The Food Bank

Yesterday, I had my first experience of a food bank.

It was my first day shadowing an advisor at a local Community Project, with a view to eventually joining the advice drop-in team as a volunteer.  I took a message to the food bank team, busy selecting goods for a customer.  I know food banks are on the rise.  I have read articles asking for donations, articles citing the increasing numbers using food banks and articles criticising the food that is given out, but up until yesterday I hadn't seen one first hand. 

Seeing the shelves of tea bags, pasta, rice, tinned vegetables and meats, toiletries, baby products etc. really brought poverty home to me.  I don't know what I had expected from a food bank and doubt I had given them in-depth thought.  Most of the items on the shelves, apart from the baby products, I generally always have in the cupboard.  People who use food banks are not going there for high cost items to supplement a staple diet, they are there for the staple diet.  Their cupboards are well and truly bare.  They can't make a cup of tea or have a bowl of cereal, they can't afford even that. 

The team didn't interrupt my reverie as I stood in the doorway, gazing in awe at the contents.  They were busy, but I also wondered if they were accustomed to this reaction from the uninitiated.  Poverty is much talked about in the media, much of the rhetoric seeming like the unwanted child batted backwards and forwards between the warring, separated parents of the political parties. I may be naive and I suspect that I lack imagination, but I hadn't given that much heed to the many shades of poverty that clearly exist between people like me - unemployed, on minimum benefits and the homeless.  

"There is nothing in the cupboards" takes on a far more literal meaning than the hackneyed phrase we often employ.  What we actually mean is that there are staple goods, but nothing that whets our over-indulged appetites.  Most of us will have tea, coffee, cereal, rice, pasta, herbs, spices, sugar, various pulses bought in anticipation of trying out the latest favourite TV chef's recipe and abandoned at the first hurdle of not being able to find sun-dried, sicilian-ripened cherry tomato puree.   We have cupboards and freezers bursting with food.  A friend started an exercise of planning meals that would use up this bounty rather than constantly over-spending at the supermarket.  Once she got to the back of the cupboards and the bottom of the freezer, the menus became "interesting".  When we talk about food waste, I presume it is fresh foods such as meats, fruit and vegetables that get thrown out unused.  I tend to forget about the amount of items I keep in my cupboards.  For myself, particularly in my current situation, I need to use or lose this otherwise it just becomes waste,  I could find that I eat more healthily and definitely more frugally.

I also want to look behind the headlines and the sound bites and really see how some people are living.  I thought I was struggling, but I have a home, my health, family, friends, food, a social life, the dog, a purpose,  a television, phone, internet.  I am not struggling by any means, I just have a different standard of living to the one I had a few years ago.  It isn't a lower standard of living, in many ways it is much richer, for one thing I am a time millionaire, it is just different from the over-indulgent, pampered life I lead for so long - and to which I may possibly return, to some degree, in the future.  I have wondered if I am in a repetitive cycle, as in the film 'Groundhog Day' and my situation won't change until I have learned the right lessons.  I am a long way from  aware, but I am optimistic that I am getting there.  When I get a job and the worry of how to pay the bills is replaced with idle contemplation of what to spend money on, I will keep these lessons in mind and focus on just how fortunate I am. A man on the news yesterday was asking for understanding for society's needy.  Even whilst asking for understanding, he actually said  "they've got themselves into a mess".  How often do you hear cancer sufferers being blamed for their own situation?  Poverty is everybody's problem, if we did more to really understand what it is like, possibly we would find better ways  to genuinely improve the lot of those who suffer from it.