As delicious as the recent news is about Asda returning its SmartPrice range to the shelves of all 581 of its stores, it’s a very small part of a much larger picture.
Its 13p spaghetti is, like the proliferation of food banks in the UK, a treatment of the symptom of poverty.
We need to address the cause. The responsibility for the welfare and wellbeing of our most vulnerable citizens should not rest on the shoulders of charities, nor supermarkets.
It’s easy to paint the large corporations as the villains, but questions need to be asked as to why people need 13p spaghetti and 29p pasta to survive in one of the richest economies in the world.
And the answers lie squarely at the well-heeled feet of those who have held the purse strings and policies of the country for the last 12 long and dismal years.
Those years of austerity cuts to social care and health services mean the safety net of a decent and supportive society is less than threadbare.
The triple threat of rocketing food prices, unmanageable energy bills, and an underfunded National Health Service is going to cause long-term damage to families, communities, and individuals in almost every neighbourhood in the country.
Every area now has at least one foodbank; we live in a society where people need the ad-hoc macro philanthropy of neighbours and strangers to not starve to death.
Over the last two years of the pandemic, the Chancellor has proven time and again that he can magic up a whole orchard of flourishing and evergreen money trees when it comes to propping up his pet projects.
Writing off £4.3billion of furlough fraud, £8.7billion “lost” down the back of the Downing Street couch, supposedly spent on PPE nobody has any record of, not even the company that received the payment.
That money alone could have paid for TWO YEARS of the continuation of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit.
Somehow there is always money for crony contracts, Parliamentary p*ss-ups, weaponry and warfare, and DWP cover-ups, because it comes at the expense of social care, school dinners, and starving pensioners.
So while I welcome the reappearance of budget groceries on the supermarket shelves as an immediate-term relief for millions of people struggling to make ends meet, and while I will continue to write recipes for 60p a head and publish them for free on my website, I’m determined that we work towards building a world where neither of those things are essential any more.
As the late, great Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said: “It isn’t enough to simply keep pulling people out of the river. Some of us have to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
