On a cold December morning the dining room of the Whitechapel Mission in east London is filled with people sitting around tables eating a hot breakfast of baked beans, bread, egg and sausage.
The geniality and warmth of the crowd, marked by fist-punches and high-decibel exchanges across tables, is partly a mask for the underlying sense of embarrassment and failure that the charity-dependent feel. But the Mission tries to heft each one of them out of a life of dependency through a range of services. It is one among a great many charities in London that are part of what is called the food bank movement -- an alliance of charities that offer food and other forms of support for the city’s poor.
Between 8 am and 10 am every morning Whitechapel Mission’s dining room feeds 200 to 300 homeless and/or unemployed people. The woman in charge of the centre politely but firmly tells me that I may not interview anyone or take photographs. “We must be sensitive to the dignity of those who use our centre,” she says. “Our trustees believe we should do our work quietly and without publicity.”
An increasing number of people in the United Kingdom are turning to public kitchens and food banks to get by, despite the economic recovery. Trussell Trust, a leading food charity which has a network of 420 food banks says that the numbers using its food banks in the first half of the 2014-15 financial year is 38% higher than numbers helped during the same period last year.
“Hunger stalks large parts of our country,” the Archbishop of Canterbury said on the eve of the release last week of a landmark report by an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hunger and Food Poverty led by Frank Field Labour MP and the Bishop of Truro, the Right Reverend Tim Thornton.
The Report contrasts the decade between 2003 and 2013 with the post-War years in Britain when modest increases in the costs of housing, utilities and food were outpaced by rising wages that allowed families to build a financial buffer against crises.
Between 2003-2013 however, this trend was reversed. Of the advanced western economies Britain saw the sharpest inflation. Prices rose by more than 30 per cent and food inflation rose by 47 per cent. The overall combined proportion of household incomes spent on food, housing, and utilities increased from 36% in 2003 to 40% in 2011.
At the same time, average wages flattened out. With no financial buffer, a sudden crisis – most often caused by delays in or the withdrawal of state-benefits to individuals – brings the family face-to-face with the prospect of hunger. “Help from a food bank, it appears, allows these families to re-establish control over their finances and they are then able to work their way out of the crisis,” the report says.
The report’s 77 recommendations hang on its central demand, namely that the food bank movement should lead the way in establishing a body called Feeding Britain, which will also have government representation. “It is through Feeding Britain that a strategy to abolish hunger as we know it can be successfully mounted.”
