The growth of food banks and reported cases of malnutrition is a scathing indictment of 21st century British capitalism.
You do not need to be a socialist to see food poverty as a shameful scourge that must be dealt with as a matter of urgency. And as I was fuming quietly to myself about the shame of this happening in my country, a very simple and practical idea to end food poverty at a stroke came to me. Bear with me….
First, we need to raise enough money to fund my programme. The simple way to do this is to tax soft drinks and/or sweet foods. Without carrying out a back-of-the envelope calculation, it should be possible to raise enough money to fund my programme. Let’s say we put a 50p tax on every sweet snack. That is 50p per piece. So every Mars bar now costs an extra 50p. And every Mars Duo bar costs an extra £1. (I know – it needs a little more thought. But it cannot be beyond the wit of the human race to figure out how to raise approximately £20.00 per week from every family in the country (or at least, those of them who consume sweet foods and soft drinks) to eradicate food poverty in the UK. And the people complaining about the imposition of an onerous new tax will get their £20 back in healthy food.
What do we do with the money?
We open a workers’ co-operative shop in every town, village and high street in the country. The aim is to make sure there is an outlet within walking distance of as many homes as possible.
And in those shops we provide free vegetables and free fruit.
That’s it. It is simple, and it is practical.
This country introduced the first and greatest health service in the world. Now let’s introduce a National Food Service (NFS).
What fruit will be available? Any fruit grown in the UK. Apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, rhubarb. And similarly vegetables grown in the UK are also available for nothing.
Now any undernourished kid being sent to school by impoverished parents with no money for a nutritious meal can simply send their kids to the NFS shop to pick up an apple or a pear to keep them going. Carrots, celery and other “snacking” vegetables are also available, as well as staples like potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower etc. So the evening meal does not have to be filled with processed packaged cardboard food.
And what happens to the supermarkets? Well, to be honest, I don’t really care what happens to the supermarkets. But let’s follow the scenario through. They have to charge more for those sugary ‘impulse buys’ they dangle in front of us at the checkouts. Tough. And they no longer have any incentive to sell the produce you can get free from your local NFS shop. But they can still sell more exotic fruit and veg: peaches, bananas, mangoes and so on.
In the new food stores there is no reason to sell multi-packs. You are better off just picking up small quantities of what you need, when you need it. No promotion of bulk items to induce you to buy more than you need. So less food waste, fresher foods in the home, and you even reduce the carbon footprint (whatever that is) by sourcing as much of the produce as you can from local growers.
Once you establish the principle that healthy food is a basic right – like air and water – it becomes unthinkable that sections of the population are ever unable to afford a healthy diet. Like the NHS’s free healthcare from the cradle to the grave, we want free healthy food for all.
Are there issues with this programme? Of course there are. But there is no reason why it cannot be done. The human race is not so poor in ideas and ideals that we cannot find a way to put it into practice. And the end result is that we abolish the shameful existence of food banks.
The growth of food banks and reported cases of malnutrition is a scathing indictment of 21st century British capitalism.