shopping for others

Central Salford food bank were collecting outside Tesco yesterday. The way they do it is to hand shoppers who will take it a list of things they are especially short of. This obviously makes sense; it also distinguishes itself from how the dog’s home collects, which involves putting a wheelie bin in the store and inviting shoppers to buy something from the pet food aisle and lob it in. I assume the reasons for this difference are mainly utilitarian, though I hope some concept of dignity also comes into it.

I had a tenner to spare so I took a list. I’ve always hated the idea that ‘the poor’ should be given things that are obviously barrel scrapings, so at first I thought I’d fill the list out with cheerful looking brand names, or at least own-brand names, the sort you see in an ordinary kitchen in ordinary times.

No hang on, you’ve not thought this through. They’re short of this stuff. They need as much of it as possible. That means the stuff that screams ‘I’m cheap in all senses of the word’. And anyway, why pay extra for branding?

Yet there is some difference between the contents of packaging, as I recalled when I was selecting rice pudding. I had difficulty working out why that was on the list at first, a list of particular shortages of stuff that the food bank used a lot of. Then it occurred to me: it’s cheap, semi-nutritious and most of all filling. It’s a stomach blocker. Rice pudding is what Britain has instead of outright hunger. So do you get three tins of cheap, runny rice pudding or one of the stuff that actually sticks to your gut? Where is the false economy here?

I spent about 20 minutes in the store busying myself with questions like these. Sugar was on the list. Do they need sugar, these poor people? Shouldn’t they get used to not having it in the 40 bags of tea dust that you can get for 27pence? Isn’t it good for them? How about topping the thing off with a six pack of two bar kitkats? I would have every reason to say no, and with all these reasons that virtuous sense of sour pleasure that comes with taking a small chocolate bar away from a small child. I got it in the end, and had an equally virtuous fleeting sense of sticking it to the puritans.

A tenner buys you quite a lot of economy line food – if I’d just bought sardines, for instance, I could have got around 28 tins of them, I think. Imagine the happy faces! But what a tenner really bought me here was a happy half hour deciding personally what and how other people would eat. What it bought me was a measure of power over others. Attlee was right: it’s a cold, loveless thing, charity. A curse on those who make it necessary.

Anyway, I'm 49 tomorrow so take this as one of those famously cheerful birthday posts you get around here.

Comments

[Charlie]

Rice pudding is probably not so bad from the nutritional point if view, if a bit sweet. But I digress. For a related moral poser, how about the trajectory of Jack Monroe, who has just gotten famous for showing herself to be capable of eating decently on a pound a day. Should she continue with that? Should everyone now do likewise? Monroe is hardly an IDS poster child, since she's consistently critical of the government, but what people seem to care about is her recipes.

[nick s]

What it bought me was a measure of power over others. Attlee was right: it’s a cold, loveless thing, charity.

If you've ever been to a bake sale for someone with massive medical bills, as happens far too often in the US, you get that taste in your mouth, and it's not from a $5 muffin.

The capriciousness, the futility, the way in which it's bolted into the tax system as a way to laud it over others, get personal write-offs and fund all manner of dubious enterprises: Americans love it all, in the way they love so many bits of secularised Calvinism.

The standard line is that you should just give the food banks cash money so they can buy wholesale, but I'm not sure if that's even true, given that the supermarkets probably provide shoppers with a better price for brand names (compare the markup at the local corner shop) and have the contracting power to create those "value" lines.

[Charlie]

And many happy returns!

[Charlie W]

Anyhow, on my way to Sainsbury's just now to spend a significant multiple of the Jack Monroe budget on wine and sweeties, I rehearsed a counter-argument to the Attlee-style position wrt food banks, and am eager to try it out, at the risk of annoyance:

- Someone who knows how to cook well (situations with meagre resources included) is better off, regardless of wealth, than someone who doesn't; therefore, assuming we care at all about outcomes, we should teach people how to cook well (unless, I suppose, this blocks yet more effective benefits, but this is a detail);

- The improvement of outcomes is not only a state responsibility; the responsibility is shared between citizens and the state (for example, parenting);

- Therefore, we all should teach people how to cook well.

My hunch is that some degree of neighbourhood paternalism is inescapable unless a thoroughgoing libertarianism is what we're all signed up to.

[Igor Belanov]

You should really have bought £10 worth of lettuce, because according to a string of 'Breakfast News' reports, almost anything other than that will cause premature death.

I'm sure it is possible to eat 'healthily' enough for £1 a day if you know the tricks, but I did see a news item with Jack Monroe once and I think if I had to maintain her diet week after week I'd probably end up slitting my throat. I don't see why people shouldn't be allowed to get some pleasure out of eating.

[dick gregory]

n February last year, I adopted a version of Abbie Hoffman's recipe for rice and cong sauce for my evening meal. The pounds dropped off, but I still enjoyed every meal, so have generally kept with it. £1.10.5 a day. Here's a rough calculation:
100g rosecoco beans – 16p
80g basmati rice – 4p
150g carrots – 7p
50g onions – 4p
1/2g turmeric – 0.5p
2g seasoning – 1p
10ml soy sauce – 2p
150ml curry sauce – 9p
10ml sunflower oil - 1.5p
5ml white wine vinegar - 0.5p
125g yoghurt - 8p

250g granola – 50p
70ml milk – 7p
http://www.tenant.net/Community/steal/steal.html#2.01.6

[Charlie W]

Sounds pretty tasty! Maybe a birthday dinner could be had from that ...

[dick gregory]

Though as a friend from the first time I went to college pointed out, you shouldn't have to choose to eat that cheaply.

[john malpas]

Maybe it is time again for food parcels for Britain from Canada and the USA ( a la WW2 and after)
As I remember I got an apple out of a parcel sent to our school from Canada.

[Keir]

Orwell talks about this kind of eating cheaply in Wigan Pier. Depressing how persistent an issue it is.

[Alex]

The horror, and possibly the point, of this kind of program is that it creates so many opportunities for badgering the poor about what they're allowed to eat, and also for rent-seeking - the various American food stamp systems all seem to be set up, in that delightful American way, to move products from this or that senator's farmers.

[ajay]

it’s cheap, semi-nutritious and most of all filling. It’s a stomach blocker. Rice pudding is what Britain has instead of outright hunger.

It's even cheaper if you make it yourself rather than buying it in a tin. Milk, rice, sugar and a few extras, heat it in a pan and there you are. You don't even need an oven. Takes ten minutes to do.

The standard line is that you should just give the food banks cash money so they can buy wholesale, but I'm not sure if that's even true, given that the supermarkets probably provide shoppers with a better price for brand names

I'd be interested to know a) whether it's true and b) whether and why people might be more willing to donate food rather than money. I suppose there's a sense that food isn't going to be "wasted on red tape" or indeed on booze.

[Chris Williams]

If you have substandard merchandise to shift, get yourself onto the Board of Guardians and shift it to the paupers. They complain less than yr other consumers.

All the arguments for why free markets are good are _also_ arguments for why the best thing to give to the poor is money, so that they can trade in the marketplace with everyone else, maximising their own utility and removing an opportunity for rent-seekers to capture undeserved profits. But where, oh where, is the 'Adam Smith' institute making this point?

[dsquared]

Milk, rice, sugar and a few extras, heat it in a pan and there you are. You don't even need an oven. Takes ten minutes to do.

like anything which involves cooking milk, it's really easy to fuck up though, and generates nasty washing up.

[ajay]

Maybe it is time again for food parcels for Britain from Canada and the USA ( a la WW2 and after)

The best thing to do with such parcels would be to send them right back where they came from, where the need is even greater:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2013/may/08/food-poverty-american-way-foodbanks-charity

[Phil]

"I thought, I'm not giving that homeless guy any money - he'll just spend it on beer and drugs. Then I thought, why not - that's what I'm going to spend it on..." - Denis Leary (from memory)

Still, food banks are probably better than the alternative (given that most of the time the alternative will just be "no food banks").

[BenSix]

When I was a student in London I used to buy Sainsbury's Basics rice pudding for eighteen pence a can. A while ago, I noticed that the price had dropped to twelve pence. I don't like to think about where savings had been made.

[nick s]

the various American food stamp systems all seem to be set up, in that delightful American way, to move products from this or that senator's farmers.

Not quite. The SNAP system is basically cash-equivalent nowadays with blacklisted items (booze, fags, pet food) although there's a fair amount of scolding wrapped up in its use; WIC, on the other hand, is very much whitelisted, and about foisting bottom-tier agricultural products from America's Heartland™ onto mothers and children.