’s expenses are covered by social assistance. Sim supplements that income with what he earns from the ramen shop. A major perk of the job is getting to use whatever is in the restaurant’s kitchen to prepare dinner for himself during his shift. “It’s basically all you can eat,” he said.
About 30 per cent of young adults live in food-insecure households, according to a 2021 online survey published in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. Sim hasn’t needed to access food banks and he prides himself on being very careful with his money. It pains him to spend frivolously.
There are no impulse purchases of what he calls “dumb food”: chips, cookies, chocolate bars. He never bought Timbits or ice cream cones after school (Sim is lactose intolerant, but still). When he has food cravings, it’s for sushi or the Thai curries he’s become so adept at making. Sometimes he’ll go to one of the many shops in his neighbourhood to have pho.
But he doesn’t want his penny-pinching to dictate what he feeds himself.
“I tell myself I should never budget at a grocery store,” he said. “You need food to survive. You shouldn’t feel bad for buying food for yourself.”
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