‘You might know the price of potatoes, but you have to value compassion too’

ONCE AGAIN, food poverty has hit the headlines. And once again, everyone has piled in with their opinion on it, including the MEP Annunziata Rees-mogg, daughter of a baron and sister to MP Jacob – a man worth an estimated £150 million. Recently, she tweeted that raw potatoes are 53p cheaper than oven chips, adding, ‘The oft repeated but inaccurate belief that low quality/ unhealthy food is *always* cheaper than raw ingredients is part of the problem. It’s why learning to buy/budget for food is important alongside learning to cook.’

Having lived in grinding poverty, I know the price of potatoes at three different supermarkets through eight consecutive years. I know that tinned potatoes are the cheapest way to buy them, and they make a cracking potato salad, saag aloo, dhansak, casserole and more.

But what she, and so many others who assume poor people don’t cook more because they’re lazy or stupid, don’t know is that there are many reasons why people choose convenience foods over preparing their own from scratch. Sometimes it’s a lack of time, or a lack of equipment; living in a B&B or a refuge; poor mental health. Working two or three jobs to make ends meet. Not believing in a future. Why would you batch cook when you’re suicidal?

I know I certainly didn’t.

My route out of poverty was a series of timely accidents. From 2011, I was unemployed, and my world shrank into a tiny flat. As I isolated myself from friends and family in shame and depression, I started to write a blog, which expanded to fill the space that human contact had left behind. I wrote about my day-to-day life, the mundane dreariness of living in a world of poverty. The blog turned into a cookery book, A Girl Called Jack, and I have spent the last seven years working with families on the breadline and individuals in poverty and hunger in the UK.

Day to day, I hear and understand that there are myriad reasons why people choose convenience foods over preparing their own from scratch. When I was in a similar situation, I unplugged my fridge and freezer because I couldn’t afford to run them. Give me a tenner for groceries now and I can still make it last a week. I am one of millions of people who have lived like this in this country, and it’s only getting worse: demand for food banks has risen enormously during the pandemic, showing just how prevalent food poverty is right now.

I also know poverty is something you never quite escape: despite being a bestselling author working on my seventh and eighth books, I rent my home because I can’t buy one. I’ve tried. It was humiliating. The bungalow I rent would cost 37 times my annual income to buy. One day, I tell my 10-year-old son, as though saying it aloud will manifest it into reality, one day we can paint the walls whatever colour we like.

Poverty and privilege are largely accidental. You don’t choose to be born into an income bracket, a country pile, a housing estate, a double-barrelled name or a damp tenement bedsit. But ignorance is a choice. And choosing to use your privileges to patronise people whose lives are entirely beyond your experience and comprehension is a choice.

MPS and MEPS choosing to use the powers vested in them by the people they serve to deprive those same people of light, heating, food and home security is a wilful and deliberate act. And it has to stop. And if your response to people in crisis is to simply lecture paternalistically about how you would be better at being poor than they are, I suggest you put your money where your mouth is and give it all away: women’s refuges, child support services and food banks could do with it.

You may well know the price of potatoes, but in order to tackle food poverty on a real level – rather than just pontificate for a jolly brouhaha on the internet – you need to understand the value of compassion as well.