The Right to Food Can’t Wait Any Longer
Food inflation has hit 14.6% – its highest level in four decades. As millions more turn to foodbanks to survive, the right to food is fast becoming the frontline of the cost of living crisis.
Crates of food are seen at a foodbank sorting hub at an industrial estate, on 15 February 2022 in Weymouth, England. (Finnbarr Webster / Getty Images)
In January, the managing director of Iceland, Richard Walker, made headlines for telling the hosts of Good Morning Britain that his supermarket was losing customers ‘to food banks and to hunger’. The interview took place two months before inflation hit a 30-year high of 7 percent. By March, Walker was on the BBC’s Today programme saying customers were declining root vegetables and potatoes because they couldn’t afford the energy to cook them. Then, in April, the 54 percent rise in the energy price cap kicked in.
In a just world, these scenarios being described by an industry official, backed up as they are by a rash of reports from charities and widespread personal testimony, would have prompted serious government intervention. But energy bills have been allowed to reach £2,500 a year while wages continue to flatline, and after slashing Universal Credit by £20 a week last October—the biggest ever overnight cut to our social security, already among the lowest in Europe—the Tories are now threatening not to raise pensions and benefits in line with inflation in double digits.
The result is that hunger, already endemic in modern Britain, is growing at a catastrophic rate. A study conducted by the Food Foundation found that more than 2 million adults went without food for an entire day in April because they couldn’t afford it. One in seven adults, or 7.3 million of them, are now experiencing food insecurity, a leap from 4.7 million just back in January; 2.6 million children are having smaller meals than usual, not eating when hungry or simply skipping meals altogether. The long-term consequences for their health will likely be devastating.
The economic groundwork for those figures has been laid over years. A 2019 Human Rights Watch report on the growing state of hunger in Britain pointed at a decade of austerity and the destruction of the welfare state for pulling food out of the reach of much of the population, citing an increase of more than 5,000 percent in the number of emergency food parcels distributed between 2008 and 2018 by the Trussell Trust. The two-child limit, the benefit cap, and the freeze on payments to ‘workless’ households are noted as particularly sinister policies that ultimately contributed to a breach of human rights. By the end of 2019, the UK had more food banks than branches of McDonalds.
It didn’t help that at the same time that money was being taken out of pockets, the price of the items on the shelves was growing. Research by food campaigner Jack Monroe found that the value and basics ranges have been quietly disappearing from supermarkets for years, while the items that remain are considerably marked up: stock cubes for 10p in 2012 now cost 39p; a shop worth £10 in 2012 now costs almost twice that. Where prices have stayed stable, shrinkflation—the reduction of portion sizes—has meant that what money there is goes a shorter distance. The savings made by supermarkets in this process have not been passed on to food workers, one in five of whom, according to a survey conducted by the Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union (BFAWU) last year, have themselves run out of food because of a lack of money.
Then, after austerity destroyed our social defences, Covid hit. In term time, the provision of free school meal ‘hampers’ was outsourced to private companies seeking to profit by giving out single slices of cheese and bruised bananas to hungry children, and it was only due to the efforts of campaigners led by footballer Marcus Rashford that meals continued through the holidays at all. The result of such patchy support shoring up an already broken system was that the Trussell Trust distributed 2.5 million food bank parcels in 2020–2021, its biggest year on record. But with food inflation now reaching over 14%, things are still getting worse.
Change, Not Charity
This recent history shows a clear correlation between Conservative policies and growing hunger. That hasn’t stopped Tory MPs like George Eustice and Lee Anderson trying to put it down to a sudden collapse of cooking and budgeting skills sweeping the nation. Eustice, the Secretary of State for Food, Environment, and Rural Affairs, explained to Sky News in May that ‘by going for some of the value brands rather than own-branded products’, families could ‘actually contain and manage their household budget’, after which Anderson stood up in Parliament and announced that the reason people use food banks is that they just don’t understand how to make meals on the cheap.
For Ian Byrne, the MP who established the Right to Food campaign, rhetoric like this exposes the condescension behind Tory approaches to poverty and hardship. ‘The suggestion that a cookery class or an hour with Mary Berry would fix the problem of millions going hungry is grotesque,’ he told Tribune. ‘The government seems to think hunger is the fault of the person in poverty—that they just need to pack in their zero-hour, minimum wage job that no longer covers the bills, and become the CEO of Apple. The reality is, they have the same experience of poverty as I have of the annual reunion of the Bullingdon Club.’
The real reason the Tories are so keen to make excuses for growing hunger is that hunger doesn’t exist on its own. By its nature, hunger is a problem that exposes other problems. There’s no one reason people go to a food bank. They might be underemployed or be working a job that doesn’t pay enough or have had their house rent hiked. They might be spending what money they have on vital care or be subject to visa conditions that stop them from working. Now, they’re likely facing unpayable energy bills. Most often, they are subject to one of the forced waits or bureaucratic mazes baked intentionally into our welfare system by those who would prefer it remained unusable.
Food poverty isn’t a case where the odd anomaly slips through the net; rather it exposes the fact that the safety net has been torn apart. The country’s proliferating food banks are not themselves the answer. What they do show, however, is a widespread willingness to support one another and our local communities. This is particularly the case with those groups and projects that model their action on a philosophy of solidarity, not charity, and see it as one part of a broader push to change society in general.
For Byrne, this approach is key to tackling the crisis. ‘If charity alone was a sufficient guarantee for basic humanity, previous generations would not have legislated for universal state schooling and the National Health Service,’ he points out.
The time for sticking plasters—such as reliance on thousands of foodbank and pantry volunteers and donors—is over. We need systemic change so that all our people might live with the opportunity of health, happiness, and dignity. That means legislating for the right to food.
On the face of it, the Right to Food campaign’s demands are basic: universal free school meals; government-supported community kitchens instead of volunteer foodbanks; accounting for food costs in benefits and minimum wage calculations; a Secretary of State for Food Security; and independent enforcement through a Foods Standards and Security Agency to make sure that hunger is monitored and fought consistently by government. These are not revolutionary changes, but sensible policy responses to an urgent crisis.
But precisely because this crisis tells us so much about Britain’s economy, its ruling elite, and its government, the Tories have no intention of challenging it. As the Trussell Trust argues, the current cost of living crisis is in many ways a ‘crisis of our social security system’. To tackle it, we need to challenge all of those who benefit from the existing order and to demand that having enough to eat is a bare minimum entitlement for everyone in our society.