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Grace Dent's food for thought |
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Months back, when I chose the title Hungry for my new book, I’d no way of knowing how fitting it would be by October. I chose the word "hungry" because the book is a memoir that revolves around food and the nostalgia I have for everyday childhood dinners, teas and snacks, savoured in Carlisle in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Nothing fancy, just a couple of squares of my Dad’s Fruit & Nut while we watched Kenny Everett, or a sachet of Butterscotch Angel Delight, or "sketty bolognaise" made with Campbell’s cream of tomato sauce with white pepper flung in for seasoning, and eaten from a bowl on our knees. I wrote: "I would give anything to go back there for just for one normal evening. Because I was loved and I was never hungry, and for a small girl from Currock, that was as good as things got." Back then, I took it for granted that I would be fed three times a day. Presently, as we head into winter 2020, millions of schoolchildren across Britain really are in a much more dire position. A few years ago, I noticed that an infant school teacher friend had started taking bread and jam in with her books and pens to feed children who arrived at school without breakfast. She knew they’d not eaten since the free school lunch the day before. Her anecdotes about starving kids, which she’d tell me on nights out in the pub, hung over me like a cloud. These children didn’t need advice, lectures or judgment – they just needed toast and Nutella or a buttered bagel to set them straight for a few hours so they could learn. When lockdown began and all our normal schedules dissolved, my friend said to me quite casually: "What worries me most right now is that some of my school will just fall off the radar and eventually starve to death." Perhaps the one positive thing about the current raging national debate about child hunger is that we are all being forced to look squarely at this very awkward truth. There will certainly be thousands of children who find themselves hungry over the Christmas school holidays, if free school meal vouchers are stopped. However we decide to stop this occurring, it is a priority that we must. |
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