One in five Australian kids missing meals
One in every five Australian children has gone hungry in the past 12 months according to a new report, with some even resorting to chewing paper to try to feel full.
The survey of 1,000 parents commissioned by Foodbank shows 22 percent of Australian children under the age of 15 live in a household that has run out of food at some stage over the past year, abc.net.au reported.
One in five kids affected go to school without eating breakfast at least once a week, while one in 10 go a whole day at least once a week without eating anything at all.
“I think that’s a very sad indictment on us as a society,” Foodbank Victoria chief executive Dave Mcnamara said.
“The most vulnerable in our community — our children, our future — are suffering and I don’t think that’s right, I don’t think anyone thinks that’s right.”
Chewing paper to feel full
Mcnamara said the report showed more children were going hungry in Australia than adults.
“We’ve heard stories of kids turning up with packets of chips and coke [to school], that was their breakfast and lunch,” he said.
“Some kids were eating paper. Their parents had told them, “There’s not enough food, if you get hungry you’ll need to chew paper”.
“This isn’t made-up. This is a story we heard setting up one of our school breakfast programs down in Lakes Entrance, which is a beautiful part of the country.
“No-one’s spared. It’s not people on the street; it’s people in your street. It’s in every community across Australia.”
Collin Peebles, chief executive of the Geelong Food Relief Center, said demand had exploded for services over the past three years.
“Only recently we had a seven-year-old girl walk into the Food Bank on a Thursday afternoon, she hadn’t eaten anything for five days,” he said.
He said mortgage stress and the cost of living were driving families to use foodbanks for the first time.
A mother’s struggle to put food on the table
Louise Holland knows first hand what it is like to constantly worry about not having enough food to feed her children.
The former nurse, from Sydenham in Melbourne’s northwest, took time out of the workforce to care for her ill husband five years ago. He died in 2016, leaving her as the sole carer for her four children. Once the family’s savings were gone, it became harder and harder to make ends meet.
“We would eat low-grade mincemeat, sausages … anything that was filling but that was cheap,” she said.
“Sometimes the kids would go to school with no lunch. There would always be something on the table at night, but it might not have been as nutritious as it should have been.”
Sometimes things got so bad, Holland and her eldest son, Nathan, 20, would not eat.
“We thought as long as the younger ones were fed, that was the main thing,” she said.
It was not until January this year that she decided to seek support, turning to the Helping Hands food pantry in Melbourne’s Airport West.
Families are allowed to access 20 kilograms of fresh food and pantry staples a week, for a gold coin donation.
“It was an incredibly hard step to take,” she said through tears.