‘Every day is doomsday’: how a food bank is struggling to keep up
T he shelves should be chock-a-block with baked beans, soup and tuna but it looks like someone has played supermarket sweep and Angela Gardiner admits she has never seen supplies at the food bank so depleted.
“I have never seen it like this,” Gardiner says, pointing to yawning gaps on the blue racks filling the unit at the Canterbury food bank, where she is operations director. “This is normally full of beans, but we are short of tinned stuff.”
After the Christmas rush, January is usually a quiet month for the charity, with demand dropping by about 40%. However, this year has been different. It delivered a record 1,460 parcels in December and the tally for January is not far off that, at 1,300. After that bumper December, donations are down sharply as its supporters rein in spending after Christmas.
When the Guardian first visited a year ago, the charity had gone from spending virtually nothing on food to spending about £3,000 a month to cover the shortfall in donations as the Covid crisis segued into a cost of living crisis, forcing it to rapidly expand its service. At the time that figure seemed shocking, but in January the charity’s food bill totalled nearly £7,000.
Not only is demand greater, each pound is not going as far, as the price of everyday foods – from baked beans, biscuits, pasta, instant coffee and long-life milk – rises.
In February 2022, the cost of the items in a standard parcel (enough to feed one person for three days) came to £24.78. Today an equivalent food parcel costs £34.11, an increase of £9.33 or nearly 38%. A children’s food parcelis up by £8.24 to £25.75, a jump of 47%.
A year ago inflation was “just” 5.5%, but the Ukraine war has changed all that. Official figures to be published on Wednesday are
Read more on theguardian.com
