We live in the South East of England, in the county of Surrey, one of the richest counties in England. So, what does food security have to do with us?
Well, being a rich county, close to London, the price of houses and flats is astronomical. Some young people are paying as much as two thirds of their wages simply to provide a roof over their heads, leaving very little money for even the basic essentials, like fuel to keep warm in winter (and our winters are cold, sometimes falling to temperatures below freezing at night time) and food to eat. Very often, it is a choice between eating well and being comfortably warm, but one of my own children has previously been in the uncomfortable situation of being neither warm nor well nourished. If you do not have a family to fall back on in these circ**stances, things can go from bad to worse.
It is difficult to get warm in a cold house, especially if you are not able to eat warm food. This means that it is unlikely that you will be able to sleep much at night, and therefore are more likely to be tired in the morning. If you work and are tired, then you begin to make more mistakes and are thought of as a less valuable employee. This, in turn, creates more stress, making it less likely that you can sleep and more likely that you will become depressed and ill, which has a worsening effect on your chances of retaining the job that is keeping the expensive roof over your head. So what do you do?
Katherine Hibbert wrote a book called "Free" which she described as "adventures on the margins of a wasteful socieity". The astonishing thing about this book was that many of the squatters with whom she lived for a year of her life, ate better by gathering the waste food thrown out by supermarkets, sandwich shops and restaurants, then they had ever done when they were in full time employment and attempting to purchase a reasonably diet for themselves.
In our day and age, surely it is criminal to throw away perfectly good food that could be used to feed the poor, rather than reducing the cost of left over food to a level at which the poor could purchase it? It's not just young people either. Pensioners, on fixed incomes, again, often have to choose between fuel and food.
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