“Is it always this quiet in summer?” I asked one of my more long-serving colleagues at our food bank today. I was told that it is. There is more support available in the summer holidays by way of clubs, play groups and numerous other holiday activities so some, though not all, food banks are less busy. We were so quiet that we closed early, unheard of in my time at our food bank, but there really was no point in staying open for nothing.
Don’t worry. The people we see attend by way of referrals. We do see some people who just come off the streets, but they are the rare exception and not the rule. But as there were no people to see, we shut up shop.
I do wonder if we are experiencing compassion fatigue. As we have noted in previous weeks, donations to local food banks have declined considerably this year. Added to the continuing cost of living crisis, we are going to run into problems this autumn if stocks continue to plummet. In recent weeks, we’ve been able to hand out cheese to our callers, a relatively luxury item by food bank standards, and no one has refused it. In fact, callers were surprised and delighted to take some with them. We didn’t today, though, because the supermarket which was generous enough to give us some in recent weeks can’t have had enough spare to give us. I don’t knock that. Supermarkets are, first and foremost, businesses and are, in my experience, very generous to people like us.
That, and the bread and spread we routinely give out, is the nearest thing we have to fresh food. That’s because we don’t have fridges to keep stuff in, unlike in some parts of the country where food banks have fridges donated by King Charles. I’m sure many of our callers would love to take fresh items, but here’s the thing: not all of them have fridges. I can certainly relate to that because my mum and I didn’t have a fridge until I was well into my teens, something that was far from unusual in the late 1960s and 1970s. To come across people today without basics like fridges, cookers and basic heating is a bit shocking at first, but you soon come to realise that while it’s not common, it’s also not unheard of.
Rishi Sunak hasn’t magically ended food poverty because he doesn’t care about it. He and Mrs Sunak manage to struggle by with a mere three quarters of a billion quid in the joint bank account and he doesn’t understand why others can’t seem to cope. Food poverty, in Tory eyes, is the fault of the poor. Nothing to do with me, guv. It was good that we weren’t rammed today, but it won’t be like this for long.
