The footballer Marcus Rashford volunteers at FareShare in Manchester
Should the Government feed poor kids? Marcus Rashford thought so. Few will be unaware of the petition launched by the Manchester United and England footballer in favour of extending free school meals provision during the holidays. More than a million people signed it. The Government rejected the idea.
Until this weekend. At which point a screeching U-turn was performed — though this may have been lost amid the hubbub in America. Now, free school meals will be provided to eligible children during the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year.
The debate, as it raged over the past months, was partly philosophical: is it correct for the state to step in where parents have failed, either through neglect, poverty or sheer ill fortune? The Conservative MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, taking the argument for personal responsibility to its logical conclusion, provoked mirth by telling the Commons that he didn’t believe in “nationalising children”.
Another feature of the argument — and a frequent component of all such ideological wrangling — was the light it shone on what politicians and commentators would define as food poverty in contemporary Britain. Indeed, some of those opposed to Labour’s motion clamoured to demonstrate that it is possible to eat well on a shoestring and that food poverty is more often a consequence of irresponsible choices than genuine financial hardship.
When I was researching a book on low-wage Britain, I stumbled across an article in the Daily Mail about a woman who managed to survive on £1 a day. “Frugal Kath Kelly, 51, ate at free buffets, shopped at church jumble sales and scrounged leftovers from grocery stores and restaurants,” ran the story. “She even collected a staggering £117 in loose change dropped in the street.”
The story was written in admiring tones — Kath Kelly was presented as a sagacious and resourceful example to the poor. The underlying message was that the lower orders were feckless and stupid. Instead of sourcing and preparing healthy ingredients, they chose to plonk themselves in front of a television set and inhale pot noodles and multipacks of crisps.
There is a George Orwell quote that is trotted out during every debate about food, with Orwell arguing that poverty and unemployment lends itself to the desire for “tasty” food over dour offerings such as kale and brown bread. “The less money you have,” writes Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food.”
But is it actually more expensive to eat well? And how much does it cost to eat nutritious food in Britain in 2020?
Nutritious ingredients such as lentils (£1, all Asda prices), potatoes (49p), chickpeas (33p) and half a dozen eggs (75p) certainly go further than salt and sugar-filled ready meals (£2) or a calorie-dense stuffed crust pizza (£3.50). The food blogger Jack Monroe has demonstrated conclusively that it is possible to make tasty and nutritious meals on a budget: her website showcases recipes for Cornish fish pie, mustard chicken, salmon and pea pasta — each meal costing less than £1.50 to prepare. But the cost of these meals per person is typically based on making enough for four to six people, which is not applicable to every family. They also don’t take account of the cost of electricity and gas, and the limited storage and cooking space that people may have access to.
Moreover, there are other impediments to eating well on a budget. A lack of education about culinary preparation is one commonly cited factor, though that has been mitigated in recent times by the emergence of budget-food celebrities and more generally by access to the internet. Though a strangely snobbish attitude toward frozen food lingers in Britain, with one in three believing it is inferior to fresh food. Bizarrely considering the popularity of frozen food in France, a nation viewed as infinitely superior to us in terms of diet, 30% of Brits agreed with the statement “frozen food is not for people like me” according to a 2015 survey.
A lack of education has become a catch-all explanation for many contemporary phenomena, from bad diets, to Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. However, a 2013 study concluded that unhealthy diets seen in poorer socioeconomic groups may be related to different physical activity levels. For example, the study found that adults of lower socioeconomic status were more physically active and expended more energy than those of higher socioeconomic status, perhaps explaining their higher consumption of sugar- and fat-rich foods.
A critical factor in poor dietary choices in the UK is a lack of time. Britons work some of the longest hours in Europe and have some of the largest waistlines. A 2014 survey found that three-quarters of British workers said a bad day at the office was the main reason for bingeing on foods such as pizzas, burgers and curries.
Moreover, eating for many occurs “on the go” — as a thousand advertorial blandishments like to phrase it (although less so during the Covid-19 pandemic). The reality is somewhat less glamorous: the “buffet” car aboard most trains is a degradation of the act of eating; the typical offering is a choice of sweets, crisps, stodge, grease and other high calorie snacks. And while it may be relatively easy to source cheap ingredients from the supermarket, motorway service stations feature a “choice” that is usually limited to McDonald’s, KFC, or a cold and unappetising salad box. It’s hardly surprising so many choose the unhealthy option.
During my brief stint at working in an Amazon warehouse, my diet was appalling. Orwell’s point about the unemployed seeking out something “tasty” to ameliorate misery also applies to the working poor. I didn’t go home and cook up a hearty stew of lentils and pearl barley after a gruelling 10-hour shift: I collapsed on my bed with a McDonald’s and a beer. Most human beings would do the same under similar conditions.
For those on low wages or benefits, poverty is the thief of time. Being poor invariably consists of countless hours spent waiting around for public transport, bosses, landlords or public sector bureaucrats. And that’s before one adds up the additional time it takes to care for a family. Even if it can be done relatively cheaply, preparing a healthy meal invariably takes longer than putting a pizza in the oven.
There have often been moral panics about what the poor are spending money on and what they are eating. In Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, inmates in the workhouse receive “periodically small quantities of oatmeal” and are served “three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays”. When Dickens was writing in the 1830s, the New Poor Law had recently been introduced with the intention of making life for those without work as miserable and as harsh as possible. Those is the workhouse were to be fed no better than the poorest labourer; by such methods men and women would be forced to accept the lowliest job they were offered.
We no longer dictate the food those on unemployment benefits must consume (though the argument that we ought to is a frequent saloon-bar trope). But a peculiar moral tone to our conversations about food persists. This is not confined to one political tribe. Nowadays liberals too are often heard laying down pious strictures as to what the poor should eat and drink. Sugar taxes have been introduced and junk food advertising is set to be banned before the 9pm watershed. Newspapers such as The Guardian have called for the government to go even further in terms of regulating what people eat.
Food taxes are not necessarily wrong per se — there is evidence to suggest that levies on fizzy drinks (which are empty calories after all) can encourage people to make healthier choices (what’s wrong with plain old water?). But financially penalising people for their dietary choices feels like the complacent and morally satisfying option. Perhaps it would be better to pay more attention to the material conditions that give rise to the use of junk food as an emotional palliative in the first place. Binge-eating is more often a response to external pressures than a signifier of innate moral deficiencies.
And, despite the good news this week about the Covid vaccine, things are going to get far harder over the winter before they get better. Ministers have also been warned that the weekly shop is likely to become more expensive in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
It would be too reductive to remove individual agency from the healthy eating equation altogether. Yet we should ask more penetrating questions as to why poorer families often have such gruesome diets — questions that go beyond Dickensian moralising about personal responsibility and “nationalising children”, but which simultaneously eschew the sanctimonious finger-wagging of the “nanny knows best” approach.
There are myriad reasons why Britons eat poorly. Addressing them will require a radical reappraisal of our work-life balance and a better understanding of the indignities that are a daily feature of life on the breadline. Changes wrought by the pandemic may inadvertently bring about the former. But is a Conservative government — against some of its deep-rooted ideological inclinations — ready to see life through the eyes of its poorest citizens? Never say never. But the fact it was forced into an embarrassing climbdown by a Premier League footballer over school meals for poor kids doesn’t bode well.
James Bloodworth is a journalist and author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain, which was longlisted for the Orwell Prize 2019.
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Subscribe‘A lack of education has become a catch-all explanation for many contemporary phenomena, from bad diets, to Brexit, to the election of Donald Trump in 2016/’
Yet more sneering. For the record, I have extremely good A level results from the pre-grade inflation era and I could have attended any university in the land had I wished to mingle with the sort of dweebs who go to university. I have read infinitely more serious books than anyone I know and 99.99% of those I don’t know. I would have voted for Brexit and Trump.
I don’t think the author is sneering, merely drawing attention to a specious argument used by people who ought to know better.
I totally agree.
I had a similar educational experience but I chose to go to university anyway. One of the most important things it taught me was that I wasn’t exceptional after all.
Chip on your shoulder much?
I don’t think so. I taught philosophy and logic intermittently for several years to undergraduates at the Russell Group university where I did my PhD, and some of these very polite and seemingly well-educated children were functionally illiterate. On the other hand I have friends who left school at 14 and write beautifully.
I think you might be sneering!
Well I have very bad A level results – the result of doing my exams in hospital during post-operative peritonitis – but went to university anyway and accumulated 2 degrees, an MA, and a PhD. I did vote for Brexit and would have voted for Trump.
Its not food banks they need so much as ‘get your priorities right banks’ Give some parents a 100 quid every single day of the week at 9.00am and their kids’d still go without their tea.
A neighbour works at a food bank, she tells me that the patrons only want tinned goods. Even fresh bread donated by a local supermarket in large amounts is either wasted or given to friends and neighbours. The only bread taken is the “Mother’s Pride” type.
That soft White sliced bread is all some children will eat. People won’t take it if it’s only going to go to waste.
True, but doesn’t kids turning their nose up at nice bread belie the claim they suffer food poverty?
Also, there re adults, not just kids, in the home, needing food.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but when I was a child we didn’t get that much choice
Sometimes the participants ask for food that does not need cooking because they can’t afford the money for the meter.
I buy make in a mug pasta sachets for the foodbank donation bin, thinking of those in energy poverty who can only boil a kettle. Good food it isn’t, calories it is though.
Ever noticed how fat the clientele of food banks often is? Those people are certainly not missing out on calories. And if they are eating the wrong food, then maybe just eat two cheeseburgers rather than four.
Do you work in a food bank? If not, how do you know “how fat the clientele of food banks often is” ?
The fat feel hunger too you know, if you cut them do they not bleed?
During my PhD my stipend ended and I was forced to apply for the dole (in NZ). We were stood down for 4 weeks despite my stipend being less than the dole for a family of 4. We prioritised keeping a roof over our heads and paying bills. We ate into our stocks of dried pulses and rice. We had a garden which was producing and only bought milk, cheese and flour. It was very touch and go. We could not have done it for another 4 weeks or the 5 weeks you have to wait for a Universal Credit first payment.
My village, has a van pull up each week that has delivered to the “Needy”. What is left is for those in the village who are struggling. Now the que is abour 30 people long. Not that many of them are “Needy”, Greedy maybe, for something for nothing!!
There is a lot of moral poverty (old fashioned straight-forward selfishness) about! We must never rush to judgement, but if my wife was budgeting carefully, planning her meals, making sure our three children had a good breakfast, a good lunch box and a decent evening meal whilst I was spending two or three hours in the pub every evening, would it be reasonable to say that I was being a selfish b*st*d?
How do you know?
But for many others the food banks make an enormous difference. In a recent documentary in the UK someone running a food bank described how when he and his wife started the food bank 12 years ago they provided 72 meals each month. Now it is 14,000. I don’t think that is due to fecklessness.
Unless someone wakes up to find he has mysteriously been transported to a motorway service station, it is perfectly possible to make sandwiches or some other food in advance and take it with you on a long journey.
So many of the attempts to find sympathy-inducing extraneous factors to explain people’s poor diets are remarkably lame. Lack of storage space is mentioned above: you don’t need a cupboard the size of a Kardashian walk-in shoe closet to store a few tins, some spaghetti and rice etc.
The reason people eat junk food is a combination of laziness, an inability to cook and taste preference. People eat junk food because they want to, basically, not because they don’t have a cupboard or woke up starving at a motorway service station.
Given that this is a question of people essentially making a free choice about what to eat, it’s worth thinking about whether the state has any right to interfere in these choices. Why not just live and let live?
What you cite as the reason for people to eat junk food is sometimes true but not invariably so. Your view is stereotypical.
I grew up in a working class area. There were two types of people. One lot grew veggies (even in pots on a balcony), kept a few chickens if they could, and made healthy meals from scratch. The others drank and gambled most of their money, then fed their families junk.
My goodness. Not sure what this gent’s qualifications for writing this article are, but did he ever spew a lot of nonsense.
I live in an area with “high poverty rates” and “high child poverty rates”. Most of the “poverty” is generational welfare. Kids having kids because we pay them for it. 15 year old girls strive to get pregnant because they get a “free apartment” once they are 16 if they have their own baby.
I’m a doc. I constantly see parents who tell me they don’t have enough money to fill their own (or their child’s) prescription. They have 2 packages of cigarettes in their pocket and smell of marijuana.
A couple of important stats for the author:
1) obesity is positively correlated with what we in the west call “poverty”. In a society with true poverty, it is negatively correlated. Go to Burundi and what you’ll notice is that poor people are skinny. We have “poverty” in a social sense, but not in a true material sense.
2) dietary habits are much more closely correlated to educational level than to poverty. Educational level and wealth are correlated too, so this whole mess is challenging to untangle, but as a doc I’ve met many highly educated folks (including my own brother) who have voluntarily chosen jobs that put them in the bottom percentiles of income, and yet eat far better than millionaires I know.
Thomas Sowell” “What exactly is your “fair share” of other people’s money?”
What exactly is your fair share if you are paid the minimum wage while someone else takes 10 million a year generated by your efforts and the efforts of the other people on minimum wage?
If you’re not earning enough make yourself more valuable so people will happily give you more money and/or a higher paying job. Simple.
Oh, try and leave the toxic resentment of others success behind, you’re poisoning yourself and everyone that has anything to do with you.
Do you not think the work people do in care homes is valuable? What about people who care 24/7 for sick, elderly or disabled family members? Don’t you realise yet that the value of the work has nothing to do with the pay? In fact the opposite seems to be true!
Well if it’s nothing to do with the pay then why would they complain about the pay?
I think you’ve misunderstood what I’m saying. I am saying that the value of the work is not relative to the pay. Say, for example, someone who cares for a sick relative; the work they are doing is invaluable but the financial reward is not reflective of that.
In my former employer, the CEO was paid around 2.4 million Euros a year. He later said “if I had been paid 50% more, I wouldn’t have made better decisions, and if I had been paid 50% less, I wouldn’t have made worse decisions”. His successor was paid 800% more, 21 million Euros a year, and was forced out after losing billions on purchasing assets at the top of the market (naturally, he was consoled with a few millions more in compensation). Every single person in the large company was making 200 Euros a year just to pay the salary of that one person out of 100,000 – minor for us Europeans but significant in the context of lower pay rates in other parts of the world.
The fact that you regard the greed of the CEO class as “others’ success”, while criticism of them is “toxic resentment”, shows where you’re coming from ideologically. Do you really imagine that the spiralling rewards of the Executive class, while pay is held down or actually diminishes at the other end of the pay scale, is because the Executive class are 10x as productive as they were two decades ago, while ordinary folk have not increased their productivity?
Excellent comment. I’ve been on the poverty line and eaten very well (lentils, frozen veges etc) for less than half of what an adult ‘should’ (by govt calculations) spend on food.
There was *no way* I could afford takeaways for pre-prepared meals.
And I was working full time so I can’t stand this nonsense about time poverty (and lumping working poor together with non-working poor).
Good on ya. I agree completely. I was officially below the poverty line for my 13 years of post-secondary education (I paid every cent myself other than the train ticket that sent me to university my first semester). I ate very well the whole time. I couldn’t afford to eat at McDonalds or any restaurant – that type of indulgence might happen once per semester at most.
I find it funny that in a society where we spend massive amounts of time in front of screens (as I am doing now for instance 😉 ) that people complain they “don’t have enough time” to do things like cook decent food or exercise or volunteer. Bull— I say.
Even through med school and residency I found time to eat decently, sometimes while pulling 80+ hour weeks between study and clinical hours. Given that, I find it funny that one of the reasons espoused by SJW’s for poor people not eating well is time. I work with poor people in my various roles as a doc, and most are underemployed, unemployed, or on welfare. ie: they have oodles of time to cook a meal.
All that said, I do know there is another side to this argument and I sometimes meet “the working poor” (and hang out with some who are my friends) who do struggle much more than those on welfare. But they still have their pride.
Also due to all sorts of things but mainly advances in domestic appliances, people (especially women) have far more discretionary free time than they have ever had. As with what they chose to eat, what they chose to do with that is up to them. When I waste my time (like now I suppose) or eat unhealthily, that’s my choice, but I don’t expect other people to pay for it
Here in Scotland everyone gets free prescriptions because ScotGov got some health economists to model it and because hospitalising someone, usually in an ambulance or treating something which should has advanced without treatment is more expensive than the original treatment. Also the scheme to ameliorate the cost for thoe chronically ill was expensive to administer.
Back in NZ with charges for the Dr and prescriptions and with young kids I know what it is to scurry out of the surgery knowing we can only afford the prescription and not the Dr. The hope is there will be enough for the Dr when the bill came through the door.
We were thin and ate a lot of dried pulses. My wife baked bread and buns, such good buns. We didn’t smoke, hardly drank. Yoiu fail the empathy test and are stereotyping thinking everyone is the same. During that time I got so run down I contracted trench mouth.
If you are buying in food ready made, it is certainly cheaper to buy junk food, but the cooking of decent meals also needs a pre-investment in herbs, spices, flour and similar foundational ingredients. This costs a lot to establish, even it’s inexpensive to maintain in the long term. It is generally expensive to be poor. With more available cash you can buy bulk for much cheaper, afford the buy two get a third free offers and stock up when there is a sale on. None of this is available to those on the poverty line.
I cook for two people every day and never use herbs, spices or flour. These are not ‘foundational ingredients’ but optional ones. Only someone who doesn’t know how to cook or has spent too much time in Provence would think them ‘foundational’.
Herbs and spices ARE important – it’s false economy to do without. You are aiming to better McDonalds etc., not just produce a poor substitute. But really the cost is low; black pepper and (dried) thyme are what I use most, along with garlic and chilies. They last a long time and are very cheap in Aldi etc. The ‘long-term investment’ is no more than a very few Euro. Or the price of one fast food meal.
Herbs and spices make basic ingredients taste good. You can’t cook many tasty cheap meals without them. If you have just a few staples you can make a delicious meal out of almost anything and they only cost pennies to start with.
You can cook tasty meals without herbs and spices (other than, maybe, a bit of pepper). My mother cooked for seven for many years without using herbs and spices. The meals were fine. She used meat, vegetables, fruit, flour, etc. We had canned baked beans sometimes but never lentils or other pulses and beans. We’re all still healthy (and not overweight) in our fifties and sixties.
A lot of tosh is talked about food.
Then you have not eating properly cooked tasty food then. Your tastebuds are not as mine and Charlotte’s are. I have two large spice racks filled with herbs and spices. I top them up cheaply in the local modern, do it for the planet bulk bin shop (bring your own containers). It’s much cheaper when you don’t have to pay for the packaging. I regard fresh garlic as an essential, Aldi sell it very cheaply. Garlic is a flavour enhancer before it is a flavour. You don’t know what you are missing.
You have just proved that herbs and spices can be bought cheaply. Herbs can also be grown in a pot on a windowsill.
I have two overflowing spice/herb racks too
I was talking about my mother’s cooking. There are ways to make food tasty that don’t involve soices and herbs.
Also, many people on the poverty line, and even on modest incomes, cannot afford a car to carry a lot of shopping home. It is definitely cheaper to shop only once a week, perhaps topping up on fruit and fresh veg during the week.
I work full time and don’t drive. I have no trouble at all carrying all my groceries home on the bus”I just need to stagger my shop over the fortnight. This doesn’t prevent me taking advantage of specials.
Well done. I had no car when feeding 8 offspring. I have long considered shopping to be applied weight lifting. It was worth investing in bus fare to get cheaper meat in town.
I can only occasionally afford the bus and its 4-500m up the hill from the closest stop to the Aldi. It is 3 miles away on foot. I do carry my shopping home, on my back and in hessian bags. But I can only do that for me. I couldn’t for a family. It also takes a long time.
“It is generally expensive to be poor”. I can testify to that, having been very poor at one time in my life. None of the large boxes of washing powder, for example. No three for two offers as I only had the money for one. Even making a phone call was done only as a necessity. It wasn’t nice.
I used to teach teenage boys with behavioural problems, some from chaotic families. Their favourite lesson was cooking. All the social skills e.g. communication, as well as numeracy (scaling up a recipe), literacy (reading instructions carefully), human biology (nutrition) can be covered in a cookery class. Then of course there is delayed gratification. I was lucky that the school where I taught had cooking facilities. Kids love cooking. My boys could knock up a mean pizza.
Yes, most school lessons these days are unutterably boring because the just sit down and make “posters”.
Agreed, at school in NZ i did both cooking and sewing. There was no limiting that just to the girls. That was only in Intermediate school though. There was no such option in Secondary schools.
For people to know how to cook, they first need to be taught how to eat. The French eat better than the British (not that it’s perfect or anything in France) because France has made a big investment in providing high quality meals in schools. Even the smallest schools have kitchens providing high quality food that kids want to eat.
Providing free junk food to poor British children isn’t going to change anything. It will syphon off resources from improving the quality of regular school meals, though.
I agree, but the parents do have to pay towards those meals and the children don’t get offered alternatives (unless they have allergies). Can you imagine how those factors would go down here?
I’ve always thought the French eat better because they still have some kind of local cuisine, they eat this because of local patriotism, not for health reasons. And that local dish by definition isn’t a supermarket ready meal. In Britain we industrialised first, very few townies have a family connection to the land, our local cuisine is Tesco.
I’m not sure there is actually that much truth in that stereotype, possibly where middle class Brits go on holiday in France but the average French supermarket or fast food outlet is not that much different from the UK
“Poor children”?
As children are not allowed to work and hence earn money, all children are poor.
The use of the phrase “poor children” is used as an emotional catch all, to stop people thinking; and to blackmail the taxpayer into paying yet more money.
There are undoubtedly relatively poor parents and indeed some actually poor parents.
How about an article on how much the taxpayer spends spends to help the poor. Is it correctly targeted, can it in practice be correctly targeted?
Would it be better to stop some payments to parents and use schools to feed children? Should we force some parents (who we deem irresponsible) to feed their children in a better way?
Is it wise to destroy the bond between parents & children? What would be the consequences be? After all we know that the state is often bad at looking after children.
Plenty of questions, perhaps Unherd could write some articles exploring the answers, rather than jumping on the latest band waggon to spend other peoples money on other people?
I am happy for my taxes to be used to help poor parents but, as you write, it is important to target the money wisely. I would not want those choices to be based on stereotypical views.
“How about an article on how much the taxpayer spends spends to help the poor. Is it correctly targeted, can it in practice be correctly targeted?”
Very good point.
The govt has accepted poverty wages and tries to ameliorate that for children by providing tax credits. As a result many low income families pay no tax other than VAT.
Before tax credits there was family benefit. The idea of the state giving families money to help raise children has a long history here in the UK. The principle was conceded a long time ago.
And the tax credits were cut by the Coalition Government. Taxes for those earning more than £150,000 a year were also cut.
I must have read the same article in The Guardian a hundred times. Anyway, it doesn’t really take much (or any) longer to cook a healthy meal than it does to cook a pizza. I do it every day and with food from markets and sell-by stuff etc in the shops I eat healthily for about 12 to 14 pounds a week.
I daresay that when you buy food to cook, you can read the instructions! Not everyone can.
Pizza dough takes time to make and time to rise before you can put the toppings on and cook it. A frozen or fresh pizza from the supermarket just needs putting in the oven. There are small microwave versions too.
It might be possible to do it but if the kids are hungry (when are they not? ) will they wait while you make a pizza which won’t be ready until 8pm?
I think one of the main problems is that this is at least the third generation of parents who might have often grown up in a household where food came out of tins or was ready.made.
But being poor is no fun, it’s a hard slog and it takes stamina, intelligence and luck to get out of it.
I don’t know what the answer is, perhaps community cookery demonstrations made fun, not preachy. Ainsley Harriott style.
I’ve given this some thought, and have come to the conclusion that I would hate to try and give cookery lessons nowadays. Meat and dairy would be verboten due to ethical and religious convictions. So it’s vegan only. Add in that one person is allergic to tomatoes, the next to alliums, etc, and you have an extremely limited palette to work with (leading to a rather limited palate? haha). Perhaps the government could sponsor and advertise online videos of basic cookery methods?
Veganism is strictly middle class.
Not sure about that – I know, and know of (second-hand), some vegans who are working class. Probably not socioeconomic class E though.
But then, with even a minority of nurses using food banks, assumptions about which particular SEC we are talking about are unreliable.
Yes, you’ve got a point there Chris, but I meant the general trend setting aspect of veganism is for people with more money and time to invest in food.
Yes, but it’s the only option left if you have a class which includes vegetarians, religious types of various creeds, the lactose intolerant, etc etc. Which is why the whole thing is now a non-starter.
We manage it here in Scotland. You have defeated yourself before you try. I am genuinely lactose intolerant, we are not that common. You just tell them what milk substitues they can use (Aldi does 1L cartons of LF milk for just 86p).
If you define poor as ‘in poverty’,then by socialist standards thats 60-80%of the average wage.
They just love saying “poverty”
If you are on say,30% of average wage &and on universal credit,no its not fun ..but it IS rent free.
I was referring to the 30% sort of poor.
Housing benefit doesn’t usually cover rent unless you are lucky enough to get a council house
Agreed, I was talking to an old guy in a minimum wage job. Widowed who was being taught cooking at a community thing (this is Scotland we do things differently here) and he was proud of himself. The appetite for such lessons, if you will forgive the pun, is there. Nothing fancy but good food.
I’m aware that some people don’t have enough money to even just get by as a result of redundancy, getting sacked, or being divorced, but I’m sure many more just make bad decisions in life, like having children despite knowing that that they would never be able to afford to raise them themselves. When it comes to food, though, I just don’t understand how people haven’t got any money [or enough money] to pay for the cheapest of foods in supermarkets. There’s an abundance of food available to Western society. So much so, there’s a lot of food waste.
If people qualify for free food from the state or food banks, then their debt to income ratio needs to be properly examined, and teaching people how to shop, let alone cook, should be required in return.
Rather than reading the words ‘food poverty’, or reading headlines about children going to school without the funds to have a school meal, I think the better approach would be to ask why THAT child is in that situation, rather than the Tories be blamed for something else that’s out of their control. If I was a teacher at their school, I’d be asking questions at parents evening, knocking on doors, and leaking facts to the MSM.
Children should be the responsibility of their parents, not the state, and not charities.
Better parenting will save us all.
As Charlotte commented, housing benefit doesn’t usually cover rent.
And when the washing machine breaks irretrievably in a household with 2-3 children under 10, what do you do?
Or when you find that the school shoes of one or two of those children are letting in water now that winter is here, and they are conducting their school education in constantly wet feet, what do you do?
Presumably that’s why some families do not have enough money to eat healthily.
“Or when you find that the school shoes of one or two of those children are letting in water now that winter is here, and they are conducting their school education in constantly wet feet, what do you do?”
Children’s shoes (including rain boots) can be bought extremely cheaply”for the price of a couple of cans of beans, (thanks for mass-produced products from China etc).
It is not OK to send a child to school with wet feet.
Have you not noticed all the articles on the rise in rental costs? The waits for a council house are longer than every so many have to rent privately at extortionate rates. Add in power costs, many are in energy poverty and food then becomes difficult. If you are somewhere miles from the shops (converted office blocks are a modern example) you are in a bind.
The main reason for the lack of council housing is unprecedented mass immigration, which also contributes to low wages and pressures on other services, the party of the working class conveniently ignored (and indeed facilitated) that. Possibly one reason why so many of said class deserted them
As a serious question can somebody show stats that correlate with:
Unemployed/underemployed people who are time rich cook cheap but healthy food?
Overworked people cook/buy unhealthy food, due to absolute lack of time?
There is certainly something in this.
I’m time rich as i am under employed. I put things in the slow cooker or on low on a ring for a two hours for absolute tenderness. If I worked I could probably still do it if I was organised enough. But many are not organised enough. You cannot magically make everyone self disciplined and hyper organised.
If I earned enough from full employment I would probably only do that at the weekends. If i made enough and froze it I could then enjoy it long term. I’ve just been through the end of my financial month. I put most of my remaining veg into a large multi bean chilli (dried beans) in the slow cooker (29p tins of tomatoes from Aldi) and it fed me (Aldi’s rice is cheap) until my money came through.
But i can cook and I’m organised enough to think of doing that and disciplined enough to eat like that. My chilli is also very tasty, it takes discipline to limit it to main meals.
Advice is all very well but many cannot keep to it. Outside of wartime rationing I’m not sure how to put the genie back in the bottle. We keep people compliant with bread and circuses (sport, ‘slebs, etc) and provide meals suitable for eating in front of the TV.
I make myself sit at the table and eat properly. But again it takes discipline and thinking of and appreciating the benefit of doing so.
It is usually presumed that one thing causes the other, ie poverty causes poor eating habits. It would seem more likely to me that a person may have a bad diet and be in poverty for the same reasons, such as poor upbringing, substandard education or even (perish the thought) just plain old laziness.
I am glad to see that someone recognises that there can be a range of reasons for poor diet.
A lot of what is labelled laziness is actually depression and hopelessness. A lot of the long term poor suffer from hopelessness. You buy lottery tickets, scratch cards or put a pound on the horses to buy some hope.
if you ever wonder why the poor ‘waste’ their money on such things remember, everyone needs some hope in their lives.
is it correct for the state to step in where parents have failed, either through neglect, poverty or sheer ill fortune?
That is a different question from the one re: meals. Ironically, the food effort regards every other instance in which parents have failed, as if a full belly is a solution to abuse or other negative things that occur in homes. And once a child is in such a program, when does it end? Is there a marker that suggests a point where the parent can again resume one of the most basic jobs of being a parent.
A real cynic would ask why it is that a parent unable to feed a child remains a parent. Not that I think the state is qualified to step in; the foster system is ample evidence that it is not, but the question remains. Feeding one’s children is the lowest bar of parental expectation.
A real cynic would ask why some parents have low incomes, not least because of Government cuts in tax credits, in a country where tax has been cut for millionaires, the Home Secretary forked out £45,000 to jump the waiting list for membership of a cricket club, the Transport Secretary owns a £100,000 light aircraft, the Chancellor owns multiple homes, corporations avoid paying tax by representing that sales made to UK customers and fufilled from UK distribution centres are actually being made from Luxemburg….. and the Government proposes more restrictions on trade unions. You could almost imagine that the country is run by rich people who act as facilitators for the greed of their own kind.
A truly real cynic would wonder why Gordon Brown implemented the tax credit system, designed to make people reliant on state handouts, such that he boasted that 9 out of 10 families were receiving tax credits. Which allowed companies to not need to have to pay their employees properly; and noting at the same time, his boss was flooding the country will immigrants, depressing wages further.
I was just going to make the same point until I saw your comment. An unholy alliance of big business and the ‘liberal’ left creating a low-wage economy which provided a cheap and compliant workforce for the former and dependable and dependent voters for the latter
At a fairly basic level I don’t think there is any consensus on what constitutes a heathy/good diet or what is a good or bad dietary choice. I would guess that my definition of a healthy diet would differ quite a bit from the author. For example potatoes, bread, pasta, and rice are a staple for many people but send my blood sugar up to diabetic levels.
Bread, meat, salad. In other words a Kabab or Mcdonalds.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Word salad. Perhaps you do.
Staple food =/= healthy food
An alternative to lecturing the less well off about their eating habits:
Introduce a voucher system for healthy food. Issue everyone with a store card, redeemable only for healthy food items at the cheaper end of the scale (carrots and cabbages not kale and quinoa). Get supermarkets and other outlets (including wholesalers looking to distribute produce through box schemes and the like ; or perhaps doorstep milk delivers looking to expand the range of things they deliver (yes, the ‘milkperson’ has had something of a revival thanks to Covid lockdowns)) to compete to provide these items at the lowest prices.
Since high-end supermarkets such as Waitrose would be unlikely to be in the running there would probably be a ‘snob dividend’ for public finances, by which the well-heeled would distain to use their free allowance.
Kale is very cheap 😉
OK – delete kale, substitute some hyped ‘superfood’!
I’m sure your idea will be very popular in the statist authoritarian future we appear to be headed to, of course when that has been tried before it hasn’t ended well
I didn’t read the article referred to, but unless you’ve described it badly your conclusion seems unwarranted. Kath Kelly was being praised for saving money by making use of free meals and food items given away by shops.
That says nothing about the quality of her diet. Who knows, maybe she was blagging pre-prepared meal products and poor-quality processed food from the shops.
As for the “underlying message” about fecklessness and stupidity – again, that doesn’t necessarily follow. You might just as well say that an article admiring the achievement of a supreme athlete has an “underlying message” that the rest of us are lazy slobs.
Junk food is not cheaper. But to cook from scratch you probably need the experience of having watched a parent do it and you need the confidence to try. In parts of London where I had experience of working with health colleagues on such issues there were issues also of being able to easily get to the cheaper food stores.
Sometimes you can hardly find anything but cooking shows on TV, I don’t think there’s any serious problem accessing information about, or demonstrations of, the pretty basic skills required to cook a decent meal from scratch.
No one in this country is “poor” not even the homeless. “relative poverty” was made up by the left to continue a fight long won. There will be actual poor in this country if the Government keeps printing money to pay off those who will never vote for them. Twitter seems to be in charge of the useless Boris government.
Its ALWAYS someone/something elses fault.
Thought Unherd would swerve this nonsense.
How difficult is it to type in “healthy cheap food& how to cook it?” to Google?
Indeed. The poor make quite a few, well, poor decisions.
Try typing in healthy cheap food that you can cook without an oven/hob that children will like. It’s not always as simple as making a delicious Dahl.
Slow cookers are inexpensive and cheap to run.
Why are people so anti-pizza? It’s essentially a cheese and tomato sandwich. What is wrong with that?
Yes, nothing wrong the occasional pizza if you throw a load of veg on top.
Or as some comedian once quipped “Corn flakes are quite nourishing if sprinkled on food”.
I agree the problem is complex and multifactorial but one of the factors not mentioned here is that junk food is addictive. Ultra-processed food manufacturers have scientists specifically designing highly addictive taste and texture combinations. Once people are hooked, especially as children it is nearly impossible to wean people away from the dopamine rewarding combination of fat, sugar and salt in perfect combinations – known to the food scientists as the “bliss point”.
This is a social justice issue – highly addictive substances being promoted….sometimes subsidised….to consumers….those with high stress, low free time and reduced cooking means……adds to the cycle of people on lower income eating ultra processed nutrient empty foods.
On the one hand we hear that children are going hungry – on the other we apparently have a childhood obesity crisis – which is it? I was challenged on this argument by somebody stating that obese children can still be malnourished. I agree, however that means that parents are spending money on junk food and not on ‘sensible’ food. And to any scoffers who think I don’t know what I am talking about – I have been there, before the days of ready meals, tax credits, child tax credits, food banks etc but like most of my generation I can cook and that is the problem these days – lack of education of how to cook with perhaps a large dose of laziness thrown in – easier to phone a takeaway!
It does sound the author is making up excuses.
Indeed after a 10 hour shift you won’t feel like cooking, BUT a modicum of organisation goes a long way.
Then, there will always be exceptions, dramatic cases, etc, but by and large it is simply a matter of personal choice.
When my wife and I worked shifts, we managed to eat well. If we were both out until late we would use a slow cooker. The slow cooker is a cheap thing to buy and very cheap to run.
That was our personal choice.
You are right but you need to be able to read the instructions at least once!
No one appears to consider the lack of intellectual capabilities. As I retired social worker and with a 64 year old daughter with mild learning disabilities, I just know lack of brains is a huge disadvantage in nearly everything to do with living in a modern society. You can train and teach but unless the brain absorbs and remember and understand consequence, it is a problem.
Indeed, but your situation is hardly applicable on a larger scale, is it?
As an American, I have no idea what is going on in Britain re the food industry. Perhaps all of the commentators here are not familiar with the US government support of the food industry which gives us corn syrup in every possible food. Or the government subsidies to the dairy industry. I am forced to read almost every label to see what is in the can or box and as for fresh food – try $2.00 a pound for cauliflower . We now have bagged salads that cost upwards of $4.00 for a bag that will feed two light salad eaters.
I have no car – I live alone and eat well – and spend some $500 a month on food which I drag home on the bus because the store across the street from me charges $2.00 for an apple. Jess Bezos of Amazon fame, bought another up-market healthy food store called Whole Foods. He promised to lower the prices so that more people could shop there. What he did was make Prime Membership a requirement for a price reduction of 10 percent – I don’t go there.
As Chris Rock said, Whole Foods doesn’t have to refuse to serve a person of color – they just have to charge $10 an apple and they won’t see us.
This is an excellent article. It seems that many people in both the UK and USA assume that poverty is invariably linked to fecklessness. This is a stereotype and therefore a generalisation. Mrs Thatcher was an unusually intelligent person and came from a modest background. I think that, not realising how intelligent she was, she assumed that others who didn’t achieve well academically were simply not trying hard enough. We definitely need to go beyond Dickensian moralising.
I recall teaching an obese child who had four obese siblings in our primary school. His mother could not have cooked lentils because neither parent could read. One of the most rewarding days when I was teaching was the day this boy, aged ten, wrote his name for the first time. He was thrilled and his new classmates applauded.
The kid in the hi viz jacket actually looks rather like Marcus Rashford.
“The Government’s package includes a £170m Covid winter grant scheme to support vulnerable families in England and an extension of the holiday activities and food programme to the Easter, summer and Christmas breaks next year”.
No u-turn here. Just an extension of what the government was financing before, much of which is extra funding to councils for hardship grants.
Furlough was extended, seif employment grants was extended, business loans was extended and so was additional support for local councils including holiday activity clubs. Why, because the covid pandemic is still disrupting the Nation.
In other words, you are either actively propogating the uturn narrative or you have naively bought into it.
Regarding your long winded apology for the lack of home economics skills amongst “the poor”, make a hearty stew which can last a week in the fridge or else invest in a slow cooker. Eating well on a budget, even under time and energy constraints, is not rocket science, just needs a bit of imagination.
I would argue that Jack Munroe is NOT a good example to use as currently she is boasting of feeding three on £20 a week. However if you unpick this it’s clear she is also having milk and more delivered. She’s harvesting herbs and other items from her garden and has a bubble buddy also contributing. In short her “£20 to feed three people” ignores the extras she has coming in and the fact that many people living in poverty will not have gardens or wealthy parents who can help.
In my years of working with poor families I rarely met hungry children, I did however meet hungry parents who would go without to ensure their children were fed.
I’ve lived in poverty both as a child and as an adult, it’s not fun and it’s far from making poor choices. However as an adult I had control, I could cook and I had everything needed to cook. I didn’t have debts to energy companies to worry about. My poverty as an adult was purely about lack of money. For many many people it’s about more than lack of cash, it’s about not knowing how to cook, it’s about not having the right equipment to cook with, it’s about being exhausted as identified in the article.
For what reason are the ‘the poor’ expected to eat healthier? James Bloodworth mentions the fact the he briefly had a job at Amazon in every article and thus has an insight into poverty and the lives of the poor. Who we’re actually talking about in these discussions is a permanent underclass. The people that not even Amazon warehouses open doors to. Poverty in these cases isn’t about lack of material wealth or income, it’s about hopelessness, not a temporary lack of means whist you get your life back on track, or worse as a tourist. The underclass lack many things: intelligence, education, networks. One thing they don’t lack is self awareness. They know who they are and what people think of them, but more importantly they know that the future is never going to improve for them. Unfortunately, some people have no ability to improve no matter what they do, the best they can hope for is a slightly better paid job or a slightly better (rented or council) home. That’s it. Eating healthier provides no benefit to them, other than prolong their miserable lives. They eat poorly and don’t feed their children properly for the same reasons they smoke, drink, take drugs and commit crime: self harm and fleeting moments of joy.
The most sensible comment yet!.
There are plenty of poor people who don’t take drugs and commit crime and who do feed their children properly and send them to school. You’ll often find they are the one most critical of the underclass you describe mainly because they have to live with them and it’s often the same people who make the lives of those around them hell. They also appreciate that these are the people who live off the same and get their housing (not to mention their fags, booze and drugs) paid for by the state whilst others work. The middle class commentariat tend to be more forgiving because they don’t have to live with these people.
Well it makes you wonder how our (my) grandparents coped on rations after the war.
My dad (b. 1939) remembers his first banana aged about 9; and eating a lot of cod, as it was cheaper than meat. Apparently grandma swapped the family’s cheese rations for extra something, and the family didn’t therefore eat cheese; to this day he doesn’t like it ( as when it was finally available without restriction, his tastebuds didn’t like it).
Some of my favourite recipes are from the rationing days. Bakewell tart – just a small amount of marg, flour, semolina, 1 egg (!) and a drop of almond essence, pastry and a bit of jam. Tastes great, costs pence and is easy to make.
It seems that only recently we heard that so many children are overweight and having a poor diet that there is a huge increase in type 2 diabetes. Also that the current younger generation are likely to die at a younger age than their parents because of this.
The fact that this country feeds children at school has never ceased to amaze me since I came to live in the UK. If you intend to have children, make sure that you can feed them. Nobody’s making you have kids you can’t afford.
I grew up in a working class family, five kids, second hand school uniforms, the lot. But my parents were always able to send me to school with a proper, healthy packed lunch. A sandwich and a piece of fruit, NOT the crisps that Brits seem to find appropriate. Occasionally I was even allowed to order lunch from the school canteen. For a treat.
At home Mum cooked meals from scratch – no packet rubbish. I’ve eaten one McDonald’s hamburger in my life and that was one too many. Nobody has to eat junk food.
“Few will be unaware of the petition…..More than a million people signed it”
Hmmm…..just checking the till here – the population of the UK is 67 million odd.
So it was signed by about 1.5% of the population. And not signed by the other 98.5%.
To be fair, let’s cut out those too young or too old to be able to sign it so maybe 50 million potential signers? That still leaves 98% of people who must have been “aware” of it, and able to sign it electronically, but who didn’t.
So, if we are talking vote winners here….