Hunger in the UK, the most dramatic toll of the worst inflation in 40 years

When his two sons ask him snacks you can no longer afford, Aislinn Corey, a London nursery teacher, spreads a blanket on the floor and plays “picnic”. She takes an orange or apple that she has picked up from the preschool food bank and cuts it into thirds to share.

“We do it as a business,” he said. “So they don’t know Mommy is in trouble.”

He says dinners are often reduced to “pasta pasta pasta”, and that sometimes skip the food entirely so that there is more for your children.

In a scenario where the cost of food and heating has broken records in recent months, signs of unease are everywhere. The BBC has posted online dozens of recipes that cost less than a kilo (about $1.23) per serving.

some schools they turned off the heat. And many communities have opened up “warm spaces,” heated public rooms for people with cold homes.

Hungry working families

But in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world one of the most striking signs of the cost-of-living crisis is that a growing number of workers have difficulty feeding their children.

Some come for the first time at food banks.

“It’s appalling that it’s the workers who are coming to us,” said Vicky Longbone, a church minister who runs a food bank in Derby, central England.

For hard-hit working families, the the crisis comes from afar.

Employment growth has left Britain with fewer jobless families, but many who have found work have continued on without achieving an acceptable standard of livingputting them in a vulnerable situation when inflation hit its highest level in 41 years a few months ago and wages failed to keep up.

Austerity measures under a decade of Conservative-led governments have also reduced the benefits many low-income families receive, including working families.

Since 2016, Great Britain has one of the highest minimum wages in the world for most workers, which benefits some of the lowest incomes. But many of them still can’t get enough hours, and wages for low-wage workers have grown more slowly in Britain than in other Western countries such as Germany and France.

“Things are more difficult because the last decade has been awful,” said Greg Thwaites, an economist at the Resolution Foundationan independent research center specializing in living standards.

In October, consumer prices increased by 11.1% compared to the previous year. The cost of energy and food has fueled inflation, which has disproportionately affected low-income households, who spend the lion’s share on daily needs.

Increases slowed slightly in December, but consumer prices continued to climb more than 10% year-on-year.

children go hungry

While some key statistics are not yet available, such as the latest annual data on child poverty, there are clear indications that many workers, including working parents, are under severe stress, as are there is growing evidence that children are starving at home.

Although the percentage of working families using food banks is still very small, it currently represents a large share of users.

The Trussell Trust, which operates food banks across the country and saw more than 300,000 new users in the first half of last year, reported that a fifth of its customers in mid-2022 were from households with one person in work.

In London, the Hackney Food Bank provided meals to 647 children in Decembercompared to 330 the previous year.

Some schools have started offering free meals to all students, not just those entitled to them by the welfare system, and the principal of a deprived part of the city said that more and more children and parents depend on the free toast the school delivers at the door for breakfast.

The Felix Project, which supplies surplus food to organizations across London, said half of the 183 charities it supports recently sued full-time public sector workers they were using your services for the first time.

At the end of another busy shift, Kingsley Fredrick, who works at an east London food bank, said: “There are ambulance staff and teachers who go to the food bank. What does it say about a community, a country?” .

Low-income Londoners are bearing the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis, according to an analysis by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a British research institute, with additional pressure from rising rents. But the crisis has extended far beyond the capital: Scotland and the north of England have also been hit hard.

One recent night, Alicia Marcano, a 46-year-old nurse, paid her first visit to a food bank in the London Borough of Hackney. She listened attentively to the instructions of the volunteers and, with downcast eyes, he began packing cans of beans, cookies, and pasta. “This is new to me,” she said.

In recent months, she had saved money by preparing lunches of sausages and hamburgers for her 12-year-old daughter instead of paying for school meals.

“Normally I wouldn’t give you something like that,” she said. “But it’s cheap.”

Some Conservative Party lawmakers argue that demand for food banks does not reflect a real need. One of them, Lee Anderson, pointed out that the real “challenge” is that food bank users “can’t cook properly, they can’t make a meal from scratch, they can’t plan their groceries.”

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said the government had recognized that families are struggling and recently released billions of pounds to help people pay their bills during the cost-of-living crisis.

The Resolution Foundation explained in a recent report that with these measures the government had rightly given priority to less well-off families. But a YouGov poll commissioned for the report revealed as much 11% of people said they were hungry but have not eaten for lack of money in the last month. Before the pandemic, that figure was 5%.

The government also notes that child poverty fell during the peak years of the pandemic, but experts said the decline was likely linked to government pandemic subsidies that have now ended.

Christalla Jamil, CEO of a group of 10 schools in some of London’s most deprived areas, said she was seeing the effects of the cost-of-living crisis on a daily basis. Some children have started to carry just a bag of cookies for lunch, which their parents got at school food banks. Some assistants have even started going to the food bank.

“It’s heartbreaking,” she said. “And it’s more heartbreaking because it affects all of our people.”

Chefs in Schools, a charity specializing in school meals, said teachers had reported children stealing food from their peers to take home and hiding in the playground when they hadn’t brought anything for lunch.

“We are one of the richest countries in the world,” said Naomi Duncan, chief executive of the solidarity organisation. “We can make things better for our children.”

More than a third of children in England receive free school meals, according to the government, as do all children in their first three years of school. But charities say many older children come from low-income families do not reach the threshold to request assistance because their parents earn more than the aid limit, which for many is £7,400 a year.

For some children, school meals have recently become the only reliable and nutritious meal of the day, say teachers and charities.

Sharon Grant, a part-time cashier at an Asda supermarket in London, said the cost of energy lately has often left her with little or no money for food. Like many low-income people, you have to pay for heating and electricity in advance, entering the money into an accountant in his department. In the cold of winter, the 50 pounds you pack on the counter may only last a couple of days.

Sometimes she feeds her 15-year-old twin sons and 11-year-old daughter cereal for dinner. On the worst nights she has nothing to give them and she has noticed that they have started having problems with their homework.

“They’re not as bright as before,” he complained. “They are hungry“.

c.2023 The New York Times Society

Translation: Elisa Carnelli