No-one can accuse the current political situation of being dull.
Once the dignified period of royal mourning was over, the government seems to have been hell-bent on seeing who could announce the least thought-through, most half-baked, and above all most out-of-touch policies.
At the time of writing, the Truss government is still in place, and despite a U-turn of gargantuan proportions, Kwasi Kwarteng still has the keys to number 11 Downing Street. By the time you read this on Wednesday morning, everything may have changed.
I am not going to comment on the economic rights and wrongs of what should from the start have been termed the Emergency Budget, because the world’s economists have already given a near-unanimous verdict.
Instead, I want to reflect on the things which have been making the headlines for the past two weeks: currency exchanges, gilts and bonds, interest rates and hedge funds.
All of these things do have a huge impact on our lives, but no-one in government seems to be talking about the things which I believe most people really care about: being able to see a doctor when they are ill, knowing their elderly relatives are receiving the care they need, having a secure roof over their heads, being confident their children are getting the education they need to set them up for life.
For me as well, what has been striking has been the near-silence on the most basic subject of all: how we feed ourselves. In an era of foodbanks, chronic over-demand on NHS services, and stories of children arriving at school practically starving, this is astonishing. The ability of everyone to eat properly should be the most basic of political targets.
For those on very low incomes, simply getting enough calories to survive remains a constant struggle. I am grateful every day that there is enough on my plate. For too many that is not true.
It is no longer just the poorest in our society for whom lack of money is the over-riding reason they can’t eat properly. I cannot be the only one who is incensed every time I hear an arrogant and well-fed politician suggest that the solution is as simple as ‘budgeting better’ and ‘learning to cook’.
If you haven’t got enough money to pay your rent, heat your home and buy food, no amount of book-keeping or creative accountancy is going to help you magic up three square meals a day for your family.
But we are where we are, and most of us are looking to find ways we can feed ourselves for less. The good news is that for all but the very poorest, the situation can be improved even as we spend less in cash.
Eating well does not need to be the preserve of the comfortably-off; many of us (although I accept not all) can achieve something close to it by investing effort into feeding ourselves.
It’s very encouraging to see the enthusiasm with which children embrace cookery at school. I’m encouraged that finally we might be educating young people about the importance of food – and equally crucial, the enjoyment to be gained from it.
But we have a whole generation – actually two generations – brought up on over-processed convenience food, who simply do not know how to cook. These are the people the food industry has exploited for years, charging over the odds for rubbish and/or convenient food, trading on a lack of basic cooking skills. This, I suspect, is changing.
Fortunately food retailers are doing their bit to make this possible. Last week Aldi, which recently overtook Morrisons to become Britain’s fourth biggest supermarket, declared that it will prioritise low prices over short-term profits to help its customers through the cost-of-living crisis.
That will help in the short-term, but if there is one lesson we should take away when inflation finally starts falling and the economic outlook eventually gets brighter, it is this: if we want to be able to weather future financial storms, the ability to plan menus and cook frugally will always be useful.
It is good to see food skills once again part of the school curriculum. Even primary school children are required to ‘understand and apply the principles of a healthy and varied diet; prepare and cook a variety of predominantly savoury dishes using a range of cooking techniques; and understand seasonality, and know where and how a variety of ingredients are grown, reared, caught and processed’.
But shouldn’t we also be making cookery classes available to those generations of adults who missed out on learning even the basics at school? That has to be a better investment in the future than handing tax cuts we can’t afford to people who don’t need them.
Source:https://www.edp24.co.uk/
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