Food is a vital part of life in our country today. Countless television programmes, books, magazines and radio programmes are devoted to the searching out, cooking and consumption of food. It is an essential, needed to survive as a human being, and indeed is a basic human right to have enough food for yourself and your family to survive on?

If you’ve always had enough food to eat, when you think of simply not being able to afford enough food, children going to bed hungry or people going hungry because they can’t go out and buy a loaf of bread, I don’t suppose you think of England. You imagine a country so far away that it’s out of touch with reality for those who do have enough. Indeed, Lord Freud, the conservative welfare minister said (as found in the Independent) “Clearly nobody goes to a food bank willingly. However, it is very hard to know why people go to them.”

However, increasing TV and newspaper coverage (e.g. 7 days on the breadline, where celebrities went to live with people who were barely surviving on their income) are raising awareness.  I’ve definitely become aware of food banks over the last year or so, as there often seems to be some form of charity drive going on in the local area, but I never realised the true reality and scale of the food bank operation. The Trussell Trust estimate that 913,000 people received emergency food supplies in the 12 months before April 2014 (according to BBC News).

On a local scale, The Croydon Foodbank’s website has many statistics, including “Of 2000 mothers surveyed by Netmums recently, 1 in 5 regularly go without meals to feed their children, and one third are borrowing money from friends and family to stay afloat. Most mothers stated that their situation is worse than a year ago with less money coming in.”

According to this website, the general public (including my mum!) at Tesco Purley donated 2.9 tonnes of food to The Croydon Food bank. This just goes to show that the local community is contributing to solve this growing problem. There has also been a food drive at Wallington High School for Girls where girls were encouraged to donate canned goods, and other non-perishable produce, which has provided valuable resources for local charities.  The problem of people not being able to afford food has been shown on both a national scale and in our community. Now all that’s left to do is increase awareness and continue raising money and food resources for these worthy causes.

Anna Coupland, Wallington High School For Girls