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IF there’s any moment that sums up Britain’s toxic relationship with food, it was this tweet from Annunziata Rees-Mogg – sister of House of Commons leader Jacob.
“Tesco 1kg potatoes = 83p, 950g own brand chips = £1.35,” she posted, as the Prime Minister unveiled his new obesity plan. She might as well have said “let them eat chips”.
It’s not just the fact that cooking potatoes from scratch takes more gas, adding oil costs money, it takes longer for an exhausted parent with three jobs to provide and a kilo of potatoes is harder to get home from the supermarket on foot – it’s the fact that we’ve been here so many times before.
And the tired old implication is always the same. If only poor people could cook better, or buy in bulk, or just be better human beings.
This week I spoke to Shareen Kellett, a mum on a very low income.
A former estate agent, she’s shielding because she has the autoimmune disease lupus, making it hard to shop. Luckily, her six-year-old twins’ inspirational school, Grove House Primary, in Bradford, has kept the family fed throughout the pandemic, delivering nutritionally balanced food parcels supplied by the community interest company Rethink Food.
“I have never, ever seen such amazing food,” Shareen, 43, says. “It’s unbelievable. Giant fruit, massive vegetables, the most amazing pasta.”
It isn’t that Shareen doesn’t know what to do with a bag of potatoes. It’s that she didn’t have any potatoes.
“I’ve been making big roasts. We’ve been having strawberries and feta cheese in our salads. I’ve always cooked from scratch but having these ingredients has been amazing.” And here’s the irony. “When I asked the school where it was coming from so I could shop there in the future, they said it’s all been diverted from waste,” Shereen says.
“It was actually going to be thrown away! What has gone wrong with the world?
“We now have a fruit bowl full of fruit
Henry Dimbleby and her twins
and the kids eat long.”
This week the Government unveiled two food strategies – the PM’s obesity plan and a wider food strategy by Henry Dimbleby, the Leon founder and UK ‘Food Czar’. Refreshingly, the Dimbleby report makes clear the toxic connection between hunger, poverty, inequality and our broken food chain.
Rethink Food was set up by a former headteacher, who left teaching to launch the organisation with fellow teacher Kevin Mackay.
“One Monday after a half-term, the gas failed in the kitchens and we had to feed the children sandwiches,” Nathan Atkinson says. “There was a major incident that afternoon that I later realised had been caused by hunger. When I spoke to the children involved, one of them said to me, ‘It hurts here,’ pointing to his stomach. He said, ‘You usually give us a roast dinner when we come back’.”
Nathan started a weekly ‘market stall’ at the school, giving away surplus food from supermarkets. As they were helping to prevent food waste, families felt no stigma helping themselves, and they could try new foods without worrying about wasting it.
This led to Rethink Food – a not-forit all day profit organisation working with 85 schools in 18 towns and cities supplying nutritious food alongside food education.
At the height of Covid-19 panic-buying, a supplier brought them 27 pallets of pasta destined for landfill after restaurants in the area shut their doors.
“It was a lifeline,” Nathan says. Their coronavirus work was funded by a donation from General Mills, the food company which makes Cheerios and Haagen-Dazs ice cream – as part of a £4million gift to organisations tackling UK food poverty – and support from Defra.
“Over the last 16 weeks we’ve delivered 400 tonnes of food working with 72 schools, 30 community groups, and supplied food parcels to Leeds City Council,” he says.
Lynette Clapham, headteacher at Grove House Primary, says her staff have worked round the clock to make 5,000 phone calls and 200 home visits, as well as supplying the Rethink Food boxes. “We had a case of a mum with three kids and a baby who had no food or nappies for the baby,” she says, “but we were able to get her sorted.”
Earlier this year, the school pioneered a soil-free, electric foodgrowing tower provided by Rethink
Annunziata Rees-Mogg
Nathan Atkinson of Rethink Food
Food that saw kids grow their own fresh food. “Our children were about to create a three-course meal for our governors using food we had grown ourselves, when lockdown happened,” she says. “I’m determined it will happen when we get back to school.”
Right now, there are 4.2 million children living in poverty in the UK – nine in every classroom of 30. As Nathan points out, only a tiny 1.3 million are eligible for free school meals.
Dimbleby’s report says a further 1.5 million should be given free school meals to prevent lifelong damage from “the effects of hunger on young bodies”. “But even this leaves 1.4 million children hungry,” Nathan says.
Right now, extending free school meals to more children and over the summer, and supporting brilliant stigma-free projects like Rethink Food, are the minimum for government.
But if we truly want to stop hungry children coming to school, we must address the fact that wages are too low, too much work is insecure and the welfare benefits system is broken. And to recognise that people without potatoes can’t make chips.
They told me the food had been diverted from waste