Opinion

Rise in food bank use is not social progress

Almost a third of food bank users in the north cited low income as the reason why they needed the service  
Almost a third of food bank users in the north cited low income as the reason why they needed the service   Almost a third of food bank users in the north cited low income as the reason why they needed the service  

THE basic necessities of life are obvious - food, shelter, freedom from harm. The first of these may be the most important and the least-valued in the western world.

Food - or at least the processed kind - is relatively cheap. Staples including white rice and dried pasta are on sale for less than a pound.

A few kilos of potatoes costs around two pounds in big supermarkets.

Western farming methods and the dominance of a few big supermarkets means that even our meat is relatively affordable.

If government warnings about our increasing waistlines and sugar consumption are anything to go by, obesity is much more of a problem than hunger.

Why then, has the use of food banks in the north risen so sharply? Figures published by The Trussell Trust last week show a record number of people are using their services.

The charity provided almost 26,000 three-day emergency food supplies across Northern Ireland in 2015/16, compared to 17,425 the previous year.

On average, users needed two emergency supplies in the last year. If food bank use continues to rise, it follows that a sizeable proportion of our society cannot afford to feed themselves or their families.

There are almost 40 food banks in the north, many in the greater Belfast area.

Cynics may argue that if a service provides free food, there are those who will take advantage.

But the truth is that no one can simply walk in and demand food. People can only be given supplies if they are referred to a bank by professionals including a doctor, social worker or Citizens’ Advice.

And the banks take care to help families get out of the crisis that found them unable to buy food.

Almost a third of food bank users in the north cited low income as the reason why they needed the service.

Unlike in Britain, where delays or changes to benefit payments were the main issue, here it seems people simply aren’t being paid enough.

Certainly trade unions think so. Unite called the figures “truly shocking” and blamed politicians for failing to help raise basic incomes.

Jimmy Kelly from the union said the failure to introduce a widespread ‘living wage’ is to blame and hit out at the executive for not addressing “the burgeoning numbers of ‘working-poor’ households”.

Reliance on food handouts is nothing new. During the famine, up to three million people at one time were barely kept alive through meals from soup kitchens.

At the height of the recent financial crisis in Greece, thousands of people in Athens alone relied on daily meals from municipal soup kitchens.

Arguably our problems pale in comparison to those national crises but the figures do show that thousands of citizens in the north, and more than a million in the UK, are using food banks.

The French philosopher Simone Weil, who was deeply concerned about western civilisation in the first few decades of the twentieth century, believed that all humans have moral obligations and these are more important than our rights.

In her most famous book ‘The Need for Roots’ she wrote that we have always had one key obligation - to prevent hunger.

“Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians believed that no soul could justify itself after death unless it could say: ‘I have never let any one suffer from hunger’,” she wrote.

Weil believed that progress truly meant a “transition to a state of human society in which people will not suffer from hunger”.

“So it is an eternal obligation towards the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has the chance of coming to his assistance,” she wrote.

Weil lived through the privations of the Second World War, dying in 1943 at the age of just 34.

Living in England shortly before her death, she refused to eat any more than those suffering severe rationing in her native France.

Weil’s personal relationship with food was complex, but she was clear that no true society lets people go hungry.

David McAuley, chief executive of The Trussell Trust, warned that increasing demand "must not become the new normal” and said the number of people who cannot afford to buy food is “far too high”.

He said tackling the problem needs a “collective effort” from the public, government, businesses and volunteers.

By Weil’s reckoning, our society has not truly progressed. By McAuley’s reckoning, we all need to start pitching in.