Food For Thought

The worst thing about living in a beautiful, affluent, rural town like ours is how easy it is to forget what's on the other side.

A walk along the high street and you can be greeted by a collection box for the local choir; pop into Waitrose for some weekend groceries and you can choose which little slot to press your green charity coin (given to you upon payment at the till) into for a nearby organisation; you may be stopped by a wildlife trust representative asking about how many birds you've spotted along the moor.

Walk into any Tesco in central Liverpool and you will no doubt find a huge crate at the entrance filled with foods and a shopping list on the wall asking for Food Bank donations.

Until recently, I was fairly ignorant to this, all the more so having young children who only watch children's TV all day. I haven't watched the News in centuries and I just hadn't come across poverty in years. There is certainly no obvious Food Bank around here. I had heard of them but, with limited exposure to the news and very few trips to inner city shops, I just hadn't really paid them very much attention.

It was my aunty who brought it up in conversation one day. (She reassured me that I wasn't the only one who knew little about just what was going on in the country.) My aunty is a midwife and is out in the community most of her day. She has had training to spot vulnerable people and, as part of her training, she attended a workshop to introduce her to a wide range of services offered to people who need social and financial help. These services are largely unknown and it is really down to the likes of midwives, health visitors and social services to direct the relevant people to the people that can help them. The workshop introduced her to (amongst other things) Food Banks and the more and more important role they are playing in society in the UK.

For those who don't know about them, Food Banks were set up to give people the opportunity to buy some staple groceries and donate them. The donations are taken and given out to people as an emergency supply. The people who benefit from the Food Bank donations have usually been identified by Social Services and given a voucher to go and collect 3 days' worth of emergency food. At the Food bank, they may also be offered advice to help get themselves out of their particular situation and may be pointed in the direction of another service that could help them.

I knew that I really wanted to help out and started keeping a look-out for Food Banks local to me. And I never did find one!

It was through looking on the internet that I found out that I could donate through a local church and I have been donating there ever since. I put a few signs up in work and was overwhelmed by everyone's generosity. Like me, most of them hadn't really known about Food Banks, and if they had, had never actually come across one. Yet, being given the opportunity, they all wanted to help.

It seems a little amazing to me that those who can maybe afford it more than others ie. People living in more affluent areas, aren't given the chance to donate. This is probably because there are fewer people in that immediate area that need the help, but as all of the food is non-perishable, it makes little sense to me not to have a little box set up at the entrance of, say, Waitrose, Booths, Marks & Spencer.

3 weeks after giving regular donations to the Food Bank, I couldn't help thinking that I wanted to do more. Having two young children, with very good, healthy appetites, I don't understand why less privileged people should go with having less healthy meals. The Food Bank are very good in requesting tinned vegetables and fruits and pasta sauces, but this just doesn't appeal to me. I felt myself placing my family in the same situation and wondering how I would feel about the bags of provisions I was offered. Extremely grateful of course, but wanting the absolute best for my two little kiddies who have no say in anything and who have no reason to miss out on the very best that life has to offer. I started to feel guilty about everything that I cooked them, picturing the bags of pasta and the tins of peas I was offering to the church every Thursday.

One day, a colleague came in to see me to talk about the Food Bank and he mentioned that his wife had put a link on Facebook to a lady who advertised her leftovers on Gumtree to people in her area. I read the article and was truly inspired. I contacted Caroline and after a long Facebook conversation, we realised that we both wanted the same thing!

I sent a Facebook message to a few local friends who I trusted and who I knew cooked good, healthy meals for their families most nights, to ask for their ideas and for their support, and the overwhelming majority said that they would happily freeze their leftover portions to donate to us. One friend offered the use of her freezer, another friend offered to provide food cartons to store the meals.

I am by no means taking anything away from the Food Bank. They do a fantastic job and as long as there is poverty, unemployment, homelessness, bedroom tax, benefit cuts, there will be an important place in society for the Food Banks. Our idea is certainly not an alternative to the Food Bank. In a way, our organisation is serving me too. I'm the one that wants to do this, I'm the one that will be left with a sense of pride and a sense of happiness to be helping out – that's my selfish ulterior motive.

What we hope to do is provide meals for people who haven't the facility to cook healthy meals for themselves, for whatever reason. I envisage us serving food to families with young children, young professionals who can't meet their mortgage repayments, the unemployed, pensioners, the homeless, ex-prisoners trying to get their lives back on the straight and narrow. It's certainly not for me to judge why they are standing at my doorstep accepting food from me. Just to be there in the first place, tells me all I need to know about them.

Caroline and I are so excited about this. We have registered our 'business' and hope to start dishing up in the next few weeks. We have so far decided to target churches and Children's Centres believing them to be the most in touch with the community. The hope is that they will either send people to us (Which I would love as it would be great to meet people in the community) or we will be able to take food to the Churches for them to distribute.

I would dearly love to meet the people that live in the areas that we work and live in. It can be so easy to walk around with your eyes closed. I would love to get to know the local families. I would love it, if by Christmas, instead of dropping my Christmas present donations off to the Salvation Army, I could give them in person to the families.

Hopefully this doesn't all sound too fantastical. I just hope that it all comes off and that we can make the tiniest little difference to the people who need to know that people still care.