The front page of this morning’s Guardian carries the startling headline: ‘Four million UK children too poor to have a healthy diet.’  The reason why this headline startled me?  Because, for goodness’ sake, this is not news!  It should be not only patently obvious but engrained into our culture that those below a certain income cannot afford to buy the foods necessary to give kids – and adults, for that matter – what the food fascists call a ‘healthy diet.’

The headline comes after a study revealed that these children live in households that cannot afford to buy the requisite fruit, vegetables, fish, etc. that are necessary to meet the demands of those invisible ‘national guidelines.’  Oh, and I must stress that this study was done in, and refers to, the United Kingdom.

It took the efforts of the Food Foundation, paid for by God knows who, presumably the Government, to come to the realisation that the inability of these households to buy the above foods is generally consigning these kids to those rarely-heard of conditions that can affect the odd person or two: obesity and diabetes.  Heard of those?  I must admit I had never heard of them before reading this article.*

(*I’m being ironic.)

They say that it would take anything up to 40% of these households’ total weekly income to buy these foods, and satisfy the requirements of this thing they call the Eatwell Guide.

The ‘average family’ of two adults and two children, according to this study, having listed the types of foods they are talking about, would need to spend over one hundred pounds a week to meet these targets.  The article goes on to state that forty-seven percent of all households do not spend enough on food each week to meet the targets.  That’s regardless of income.  I don’t know any of the study’s further findings because it was on page thirteen of the paper and I only read the front page off the BBC’s ‘Newspaper Headlines’ page.

Now, one of you reading this might be saying, well, why doesn’t he read the rest of it before ranting, while the other one might be saying, I knew all of this back in 1975, why all the research being done now?

I’ll address the first point first: too much to do, mate, to go sourcing independent studies on food consumed by children when I’ve got an album to finish and a book to write.

As to the second point: I wholeheartedly agree with you.  I’ll say it loud, and I’ll say it proud: this study is a complete fucking waste of money.  Number one, you’ve only got to browse the shelves at your local supermarket of choice to work out that good quality food, that’s been grown properly, not sprayed with chemicals to keep the bugs off, or pumped with ‘water’ to make it look bigger, or grown in radiated soil, costs more.  Just stick the word ‘organic’ on to a packet of carrots and watch the price shoot up, ho ho ho.*

(* Placing the words ‘ho ho ho,’ or similar, at the end of a sentence means I have written something that I have found extremely funny.  You might like to comment whether you agree or not.)

There is no set rule put in place by the Government about how much extra, in terms of a percentage, should be put onto organic goods, if indeed its value was to be determined by the way it was grown.  The Government’s rules and regulations regarding the sale of organic foods just don’t cover how the pricing of an organic carrot should be compared to that of a non-organic one.  And, by the way, to be classified as ‘organic,’ that carrot doesn’t have to be 100% so, but only 95% needs to contain organic ingredients, leaving five percent, which is quite a lot really, that can be anything they damn well please, but they can still charge you as though it were an organic item.  This is more true of, for example, an organic biscuit, which must be made of at least 95% organic ingredients.  The rest can be plaster of Paris and cigarette filters, for all they care.

Here’s why the Government pays private companies millions upon millions of pounds to undertake countless pointless surveys and studies: it makes them look like they’re tackling a problem that affects everyone, but really they are simply procrastinating and skirting around an issue that they have no intention of ever doing anything realistic or concrete about.

Now that’s the shocker*  It’s got to be readily obvious to anyone who can recognise themselves in a mirror that low-income families do not have the extra financial resources available to them to spend on organic foods, expensive fish, extravagant and exotic spreads and sauces, not to mention the organic fruits and vegetables detailed above.

(*It’s not for most people, just those who vapidly read newspapers on the train to avoid looking people in the eye and not really taking any of the information in whatsoever.)

And that’s because anything of quality costs more.  Duh!  I’m not suggesting that can ever change, but this survey is a real Yes, Minister moment; in which some vacuous civil servant approaches the Government minister with a brilliant idea to waste money, time and peoples lives in order to undertake another survey on a topic that there have been a number of surveys done in the past, and at the same time give the public the impression that Government is tackling the issue of obesity in kids from low-income families.  Believe me, both of you, they are not!  And of course, the focus is on children because, as you both well know, children are sacrosanct in this society and we must protect ‘them’ at all times* because they cannot protect themselves.

(*Using children is a relatively recent tactic; If you say, there’s too much violence on TV, it’s not good for the … children!, what that really means is, there’s too much violence on TV, I don’t like it because I’m a prude and I want it taken off the air.  Plus, I’m scared a Muslim will see it, be converted into a Jihadist, and blow me up in a shopping centre or some other place I, er, wouldn’t be seen dead in.)

What makes me angry and want to rant is this:  The Government well knows that four million kids’ families cannot afford decent food for them.  I know this first hand.  I grew up on burger, mash and beans and salad cream sandwiches for school not because my mother was lazy or ill-equipped for parenthood – far from it – it was because money was extremely tight and there was no way to afford anything exotic.  Until the day she died, she tried her best to keep stuff that would worry us to herself, but I remember one day when she sat me down and said, ‘We’ve got fourteen pounds between us and the workhouse,’ which meant fourteen pounds to last a fortnight.

Indeed, after my mother passed away in 2015, my dear wife was unable to work for three weeks while she helped me get things done, and we had to go to a food bank here in the Forest of Dean to get some food that would last us until my wife could earn some money again.  And food bank fare is not organic, prepared in factories that don’t use nuts or anything remotely approaching healthy.  Tesco Value baked beans, at nine pence a tin, gives you a ready idea of the level we are talking about here.  It was the most humiliating, degrading experience I think we have ever been through.

It also makes me angry that this Government, like many before it and most likely many more to come, have wasted public money on a survey that proves nothing, achieves nothing but avoids everything.  We’ve known about the poverty crisis in the UK for many decades, just as they have in many other ‘wealthy’ nations, but still they exist, and in large numbers.  Why?  Because it suits governmetns to have them, like lab mice, dogs or chimpanzees.  Divide and conquer.  They don’t address the issue, they just gloss over it, like you would paint over a crack in your wall.  It is that effective.

Incumbent governments are scared of the likes of Jeremy Corbyn becoming Prime Minister because they know he would put the needs of the poorest first, thereby dismantling all the procedures that previous Conservative and Labour governments have put in place to make sure that the poor stay poor, the rich stay rich, and profits are creamed off by ministers and their friends to pocket for themselves while at the same time making it look as though they are doing something constructive about it.*

(*I have rammed the same points home multiple times in this rant on purpose; to demonstrate how little effect repeating something actually has, as though every sentence reveals something new and fascinating about this topic, but in fact just repeats the old, pointless stuff and never really achieves anything new.)

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