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Since I see we’re at the “sharing recipes for chicken stock” stage of supposedly feeding the poor, I think it’s a good time to point out that as of March this year England has 93,000 families in temporary accommodation. This figure has been trending steadily upwards.
Now it seems to me fairly logical that there’s likely a substantial overlap between families in need of assistance with food and families in overcrowded, unstable, unsafe or generally unsuitable housing.
I do t know what people think temporary accommodation *is* but it’s most likely a room in a hostel. Maybe some of your family get another room, maybe they don’t.
There are not necessarily any kitchen facilities at all. What there are will be basic, and most likely shared. If you *do* have your own kitchen facilities we’re talking a hob in the corner of the room.
Let us factor in also that you’re most likely working. This may well be casual or shift work. And/or you may also have health problems, very often a contributory factor in needing temporary accommodation in the first place.
Let us factor in also that you may well not have anywhere to *store* food, particularly cooked food.
Once you factor all this in, you can fairly quickly see the massive blind spot at the heart of so much of the ideal-home “cook for the week” type advice currently being deployed in an effort to suggest not being able to feed your children is basically an issue of culinary ability
It all assumes you’re in a home. More than that, it assumes you’re in a home that offers you the facilities needed to live in this way. It also all assumes you’re able-bodied and *at* home rather than at work.
And so you end up with two possibilities: one, these suggestions for how to feed a family are simply painfully naive, based on no direct experience whatsoever.
Or two: they’re not actually suggestions. They’re deliberately misleading weaponised fantasies expressly designed to undermine empathy and obscure the gaping holes in our social provision.
Oh and by the way, lest there be any confusion about the word “temporary”: temporary accommodation in this country can wind up being where people live for up to three years.
