The reality of food banks

00:00 04:33

Lloyd Evans has narrated this article for you to listen to.

The old man next door asked me to collect his parcel from the food bank. ‘Sure,’ I said. I joined a queue of 20 starvelings outside a chapel in the East End. Most were migrants carrying rucksacks or bags for life, and there were a few Cockney mums with fidgety nippers in tow. Everyone in the queue had a mobile phone – which is normal these days – and most were dressed for the Olympic Games in Adidas sprint shoes, Nike jogging pants and Reebok breathable weightlifting shirts. I felt distinctly under-dressed in my Oxfam castoffs. Despite their keep-fit attire, many of the applicants seemed to be on the corpulent side, and one or two had stepped proudly out of the closet and were openly obese. Good for them.

After waiting in a gale for 25 minutes, I was ushered into a brightly lit Anglican chapel which had been systematically stripped of any reference to Christ, the cross, the commandments and so on. Nailed to the walls were abstract posters bearing mottos for zombies: ‘We Are All One’ and ‘My Spirit Shall Bring You Life’.

 I filled in a form and took a seat opposite an elderly adjudicator whose wrinkled face was hidden by a surgical mask. ‘Is English your first language?’ she asked. I told her that I was collecting food for an elderly neighbour and she queried the reason I’d given on the form. I wrote ‘debt’ as it sounded better than ‘grinding poverty’ or ‘starvation’. She said: ‘Let’s put “rent arrears” as it’s more sympatico.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘but why?’ She misheard me. ‘Sympatico,’ she explained. ‘It’s Italian.’

She showed me the options on a laminated sheet with the words and symbols printed adjacently, as pub signs are, to help the illiterate. Shampoo and loo-roll were offered along with sanitary towels, moisturiser and other women’s toiletries. I could have got some pet food too. The mood among the staff was gushingly, and exhaustingly, friendly. ‘Mia! What a beautiful name,’ yelped a volunteer from a nearby table where a Ukrainian refugee was being processed.

On the other side of me, a Sri Lankan male handed his passport to a volunteer who noticed that he’d recently turned 30. ‘Congratulations for last week,’ she beamed. The birthday boy didn’t appear to understand her, even though he claimed to be studying engineering at a London university. To complete his paperwork, she asked him how he’d travelled to the food bank. ‘On foot or by public transport?’ He frowned uncertainly and said: ‘Yes.’ When she’d finished transferring his answers to the computer, she handed him the form with a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s yours. Take it with you,’ she said. ‘Throw it in the bin. Do whatever you like with it.’ She mimed ripping it up, as if to assure him that the food bank wasn’t a front for the secret police.

The terms of trade were tougher than you might imagine, and the system is designed to thwart scroungers. You can collect a three-day supply of food but you can’t return for at least a month. So the notion that anyone in Britain is ‘reliant’ on food banks must be a myth. The banks themselves prevent dependency.

I joined a third queue at a delivery point across the road and collected my free goody-bag. It looked like the contents of a dead bachelor’s pantry. Packets of powdered soup and butterscotch mousse. A pound of caster sugar. Plastic pouches filled with rice and lentils. A can of ‘Del Monte quality halved pears in light syrup’ (which looked quite tasty in the picture). For energy, I was given a kilo of ‘wheat biscuits’ from Morrisons which a performing elephant might enjoy. The fresh veg was limited to a bag of fist-sized yams. Finally, for pudding, I got a family pack of four Mars bars. In Tesco, my haul would have set me back about £18 which is the sum you’d earn working on the minimum wage for 90 minutes. And that’s how much time I spent in the queue. Financially it was the same as having a crap job for an hour and a half.

When I got back, the old guy was at home with his son and daughter and he asked me to call again later. Perhaps he was embarrassed to admit that we’re on speaking terms. Fair enough. Or maybe he wanted to conceal his straitened circumstances from his family. Anyway, I felt a little stung by his rebuff so I wolfed all his Mars bars and ate his Del Monte halved pears in light syrup. Then I simmered his yams for ten minutes but they dissolved into a puddle of reddish phlegm so I slung them into the garden for the foxes to fight over. No takers. Even vermin are too sniffy for my cooking.