In 1909, Maud Pember Reeves, a bank manager’s daughter with a big house in Kensington, came up with a plan to make British poverty less lethal. She would cross the river, enter the houses of the poor in Lambeth, and preach — in her words — the gospel of porridge.
Reeves was an energetic and successful socialist campaigner. In New Zealand, she’d helped secure votes for women. In London, where she moved in 1896, she founded the Fabian Women’s Group in her front room in Brunswick Gardens and, appalled by the disparities in child mortality rates across the city, decided to investigate. She and her fellow Fabian Dr Ethel Bentham recruited a cohort of 42 mothers and encouraged them to keep records of their domestic expenditure, with a particular emphasis on diet. Some were not literate, but their children were. Their spelling was often touchingly hard to decipher. Reeves scratched her head at references to items such as “dryaddick”, “sewuitt” and “currince”.1
Reeves and her Fabian comrades wanted to answer questions that attended the discussion of poverty in the Edwardian age, and are still asked today. Why did the working poor spend so much on the wrong things? (Lavish funerals, it seems, were the Sky boxes of 1909.) Why did they eat unhealthy food? Why, for instance, did they have bread and margarine for breakfast when a nice bowl of porridge was cheaper and more nutritious? “The women of Lambeth listened patiently,” wrote Reeves, “according to their way, agreed to all that was said, and did not begin to feed their families on porridge.”
Over a century later, the preaching goes on. At the end of last month, the staff at my local food bank used Twitter to issue a statement about confectionery:
Some followers have raised concern about us putting certain items on our shopping lists (eg crisps & chocolate). Let me clarify – whilst we agree that they are of little nutritional value, we also believe in blessing our clients with a treat from time to time. (1 of 2)
— Lewisham Foodbank (@lewishamfood) June 25, 2020
The announcement provoked an indignant report in the Lewisham News Shopper and a convulsion of disgust on Twitter — which was quickly converted into pledges of Milkybars and Curly Wurlys.
Human emotions are historically contingent. Nobody today is plagued by acedia, the form of religious despair felt by fourth-century Christian desert hermits between 11am and 4pm. Others are culturally specific. Only the Ilongot group of the Philippines feel liget, an angry enthusiasm that pushes them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. So what’s the nature of the concern felt by those donors who complained about the presence of chocolate in the parcels sent out by the Lewisham food bank?
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SubscribeI always add a few treats when putting items in the food bank collection bins at the supermarket..usually chocolate biscuits or cake or chocolate bars. It looks so bleak just to see Weetabix & tinned beans. Quite right, as you say..if I have treats in my trolley why shouldn’t they ?
Well done you.. you must feel very righteous and neighbourly.
Congratulations on being an ass.
Because it isn’t a “right” is it? If you want to do something nice that is different and commendable.
She didn’t say it was a “right.” She used a figure of speech. She could have said, “yes,” or, “it’s true,” or, “I agree.” And you could have avoided being a jerk with your comment. I suspect that people who know you would have found that “different,” about you, but not commendable, rather, “shocking.”
I read a number of the alcohol/food voucher press stories last week; it seems the notion came from supermarket workers, or one shop worker at least, who was quoted (I don’t remember which newspaper/s it was in). Whether or not this is true, I am often shocked by the apparently widespread belief that poverty does not exist in modern Britain, or the fairly callous attitudes expressed by some people toward those less fortunate than themselves.
There are younger people in the company I work for who are paid £20k a year. I have no idea how they can afford to live in London; let alone have anything approaching a decent quality of life. It is easy to see how someone earning a minimum wage would struggle to pay rent, travel costs and bills; and have little left for food. If that person is a parent it follows that their children could end up hungry, even malnourished, even if their parents were loving, selfless experts on nutrition. £15 a week for food is very little, but someone on the legal minimum wage could struggle to have that amount left for food when struggling to keep a roof over their family’s head. Recent reports from Leicester mention garment workers being paid £4 an hour.
Of course a significant number of people/parents are irresponsible: they drink alcohol, take drugs, gamble, not infrequently to excess. They also tend to be the less well-educated. Which is presumably why the government issues food vouchers rather than makes cash payments. It is right and proper that society try to help children living in poverty. Given the economic sh*tstorm that is heading our way, I think the government should ask people like me to pay more tax.
If you keep loweting the bar as do where poverty begins, you will eventually find many of us are in poverty. In real terms poverty is how we spend our money, not how much we have. Sanctimonious, virtue signallers like you don’t need to be asked to pay more tax, just send the IR a cheque. I prefer to keep as much of my hard earned money as I can in order to spend it as wisely as I want.
I have always thought that the idea of food banks was to provide food to those who are unable to afford it. They might be unable to afford it for a variety of reasons – but they still needed food to live.
Whilst Chocolate is nice to have it is not essential for life.
However as a smoker, free tobacco would be good – would you approve of that?
A good point, but with a fatal flaw: chocolate is nourishing, with plenty of calories to help stop you starving. Tobacco will also give you a dopamine hit, but hammer one more nail in your coffin.
As a former social worker and smoker have often been tempted to drop packets of fags into foodbank collection boxes. Feel they might cheer up the collection of worthy items already there. Just know they will be confiscated so stick to crisps and biscuits.
That some non-necessities are harmful does not mean all non-necessities are harmful
Surely the last place to which you would send malnourished children is an NHS hospital! They will only become more enfeebled.
That aside, there is no reason for anyone to be malnourished in modern Britain given that fruit and vegetables are virtually free by historical standards and the supermarkets massively mark down perfectly good food due to use-by dates etc. I typically eat very well for around 15 pounds a week. And the government should not be buying meals for all these children over the summer. The parents should be paying for them. Or Marcus Rashford.
Most of the ‘customers’ to our food back in London are illegal migrants. Single parenting is the main path to poverty in the UK, but no political party wants to incentivise marriage.
How do you know that they are illegal immigrants as opposed to appearing to be foreign?
The left, including the current government have a different means of reducing the birth rate.
They have begun to introduce abortion to full term, starting in Northern Ireland, among the religious communities. They have brought in abortion at home, which I have no doubt will stay in place after Covid legislation is lifted (if it ever is). They have allowed ‘do not resuscitate’ notices to be imposed on anyone elderly, that is over 70, or those with even the mildest learning difficulties. It has introduced the ridiculous notion of ‘presumed consent’ for the removal of body parts from the undead. I bet it will turn out in ten years time the organs of the poor will have been whipped out after brain death to keep alive the wealthy. They have introduced the paedophiles sex education agenda i to primary schools, in order to allow the continued rape and abuse of children disguising it as the child’s choice now the children’s home scandal has been exposed. The green agenda will leave the rural poor to freeze, off grid for gas which is to be phased out, unable to afford electric heating, banned from burning coal or sticks,
Don’t be fooled into thinking it is only obvious eugenicists in the Tory Party that wish to severely reduce the native, working class population, it is the policy of all the mainstream political parties.
As always, Alison, you are bang on the money.
Kanye West and Candace Owens have woken up to this in the US, with Kanye stating just the other day that the progressive left has maintained a deliberate and determined policy of siting abortion clinics in urban areas occupied mainly by black Americans.
Thus, last year there were more black babies aborted in New York than actually born. (To make matters worse one of those babies was shot and killed the other day, but that’s another issue). I can’t remember the number of black babies aborted since Roe v Wade but it will make your stomach churn – and I am (broadly) pro-choice.
Equally stomach churning, as Candace Owens points out, is the way in which de Blasio and the progressive in NY lit up the Empire State Building in order to celebrate the introduction of full term abortion. These people are sick, very sick.
Not surprising since the original Progressive movement in the US in the early 20th century was the seedbed for the Eugenics movement that inspired the Nazi party in Germany.
The big industrialists were huge fans of improving the human race by weeding out the “inferior lineages”. Henry Ford and Charles Limbergh are two of the many, many well known proponents of, as Margaret Sanger the founder of the Birth control movement in the US wrote,””the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Sanger, The founder of Planned Parenthood, a saint in Progressive circles, purposely sited the organization’s clinics in black areas.
Very sick.
An elderly friend in her 80s was horrified at the number smoking in a food bank queue. She didn’t donate food again. How people are perceived can also impact on those who are not spending money on non essentials.
The undeserving poor spoil it for the rest
It’s not the children’s fault if their parents are smokers.
Yeah, whatever. It still doesn’t help the cause to see seriously fat people, and not just a minority, queuing up at the food bank.
I used to donate but after seeing that? Nah.
It’s much easier to get fat when you’re poor. Lean meat, tasty veg and fruit tend to cost money. Refined flour and sugar, the cheap fatty offcuts of meat, salt and vegetable oil are the foundation stones of cheap food.
Animal fat is good for you. Read up on diets
Utter nonsense. I eat lean meat and/or fish, veg and fruit every day. This week I spent about 12 pounds on food. I am not poor – in fact I’m quite rich by most standards – but I buy from markets and pick up good that is past it’s use-by date or whatever.
From the Government’s own figures, 40% of children from disadvantaged homes are obese.
Different people have different ideas of what constitutes a treat. I always make sure I put plenty of vegan items in the collection bins. Just because someone is poor doesn’t mean they have to eat against their principles. I also put some toiletries in such as feminine hygiene products, disposable razors and shaving foam, and during this pandemic some hand sanitiser.
I live in a fairly well-to-do enclave. People round here are very generous when it comes to food bank appeals and constantly virtue signal their solidarity with the poor. However, I have noticed that our shopping baskets generally don’t reflect what’s bought for the food bank. Instead of bundles of asparagus, sacks of avocados and sheaves of fresh herbs, I see tinned peaches, UHT milk, value range bags of flour and supermarket sanitary wear.
Yeah well all the foods you mentioned are perishables, and while one might wish to donate these items, the food banks are not really set up to handle and distribute them. So, tins and packets are what’s needed.
If you think the people who go to food banks will eat avocados, asparagus and fresh herbs – or anything green or healthy whatsoever – you are utterly mad. I suppose they might seize on the avocados in the assumption that they are hand grenades.
What a generalisation!
Nothing like a bit of disgraceful stereotyping.