10 beans a day
I saw that Jack Monroe was raising the roof yesterday on the subject of insultingly meager and worthless lunch parcels for children to replace school lunches during lockdown, handed out by people who pocket far more money than the parcels can have cost. The subject exploded and now it’s all over the UK news, with good results.
Clearly the plan is the children will eat the sandwich of one piece of nasty processed “cheese” between two pieces of nasty processed sponge bread, and a potato. On banner days they will be allowed an apple.
The government and the catering companies it has hired have come under fire after photographs of free school meal parcels were circulated online.
The food packages sent to children who qualify for free school meals and are remote learning because of the national lockdown were not considered to contain enough high quality food. The Department for Education said it was looking into the issue, and that “parcels should be nutritious and contain a varied range of food”.
The Guardian talked to some lucky recipients of this dreck.
Mother of three, Karen Phillips, 33, has been forced to spend her rent money on her children’s lunches after receiving a “disgraceful” food parcel from her school last week.
The parcel, intended to last her 12-year-old daughter all week, didn’t contain any carbohydrates except two potatoes, alongside one onion, two peppers, a satsuma, single tomato and carrot, and two eggs wrapped in cling film. The parcel also included one small tub of soup powder, the same sized tub of tuna mayo, and a small bag of grated cheese.
I’d be a lot less worried about the carbs than the protein – of which there is almost none. Two eggs, a small amount of tuna, and a small amount of grated cheese. That’s three lunches at most, so what about the other two days? Gnaw on the potatoes?
Jack again:
It’s appalling. The apples and carrots and tomato and bananas are fine in themselves but they can’t make up for the slap in the face quality of the rest of it. Disgusting worthless pseudo-bread and even worse pseudo-cheese – why not just give them little plastic bags of mud?
Another what Jack Monroe can get for 20 quid:
I frown on the soft white bread in the upper right, but other than that – it’s more and better and 2/3 of the price.
I remember the year I got a food basket from a local church. My son and I needed it, but it was mostly just canned green beans and canned meat (not tuna, more like spam). I do not eat green beans, so my sister traded the peas from her food basket for my green beans (she will not eat peas), but it’s still rather meager.
I buy food for our school food closet several times a semester, and I do pretty well by them for not a lot of money. If I were able to buy in bulk, I could do better.
I have no love for Chartwells; they have been serving up the crap at our school for some time, and their contract is so exclusive we can only use the culinary school for events if Chartwells doesn’t want to do it. And they always want to do it, because money. And the culinary school gives us a lot better food, and gives the students a chance to practice the craft they’re learning.
Charity depends on empathy, and though not entirely absent, tends in turn to be in rather short supply among those who have spent their lives clawing their way to the top of various corporate trees. Giving with much fanfare and publicity with one hand while quietly taking with the other has also been known to happen.
I read that Chartwells made £2bn profit last year and paid tax on about 2% of that. Needless to say, they are big Tory donors, their CEO is friends with ex Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, and there was no tender process for this contract. This is rife. It’s nowhere close to exaggeration to say that the Tories are using the current catastrophe to divert very large amounts of money to themselves and their friends. At last count there were exactly umpteen companies with no prior experience in the provision of PPE or meals or whatever, and which were losing money, who were suddenly awarded contracts worth tens of millions or more to do things they didn’t know how to do without ever having to tender. In many, many cases, they failed spectacularly to do what they were contracted to do with no apparent consequences to them.
It looks like asset stripping more than it looks like anything else. I genuinely think the government are delighted that the news has come out about the food parcels because it’s something they can (appear to) visibly fix, diverting attention from the enormous volume of corruption elsewhere. I don’t doubt that they’ll be able to convince a lot of the population that they took decisive action to feed our poor children against all the odds.
Some of the pictures of the food boxes are heartbreaking. We don’t know that they’re all real, of course, but there are boxes that appear to have contained half a pepper or carrot or fucking tomato. As many have said, surely the cost of cutting a pepper in half outweighs the cost of putting in a whole one. Some of the items don’t even meet basic hygiene and safety standards. For example, it is not remotely acceptable to decant tuna into a non-sterile plastic bag for transport and storage. The intention here is to punish rather than to feed the poor.
There is some background. In a previous lockdown, parents received vouchers instead of food boxes. This, of course, is a much better idea. It’s more scalable and leverages (yeah, I said leverages) the supermarket supply chains. This is especially important this time because the government were adamant that schools would be operational…. before opening them for one day to ensure as many children as possible infected each other then closing them to ensure the children infected as many people as possible at home. So the supply companies were arguably not ready while the supermarkets were.
Anyway, vouchers are generally speaking a much better idea, but there were a few concerns that parents might spend some of the money on booze and fags and scratchcards and the poor children might receive inadequate nutrition as a result. So it was decided to instead make it absolutely certain that poor children will receive inadequate nutrition by replacing the vouchers with these awful boxes.
It isn’t just children being punished in this fashion, either. Vulnerable adults have been receiving inadequate food parcels, too. And they too are designed to punish and humiliate for the crime of being poor. One I read of contained one teabag for each day. Again, the cost saving of counting out exactly the ‘right’ number of teabags (surely more than one cup of tea per day is an intolerable extravagance) can be barely worthwhile and the object is to punish and be seen to punish. What do they think people are going to do with all the excess teabags anyway, for goodness’ sake? (They’re going to give them to other people who need them, that’s what).
Not a good day to be British. And there are few enough of those already, these days.
Yes, the undeserving poor. If they starve & their children starve, it is no matter, it is their fault for being born into the ‘lower classes’. They are all thick as bricks, education is wasted on them – for intelligence, as eminent biologists have informed us, is ‘highly heritable’ – so why should the de Pfeffels & the Rees-Moggs of this world (and Dominic Cummings’ father-in-law), who assume that their position in the world is due to their superior genes (as does Trump), bother their minds or consciences about this load of incorrigibles and their snot-nosed, filthy, violent children, particularly if they are not white? The fact that a great many people far more gifted than them in many ways have come from the ‘lower classes’ makes no impression on them. And why should it, when everything in the circles they move in assures them of their ineffable superiority?
I am so angry that I… I don’t know what to say.
Every time this government acts, or fails to act far too often, I swear that they have reached rock bottom; surely they can’t go lower than this? And every time they do.
But in truth I mean, we should have been prepared for this fiasco, after this intervention by a Tory MP a couple of month ago complaining that food vouchers effectively went to crack dens and brothels! This was clearly preparing the ground for later moves!
In the wider scheme of things this is part of a trend to basically assess-strip the UK; the pandemic has given this government what they see as a clean mandate to act as they wish without all those pesky restriction imposed by parliament and tradition. Hundreds of contracts totalling tens of billions have gone to private companies with link not only to the Tory party but often personally to ministers and influential MPs and party apparatchiks, not only to feed kids but also to provide PPE to the NHS and government agencies and to run testing programs. A lot of this money was just wasted as these companies had no track record and no capacity in the matter. One of those was run by Matt Hancock’s former local pub landlord, for fuck sake!
As Tim Harris says, it is all down to the Tories assumption that they are somehow vastly superior to the rest of us, that, even elected by us, whatever they do for the country is akin to a favour and we should be grateful for it. The tossing of bones from the lord’s table. That became obvious during the Brexit debates : every time a Tory grandee was contradicted by a member of the public you could see the outrage and contempt on their faces. It has not changed.
As i said to friends of mine this morning, this Tory government has done far more to radicalise me – and I suspect a lot of people – than anybody ever could. They should put themselves on the list of banned organisations alongside ISIS or the Real IRA!
This is the face of evil.
(By the way, what’s the inspiration for the title of your blog, “Butterflies and Wheels”?)
@GW:
From here http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/about/:
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