I’m eating ravioli when I first hear the story, dropped in, mid-conversation with a relative.
We are talking about family matters when she mentions the time I was seen eating out of a bin — you know, she says, the one behind the chip shop.
I’ve gone off my ravioli. God, it’s dry. Don’t you think it’s dry? How much was it, again?
I try not to choke, my mind already 150 miles north from where we sit in London, back in my village in 1980s northeast Derbyshire.
I see the chippy, and the bins I walked past every day. I have no memory of being among the fish bits, yet I still feel the dignity I’d always clung to sour at the very thought. But still, I have an overwhelming urge to reach through time and pull little me out; to take her home and feed, feed, feed until her legging elastic stretches.
Advertisement
There’s much I don’t know — how many times? Did anyone who witnessed it help? But here’s what I do: no child climbs into a bin and eats from it unless they are desperate.
So, take it from someone who knows: food poverty is neither a choice nor a fiction. It is a reality, a brutal one, and not one consigned to our past. Government statistics show that 4.7 million people in the UK are in food poverty, 7 per cent of the population. For children it’s worse: 12 per cent, more than 1.5 million.
Almost four decades may have passed, but today’s hardship is not unlike that from my childhood, when poverty surged under Margaret Thatcher’s government.
My mum, who left school to get married at 16, raised us solo on the council estate she had always called home, with a combination of benefits and poorly paid, part-time jobs. My dad? I’d hear of the time he was ordered to pay child maintenance of 25p a year. Wow, I remember thinking, I’m not even worth a quid (and no, he didn’t pay it).
The money coming in was simply not enough for our family to live on. That meant Mum not always eating tea. Buying food piecemeal in Spar: the money that dripped in not stretching to a lump sum needed for a big shop (and my Mum was unable to drive anyway). Praying that the 50p in the back of the telly didn’t run out before Blossom. Mum in bits when she could only afford a coat for one of us. Being sent out with next week’s signed child benefit slip, hoping they might pass the coins and notes over a few days early. The ritual of free school dinners.
Advertisement
Though nothing really comes free, does it? How many minutes of shame gets you a cornflake tart? Every day I’d mumble my name at the dinner lady who’d then scream, like the town crier: “Terri White! Free school mealsssss!” at a woman scratching me off a list.
The picture has only become bleaker, the need greater. A million kids are now living in destitution. Food bank use is soaring, food prices are still sky high, particularly healthy items that cost about 20-25 per cent more than a year ago. There have even been reports of malnutrition and a surge in scurvy and rickets, according to NHS figures. But don’t for a second believe there’s nothing to be done. There’s everything.
There is broad agreement that true change demands reform of wages (more than 70 per cent of children in poverty live in a household with at least one person working), social security and benefits, sanctions and public services. Plus, a deep desire from government, and all political parties, to tackle poverty — a desire that must become action, such as eradicating the two-child-limit, which would lift 250,000 children out of poverty overnight.
Until then, let’s be clear about the immediate need for access to nutritious food. A need recognised by Feeding Britain, one of the charities supported by The Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal, and met through its affordable food clubs, offering shopping at heavily discounted prices.
I remember when our situation changed. I was 14 and my mum met a lorry driver who earned enough for a big shop, drove a car with a boot to hold tins and packets. Every week, off we went to Aldi. No flash brands, but the pantry was stocked. And I made a promise: when I got a job, which I did as a journalist and magazine editor, my pantry would be full.
Advertisement
It’s not just food I see every time I open the cupboards (I sometimes just like to look at it), but a restoration of what Feeding Britain calls “dignity and agency”.
Imagine living in a country where kids are free of worry about their next meal and how to stave off hunger pains; where they can focus in class on being, well, just a kid.
Imagine what they could do, who they could be, if they truly lived, not just survived. If they were left with their dignity and pride intact.
As Feeding Britain so simply, yet radically, says: its vision is a country where no one goes hungry. How can that not be ours too?
The Times and Sunday Times Christmas Appeal is raising money for Feeding Britain, which works to prevent and eliminate hunger and destitution in the UK. To donate, visit thetimes.co.uk/christmasappeal or call 0151 284 2336
