“This absolutely has been a lifesaver to me,” Michael Cox said.
The 51-year-old had not eaten in two days and so finally resolved to visit one of Britain’s growing number of food banks providing basic items to those in need.
“I had no money. So I’ll give it a try,” said Cox, who before the current cost-of-living crisis had never before needed to ask for help feeding himself.
Photo: AFP
Hundreds of people on Monday lined up in front of the food bank in Hackney in east London armed with a coupon allowing them to collect a basket of three days of food.
Each received a mix of goods tailored to their needs and family size, with many of the items donated by members of the public.
Rising food and energy prices in Britain have seen inflation soar.
The figure soared above 10 percent in September, the highest of any G7 country, putting yet more pressure on already stretched household budgets.
“Now with the cost-of-living crisis, people ... can’t pay their bills and buy food. They have to choose one. We are noticing more and more of that, unfortunately,” food bank supervisor Johan Ekelund said.
Sidoine Flore Feumba, a graduate nurse, who receives government benefit payments, said she could no longer afford to feed her three children and heat her home as well.
“Life now is quite difficult. I’m on a universal credit, which is not quite sufficient for my own living, because inflation is rising quite quickly,” she said. “So I found that that the food bank was my last option to make my ends meet.”
Ekelund said he was worried about the arrival of cold weather and the prospect of sky-high heating bills suddenly starting to land on people’s doormats.
“I’m really worried for this winter. I think it’s going to be a horror show,” he said.
On Saturday, the food bank in Hackney registered record numbers of people coming forward for help, with demand now about double that of the pre-COVID-19 period.
A new food bank is to open next month. It will be open on Friday evenings and cater for those in full-time work.
The situation is something completely new, said Tanya Whitfield, Hackney food bank’s head of services.
A particular rise in the cost of basics was also making the situation even worse, she said.
“Everyone sees pasta as a cheap option; it’s no longer a cheap option,” she said.
The price of vegetable oil has gone up by 65 percent in a year, while pasta is up 65 percent, two items the prices for which have risen the fastest, according to experimental research published by the Office for National Statistics yesterday.
Millions of Britons have been reduced to skipping meals, a recent poll by the consumer association Which showed
It said half of UK households were cutting back on the number of meals they ate, citing a survey of 3,000 people.
The situation of those on benefits was precarious, with many saying they are having to choose between eating and heating.
“The number of people coming and asking for food that they don’t have to cook is ‘shocking,’” Whitfield said.
“And it’s frightening that those requests are going up every single week,” she said.
Another consequence of the cost-of-living crisis is that people have less money to give to others.
“At this time of the year we’re normally quite busy with school and church harvest collections and donations,” Whitfield said.
However, this year schools were preferring to skip the harvest festival collections “because so many parents are struggling and they don’t want to put that added pressure on families,” she said.
With many families who would normally donate to food banks now forced to focus on their own needs, food bank worker Andrew Wildridge said they were just hoping for the best ahead of Christmas.
“Hopefully we could get an increase in the donations,” he said, adding however that the pattern since before the COVID-19 pandemic was for demand to double and donations to halve.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver