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Hunger in Britain: A food industry at war with nutrition A report that over 900,000 people in Britain had been forced to turn to food banks during the year to make ends meet has raised concern, especially since more than a third of these were children. Jeremy Seabrook comments on the paradox of such privation in the midst of plenty. A CHURCH-FUNDED report in December, supported by all the main political parties in Britain and by the Archbishop of Canterbury, revealed that over 900,000 people had had recourse to food banks during the year; of these, more than a third were children. That hunger should once more be the fate of the poorest is no chance occurrence. Almost half of those who use food banks do so as a result of delay in payment of benefits they are entitled to, or because they are victims of what are euphemistically called 'benefit sanctions'- government policy which halts payments to people who do not comply with stringent new rules over applying for jobs (which often do not exist). The theory behind welfare cuts is that if people are driven to such straits that remaining on benefit ('state handouts', as they are now disparagingly called by the press) becomes a punitive visitation, they will find work somehow or other. And there is evidence that, to some extent, this is indeed happening. But most of that work is part-time, on 'zero-hours' contracts, or at such a low rate of pay that government has to supplement income, effectively subsidising employers who fail to pay a living wage. This is especially true in London, where housing costs can take up 50% of earnings. As a result of cuts, chancellor (finance minister) George Osborne observed that 'the sky has not fallen in.' This is no doubt true for him and his gilded colleagues, but those who do not have the money to feed their families speak of humiliation and despair. The churches' report contains many horror stories: an unemployed woman taken to hospital with malnutrition because she had not eaten for five days; a pregnant woman and her partner sleeping in a tent outside a wealthy town in Southern England; a man crushed to death when a refuse lorry caught up the bin in which he was scavenging for food. Providing for the hungry The charity best known for setting up food banks for the growing legions of hungry people is the Trussell Trust. In partnership with communities and churches, it is responsible for more than 400 free food stores in Britain; it aims to ensure at least one in every major town. It should not be imagined, however, that the philanthropic satisfaction of immediate hunger solves the problem. In many homes where the principal daily meal consists of chips and gravy, or instant mash and pasta sauce, there is a cumulative effect of malnutrition: a condition neglected in Britain, since it has been assumed that a food industry on which œ196 billion is spent annually must cater for all nutritional needs. One explanation for the increasing number of food banks has been eagerly advanced by the Right: namely, that the existence of 'free food' attracts idle scroungers and adherents to the 'something for nothing' culture; that supply calls forth the demand. The reality, in cold church halls, impersonal centres and warehouses which serve as 'food banks' (even the term takes on a borrowed lustre from the sheen of money), is that the eatables on offer are bare, functional comestibles that will at best keep hunger at bay. People who use food banks do not see what they receive as anything resembling a feast. 'What you get is dry pasta, cereal, powdered milk, tinned carrots and peas, powdered potato-mash, noodles that you just have to add water to. You wouldn't go there from choice. Believe me, it is only dire necessity. If anybody had told me six months ago that I'd be using a food bank, I would have laughed at them.' This testimony is from an unemployed man whose benefits had been stopped because he failed to apply for a 'sufficient' number of jobs each week; discouraged by rejection and silence, he had lost the will to pursue work that remains, in this part of the West Midlands, elusive. It is significant that in this former industrial heartland (where I am currently working), places of ruined factories and abandoned workshops, poor people stand out, because they are either grossly obese or dangerously skinny. It is one of the paradoxes of wealthy Western societies that food seems to be at war with nourishment, and the least well fed may appear as overweight or as starvelings. Significant numbers - by no means all elderly - carry so much weight that they need motorised buggies and chairs to move around; others depend on crutches, sticks and the arms of friends and relatives. Twenty-five percent of people in Britain are obese, 37% 'overweight'. At the same time, there can be seen, standing on windy street corners, groups of thin, almost concave, young men, in canvas shoes and frayed trousers, a cigarette cupped between their fingers, scarecrows whose meagre income is used up - who knows how? - in the betting shops and gaming-machine establishments with which poor communities are over-provided, in paying off debts, maintenance to abandoned families or dues to drug dealers. There has been a long tradition in Britain of upper-class women admonishing the poor for their unhealthy diet, and the contemporary crisis is no exception. 'It is cheap to eat nutritiously,' has been the refrain ever since the early industrial age, as though people wilfully went hungry in order to embarrass their well-fed betters. 'Poor people do not know how to cook,' said Baroness Jenkin, a Tory peer, in December, who virtuously declared she had breakfasted on a bowl of porridge which cost six US cents. She later retracted her ill-chosen words, explaining that she meant that 'we as a society' had lost the art of cooking. Dangerously denutrified food All this is only one aspect of the scandal of a 'food industry' which, as well as creating hunger in the heart of Western feasting, is also responsible for what a well-known consumer activist in Malaysia some years ago called 'commerciogenic malnutrition'. In other words, the food conglomerates, by whose grace we are provided with our daily bread - or rice or corn - have succeeded in producing a population almost as ill-nourished as it was in the Victorian era, although this fact is masked by the availability of pharmaceutical products which undo some of the ill effects of a diet that undermines health and well-being: the availability (and abuse) of antibiotics is attributable, at least in part, to the lowering of resistance to infection by unhealthy eating habits. Pharmacies in Britain are vast storehouses of remedies for stomach disorders, indigestion, heartburn, flatulence, constipation and every imaginable affliction of the digestive system: eating itself has become a kind of disorder. No wonder clinics are full of people with anorexia, obesity and bulimia - we live in a culture where the collective daily sharing of sustenance has been jettisoned in favour of consumption by individuals of the products of a food industry. We should by now have become used to 'food scandals.' In recent memory, we had the association of beef with BSE ('mad cow disease') and its link to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which led to a ban by the EU on British beef; salmonella was widely present in eggs in 1998; in 2002 prawns and shrimps imported from South Asia were contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals; and in 2005, Worcester sauce made by Premier Foods had been adulterated with Sudan 1 dye from imported chilli powder. In 2005, a school meals favourite, 'turkey twizzlers', was shown by chef Jamie Oliver to contain only about one-third turkey and twice the recommended quantity of fat. Pork production in Ireland was disrupted in 2008 by the discovery that dioxin had contaminated animal feed. In 2013, lasagne contained horsemeat, which had also entered many other beef products in British supermarkets, while in November 2014, 70% of 'fresh' chickens in supermarkets were contaminated by campylobacter. Writing in The Guardian in February 2014, Felicity Lawrence reported that consumers were being sold soft drinks containing brominated vegetable oil, which is designed for use in flame retardants, while some mozzarella contained less than half real cheese, and ham or poultry on pizzas was 'meat emulsion', mechanically recovered remnants; while frozen prawns were by weight half water. Even a herbal slimming tea proved to be 'neither herb nor tea, but glucose powder laced with a withdrawn prescription drug for obesity at 13 times the normal dose.' In 2013, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimated 20,000 hospital admissions as a result of food poisoning, and 500 deaths. George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian that 'the growth rate of broiler chickens has quadrupled in 50 years: they are now killed at seven weeks. By then they are often crippled by their own weight ... overfed factory-farmed chickens now contain almost three times as much fat as they did in 1970, and just two-thirds of the protein. Stalled pigs and feedlot cattle have undergone a similar transformation. Meat production? No, this is fat production.' Apart from its dependency upon dangerously denutrified food, according to official government figures, Britain throws away 15 million tonnes of food and drink each year, almost half of it from homes, and at least four million tonnes of it edible. In November 2013, it was reported that the average family wasted about $100 a month throwing away the equivalent of 24 meals, especially bread, potatoes and milk. In October of the same year, Tesco estimated that 35% of its bagged salad, 40% of its apples and almost half its bakery items are thrown away. In spite of all this, the preparation and cooking of food has become something of a spectator sport in Britain: the number of TV programmes devoted to cookery, gastronomic diversity, the celebrity status of chefs, the availability of ingredients and dishes from all over the planet, suggest a fascination with food. Is this because we are forfeiting our knowledge of how to grow, harvest and prepare food ourselves, as we become more and more dependent upon restaurants, cafes and places of refection, in a country where 'eating out' is no longer a treat but a daily routine for the money-rich, time-poor? There is, clearly, no shortage of food in Britain. There is badly distributed food, carelessly processed food, inappropriate food, adulterated food. From nutrition to choice It is a great historical irony that the Ministry of Food was set up in 1939 with the intention of ensuring that all the people of wartime Britain received a fair allocation of scarce food. Rationing, which existed from 1940 until 1954, established the quantity of nutrients required. Shortages compelled changes in diet, and less meat, fat, sugar and fewer eggs were consumed. At the same time, those whose diet had been inadequate were enabled to increase their intake of protein and vitamins, because they received a fair share of available food. As a result, there was a decline in infant mortality and an increase in life expectancy. It has been argued that the overall nutritional status of Britain was probably at its highest in those lean, austere times. Of course, with the dismantling of controls in the 1950s, everyone was free to choose what they ate; the production and marketing of food shifted from concern for the nutritional condition of the people towards market-determined choice. The effects of this are everywhere visible in the rich world; and if, despite obesity, diabetes, heart disease and alcohol-induced sickness, longevity continues to increase, this is perhaps because, as was revealed in December, half the adult population of Britain are on some form of medication, not the least to remedy dietary disorders, those spectral attendants of our consumer freedoms. But not for the poorest. Outside the church hall, the queue begins to form early in the morning. People, ashamed to be seen waiting for charitable donations, shuffle uneasily when I ask them what has brought them here. They are humiliated, conscious of the indignity of standing in line when all around them, the air is filled with hymns to the festival of excess that Christmas has become. One woman said if it were not for food banks, she would steal to feed her children: if she were imprisoned, at least both she and they would eat enough to survive. The coexistence of hunger with obesity, of malnutrition with overeating, of the market-starved with the extravagantly self-indulgent, are visual metaphors for the inequalities which distort not only the bodies of people but all the relationships of humanity in this best of all possible worlds. u Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK. His latest book is The Song of the Shirt (published by Navayana). |
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