As someone who calls South London their home, the news of West Norwood’s first ‘social supermarket’ offers a glimmer of hope to those dependent on the strained Food Bank culture of the twenty-first century.
This social enterprise is the UK’s first full-scale social supermarket targeting the severe and growing issue of food poverty. It sells low-cost, surplus food to locals on income support as well as providing support and assistance to return to employment. The food is stated to be 70 per cent cheaper than average prices in supermarkets. With produce ranging from Asda to Marks and Spencer’s, this supermarket fights the issue of food waste by accepting the rejected food deemed ‘inedible’ purely for aesthetic reasons such as mislabeling or damaged packaging.
In the UK, 10 percent of the estimated 3.5 tonnes of food-waste each year is stated to be of this type, even before it reaches shopping baskets.This supermarket has become a reality thanks to ‘Company Shop Group’, which has diverted an astonishing 30,000 tonnes of food from landfill in the last year alone, which has additional environmental benefits as well as a social impact.
The Tory peer Lady Jenkin has suggested that the reason that poorer people were going hungry because they ‘did not know how to cook’. But the fact that food prices have risen on average by twelve percent in real terms since 2007 would suggest differently. Some food bank clients are so poor they cannot even afford to switch on their cooker.
Upstairs in the social supermarket, people can also enroll on ‘The Success Plan,’ a scheme to improve job prospects. It offers budgeting and debt assistance, helps improve self-confidence and a teaches valuable career skills like CV writing and job interview practice.
With structural issues such as low wages, rising living costs and benefit cuts, faith groups and food-banks only fill the gaps left unsolved by the coalition
It doesn’t stop there. The 750 members are able to work alongside a chef in the supermarket to learn nutritious, budgeted recipes on which to raise their families. The most encouraging feature of this program is that the services are funded from the income raised by food sales, showing how easily small-scale social development can be achieved.
Yet food-banks and social supermarkets like that of West Norwood are not the answer. With structural issues such as low wages, rising living costs and benefit cuts, faith groups and food-banks only fill the gaps left unsolved by the coalition. Although supermarkets should undoubtedly decrease their food waste and provide assistance in anyway possible, this focus runs the risk of depoliticising the issue. It is the role of the welfare state to provide poverty assistance, not that of Asda and Tesco. I think it’s a national disgrace that food banks have become a second tier of welfare support in our society.
One should always salute the kindness and compassion of the food bank volunteers. But we need to remember that charity is never the solution to food poverty. Rather than the government hiding behind and paradoxically encouraging the food-bank and social supermarket culture, they must make it their duty to revisit the moral right to food.
Nina Harris