Justice Matters: Food for Thought

After Miriam’s piece about our local foodbank a couple of weeks ago, let’s look at foodbanks. The Trussell Trust opened its first foodbank in 2000, and currently, there are thought to be over 2,000 of them in the UK alone.  Ever since they were introduced there has been a steady rise in the number of people using them and this is set to go through the roof this year.

See     We are used to seeing soup kitchens and the like for people who are homeless or battling addictions of various kinds. The appearance and spread of foodbanks became a necessity as the steady erosion of the value of benefits and other social safeguards took its toll. Now we are seeing people in full time jobs, working families and previously “coping” pensioners joining the ever increasing queue.

There is no easy way to say this – this is a national disgrace and an outrage in one of the world’s wealthiest countries.  And it’s set to get much worse.

Reflect   The Good News brought by Jesus of Nazareth is not only of God’s love for us, but of God’s wish they we do the same for each other. The flourishing of each human being as a Common Good is integral to the gospel message, not an appendix.

There is a steady push-back against the idea that grinding poverty is a growing reality in our country, among them some government ministers. Jacob Rees-Mogg is quoted to have called foodbanks “rather uplifting… shows what a good, compassionate country we are”; Michael Gove has reportedly claimed that people have turned to foodbanks because they were unable "to manage their finances". 

Guardian commentator Frances Ryan, on the other hand, argues that “Discrediting food banks or casting work as an easy route out of poverty suggest that hardship isn’t down to low wages, benefit cuts, high energy prices or unaffordable housing, but rather that working-class people are too stupid to budget properly or too lazy to look for a better job.” 

Act     Many of us contribute to foodbanks, either directly, through supermarkets or by giving donations. The details are in this news every week, and Miriam has invited people to visit the Blythswood Care foodbank.  

As a cluster of faith communities we are gifted, generous and caring when it comes to supporting others in our midst. Could we take a step further towards addressing the underlying causes of poverty? We could, for example, write to our MP and MSP asking them to support a windfall tax to mitigate the cost of living crisis. Perhaps, with the winter of 2022 in mind, we need to plan how best we can respond to Jesus’ request to “feed my lambs, feed my sheep” in very basic and practical ways. I invite all parishioners to send in their ideas to southedclust@btinternet.com

Stuart Holden