Having spent much of the last 24 hours feeling pretty depressed – this means, according to the former actor and now professional gobshite Laurence Fox, I am not a ‘real man’ – I dragged myself to the food bank this afternoon. Well, not literally dragged myself because that would be a very hard thing to do and indeed it would look very odd, but until I got there I was suffering from a minor bout of compassion fatigue. I soon recovered as callers started to arrive and remembered that my problems were, in the grand scheme of things, relatively minor.
This morning, some of my colleagues were collecting for the food bank at a large supermarket which shall remain nameless, but was actually Tesco. I’ll come back to this a bit later because in our food bank we are running short of a number of essential items. Anyway, the hours passed by and people made their donations. I’m told that the general reaction of the public was one of support, but a few folk grumbled that food shortages were something that the government should be dealing with and not volunteer workers. I have some sympathy with that viewpoint because I think it’s a blot on our country that there is a significant demand for the service we offer. Anyway, at the end of the morning some two crates of food and other provisions were collected, which seemed impressive to me until I was further told the last few times we did collections, volunteers returned with between 16 and 20 crates.
Contrast this sad state of affairs with the aftermath of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone last weekend after which there was 10 tonnes – I’ll just repeat that, 10 tonnes – of corporate food left after the event. The local food bank at Towcester became aware of the situation, collected, weighed and bagged it up for anyone who wanted to collect it. Each bag contained around £30 of food. Now that’s all I know, just the raw facts. I don’t know if all the food was used or even why the organisers had so much food left. As a friend of mine who volunteers for another food bank, “words fail me”. Whatever the reason(s), the gap between the have loads and the have nothings grows by the day.
After a quiet week, we were back to normal today. The callers arrived in a steady number so the waiting times were not too great. My colleagues who do the packing are incredible and always put in a monumental shift. As a meeter, greeter, order taker and tea maker, my job is far easier by comparison.
I met several people today who had never been to a food bank before and both of them used the same word when describing the experience: “embarrassing”. What can you say to that? What I do say is that I completely understand how they feel and if food banks had existed in the 1960s and early 1970s, my mum would have used them. I try to make people feel as comfortable as possible, explain how the process works and above all, I think, that they should know it’s not their fault. I mean, there will have been people I’ve seen who ended up with us due to poor decisions in life, but the point is they had no money and no food. I hope that by the time they left they were feeling a bit better and more hopeful about the future.
I also met a woman with serious mental health issues. I didn’t pry but I am guessing anxiety was one of them having witnessed and indeed experienced it in the past, though not to this level. I would love to have said something like go to your GP and get referred for some therapy, but given that there isn’t any therapy available, what would have been the point? I felt so sorry for her. At least I was on the comeback trail with available quantities of compassion.
We always ask that people check the bags of shopping we give them in case there’s something in them that they don’t want or to make sure we haven’t missed anything. A woman said she had asked for washing powder but there wasn’t any in her bags. I checked with my store cupboard colleagues and we didn’t have any. In fact, the store cupboard is looking bare at the moment as we continue to hand more food and provisions out than we are taking in. With today’s Tesco collection being slightly underwhelming, it’s clear that other things will be running out in the weeks and months to come.
Volunteers talked among ourselves about the shortages in stock and we believe it’s down to the cost of living crisis because we feel it too. People who may have had a bit of spare cash to buy some items for us no longer have it and are concentrating on feeding and clothing themselves as best they can. And therein lies a problem: that cost of living crisis isn’t just hurting those at the bottom, it’s hammering those on what you might call the next step up. As inflation and higher mortgage costs eat into people’s incomes you wonder just how bad this could get.
If you are thinking of donating to a food bank, rest assured that nothing gets wasted, Everything we take in is carefully weighed, as it is again when we give it out. We know things are hard for many people right now but as the aforementioned supermarket I referred to some moments ago always says, every little helps. With millions in food poverty, today this is more true than ever.
