Every single adult and child has the right to affordable food
Team GB golden girl is backing Daily Express and St Giles Trust appeal to feed families in need this Christmas
AS AN athlete, having a healthy diet has played a key part in how I perform. Food fuels my performance in many different ways. As well as providing me with physical strength, it also enables me to be mentally alert and aids my recovery. Diet also plays an important part in helping me come back from any injury – be it a minor niggle or something more serious.
As we see many families struggling to get by on less and less, I wonder how many budding athletes there are growing up in these circumstances who could be our next Olympic champions? If they don’t have access to the right nutrition to support training, could we be failing our next generation of gold medallists?
But ultimately every single adult and child has the right to have access to affordable healthy food so they can achieve their personal best in whatever walk of life they are in. This is why projects like The Pantry are so important.
Located in the heart of local communities, they don’t offer handouts but help people break out of the poverty trap, become empowered and able to take ownership of their lives. I’m inspired by the people they help; they are all living proof there is light at the end of some of the darkest tunnels. We often think of food poverty as people living off cheap processed foods which have little or no nutritional value. But St Giles’s experience has shown it is often much more extreme – people limiting themselves to a single meal or packet of biscuits a day.
Over a sustained period of time, this must be debilitating and exhausting – not to mention having potentially serious health implications. These situations are often compounded by living in cramped, poorly furnished conditions where there are often no cooking facilities or fridges to store food. One St Giles client confided she had been surviving off cereal eaten straight out of the box for weeks.
Food is uplifting and gives us a sense of wellbeing. How many of us have lifted our spirits with a comforting meal for ourselves and those around us? Sadly there are thousands of families who cannot sit together around a table to eat a meal together while swapping stories of their days because they simply do not have the money to feed themselves in this way.
Good nutrition is like medicine to help us fight infections and help us stay mentally alert. For a family living in poverty wondering where their next meal is coming from, they are denied this, giving rise to a negative impact on health which in turn can affect someone’s life chances.
This is an inequality that can be easily addressed with simple solutions like St
Giles’s Pantry. I first became aware of St Giles through its work helping young people involved in or at risk of becoming exploited by criminal gangs. I was shocked to discover that one of the grooming tactics used by these gangs is to simply offer a young teenager a decent meal. This was something many of us took for granted when we were growing up. However, today a vulnerable young person from a disadvantaged background may be bought for the price of a pizza meal deal. For that, they can then suffer some of the most horrific experiences working in a county line that no young person should be
exposed to. Unfortunately, not all of them have access to the kind of support that St Giles offers to help them get their lives back on track.
It doesn’t need to be like this. By enabling families who may be struggling with zero- hours contracts and low pay to have decent food, we can help them stay healthy, motivated and happy. By giving them added support – as is the case in The Pantry – to address problems such as rent arrears, finance problems and job losses we can provide an added safety net which addresses underlying issues and can help them into a new chapter. The mum who comes in for her weekly shop can also get support around rent arrears, budgeting and find out about what help is out there for her child. Consistency is very important as it takes a few months – sometimes longer – to help a person make a sustained change to their lives. Rather like the dogged determination I had to have training for races, the St Giles caseworkers keep chipping away at the practical and emotional issues which are holding back the people they are helping.
It takes resilience and patience but persistence pays off when a life has been changed. The ripple effects of this for those around them – families, friends, colleagues and wider community – cannot be underestimated. If we intervene now, we can save a whole lot more work and heartache further down the line. When I refused to eat my veg as a little girl, I was told you cannot run a Rolls- Royce off no fuel. We live in a country which rightly has big aspirations for its future as we emerge from the dark days of Covid. Let’s give that future the right fuel so that we can all be healthier and happier going forward.
For most of us, 2020 has been the year that never was. However, we all have the opportunity to make 2021 a better year for people who have been disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic through supporting charities such as St Giles and consigning food poverty to history.