Someone a little nicer

Thatcher: my part in her downfall June 16, 2009

food donations

I promise I don’t spend my life in the supermarket. It’s just that food-shop day comes around so quickly. (Though never quickly enough for The Two Teenagers, who by lunchtime the following day are complaining ‘there’s nothing to eat in the house’ – which translates as ‘we’ve eaten all the treats; you surely don’t expect us to eat the healthy stuff?)

This small insight into my failings as a parent is relevant because today as I wrote the shopping list  I was thinking about people for whom it really is true that there’s nothing to eat in the house.

I confess that the first time I heard that Milton Keynes had a Food Bank I was sceptical.

A scepticism born of blind faith in the UK’s Welfare State for which there is no excuse. After all, didn’t I once make a few hundred quid in my local journalist days, selling on to the nationals my story about the homeless family who’d been given money to buy a tent? This was Thatcher’s Britain and there was a six week delay in dealing with housing benefit. Which meant no-one would take thethis young mother and her two under 5s in.

The £150 Milletts  voucher to buy a tent came from an emergency fund in another bit of social services.  And probably cost its instigator his job, when government PR folk saw, on every front page, a photograph of a woman and two toddlers peering out from their canvas home beneath ‘Has it come to this?’ headlines.

food parcels

Back to the Food Bank. Thatcher may be a distant memory, frail and impotent, but so is the Welfare State, especially as the recession continues to trigger more bankcruptcies and redundancy, plus a rise in domestic violence and relationship breakdown brought on by stress.

The Food Bank is a small charity set up to distribute food parcels to those literally on the breadline. And you can track the effects of the recession by tracking its growth. Between 2007 and 2008 the numbers of adults it kept from starving doubled to 1,656 and the number of children trebled to 734. It expects those figures to double again this year.

It seemed fitting that I should drop off a food donation on my way to filling our stomachs for the week.

The food parcel I assembled was a bit of a lucky dip: a couple of cans of tuna and three of sardines,   two supermarket own-brand tomato soups (which apparently don’t taste like Heinz), pasta, shortbread biscuits, rice, a syrup sponge and a family pack of McCoys crisps (in the spirit of last week’s resolution that I need to climb out of the ‘too good to give away’ mindset and give from my heart rather than always from my head).

rust rings on the shelf

donations here please

Going through my cupboards was a shaming experience. More than half of the cans and packets I picked up were past their use by date. Some of them even pre-dated our move to this house two and a half years ago. What possessed me to pack up and pay to transport out-of-date cans of creamed rice pudding, mushy strawberries and corned beef – presents from a relative who had presumably taken that government leaflet on preparing for a terrorist attack to heart.

At the Food Bank one of the volunteers gave me a list of the things they’re currently short of: biscuits, pasta sauce, tinned fruit, tinned vegetables, long life fruit juice and milk. Which made me regret that creamed rice pudding and strawberries all over again.

Still. She didn’t reject the familypack of crisps. Even the penniless, jobless, homeless and hopeless are allowed the odd treat. I reckon next time I’ll slip some chocolate in amongst the corned beef. Now there’s an idea for the people whose job it is to come up with new crisp flavours.

What are your memories of taking food donations in for harvest festival? Could we persuade supermarkets to have a box for food donations the way pet stores do for pet food donations?