I can’t remember who said it, or when - it was the late eighties, early nineties - it was a church leader innNew Plymouth but they may have been quoting someone else, but I still recall them saying that starting food banks was a mistake because it meant the government got away with not doing its fundamental job of ensuring people had the basics of life. It was a Catch 22 of not wanting people to go hungry so filling a gap that shouldn’t have existed (the baseline principle of unemployment benefits was they should cover a family’s basic needs and this was before the 1990 benefit cuts and was mainly due to housing costs as well as inflation)
Indeed. At what point do organised foodbanks end up acting in collusion and collaboration with the (oppressive) state? Some of the rhetoric food charities use is indistinguishable from the arguments state actors use to block support for those in need - and it makes me deeply uncomfortable (to understate things a bit!)
YES YES! I have said this for a long time: in a good, fair and equitable society there should be no need for dozens and dozens of food banks, to me it is fundamentally unjust that so many "good" people think that the answer is bags of white bread, tinned tomatoes and teaching the poor to cook and grow their own vegetables ( never mind that we know how to cook and waiting twelve weeks for the potatoes and carrots to grow in a plastic pot on the concrete doorstep is a lesson in futility)
Way back in the days of Ruth, (she of the mother of all budgets) I had to feed my kids on what was left of my benefit after paying 2/3 into my mortgage, the father having left and locked himself into a denial of family support obligation with Social Welfare which went on for years after the youngest had left home.
When a stray church offered charity I was humiliated, but accepted. Nothing like hungry kids to lower your pride. My own family looked down their nose and referred to me as a "dole bludger"
We as a nation are so much better than this, yet I fear that as more people think taxes are a personal insult and that their own accumulation of money is because they are somehow superior to others and don't want to lose that sense of self importance, assauge their guilt by donating inedible budget brand food to a charity, we are well on the road to the horror of deliberately sustaining a huge, deprived and desperate underclass.
I wait until the day the worm turns and gets to wear the silk pyjamas and pose innanely grinning whilst every self appointed political "expert" finally learns what humiliation and inequity really feels like.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. We can do so much better than this as a society - but boy is it taking an awful lot of pushing and arguing just to shift the dial a tiny bit. Sigh. Still, onward we must!
Your post is a perfect statement of the arrogance and hypocrisy shown by the likes of ‘I’m rich so I’m sorted’ Luxons of this world.
And then to link their hypocrisy to religion, the source of so much war and confrontation, adds to my disgust of these people.
The uncaring, dishonest way they implement their right wing neoliberal ideology damages so many lives, I fail to understand how these people live with themselves.
Whenever I see good work being done by food banks etc I think of Dickensian England, with a tiny proportion of the rich dudes being ‘philanthropists’, but probably still running their sweat shops. I love the idea in your penultimate paragraph!
Thankyou for articulating the situation so well Dr Bex. I choose to ration (underfeed myself) when my food stocks are scarce rather than expose myself to the shame, judgement, thoughts and prayers, and inappropriate foodstuffs that a trip to the food bank would give me. Ive even defended the tinned tomatoes and canned coconut milk in the past, but i think thats cos Ive been taught thay I must be grateful for what is given. Unfortunately ive got multiple food intolerances, and very little of a single person portioned charity food box is actually useful to me.
I did however share my bountiful plum tree excess with ny neighbours, and wished I was mentlaly well enough to set up or join a community harvest co-op cos getting help to pick my trees would benefit me (especially cos I cant reach up due to my brain injury, Im only picking the low branches) and id love more variety and community in my life, but my health condition and history of trauma means it wouldnt be safe for me to invite folks into my property. Its frustrating that i can be so poor in someways, and so rich in others, but unable to make the most of the riches due to health.
I see and have fixed a lot of typos, but my vision is very doubled so apols for any that ive left.
Thanks for you ongoing advocacy for folks experiencing food insecurity. It feels really good to read, gives me hope that at least a few good folks "get it" 🙏
Thank you for sharing your own experiences, these nuances and complexities are poorly captured in the simplistic narratives and stereotypes hey?! I like how you frame it - poor in some ways, rich in others, yet unable to make the most of things due to poor health. Totally agree around strangers and safety - paying someone to come and prune my trees comes with a higher degree of safety and security than relying on a well-meaning-but-potentially-unknown volunteer.
Aww Dr Bex, i cried. You get it and I hope I recover enough to be able to step into a lived experience role to support others stuck in the poverty of health and weath trap. Much appreciate your articles and response 🫶
I’m a little teary reading this, as you have put my thoughts into such an articulate piece. I too was so angry about that Luxon post before Christmas and have been writing a letter to him in my head ever since.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I was too exhausted pre-Christmas break to be able to manage anything articulate - but like yourself, it has been ruminating away. The vacuousness of it all was quite something.
👍💯 THIS!!! EVERY SINGLE WORD!!! (except not sure about giving a govt dept a fund instead - I thought that was WHY I paid taxes 🤔)
In fact I was reading the other day (on the 1News site) about a Lower Hutt programme called "Seeds of Hope" where to summarise a community initiative has built more than 200 garden boxes in (mostly) private backyards from Upper Hutt to Wainuiomata, which supply fresh veges to 800 whanau at time of writiing. A small portion of each garden goes to the whanau whose garden it is grown in, and the rest goes to foodbanks & food rescue organisation Kaibosh to be distributed within the community. It was started by Oasis Church pastor Daryl Green 2+ years ago for precisely the reasons laid out in your newsletter - to give people agency in filling the food deficit of their whanau & share it around, making community connections along the way - should have saved the link but it is "Community kai initiative works from the ground up" written by Lauren Crimp of RNZ. They now have some govt funding to employ people to help build the raised gardens, get them started, care for & harvest the produce etc. & several workers & volunteers have gone on to paid work elsewhere, with the whanau feeling like they are contributing not taking. Using individual gardens means whanau don't have to travel to pop out & weed or plant or water etc. like with large community gardens ( but those have benefits too of course👏) Not everyone HAS a backyard, so utilising the ones that do where they are not being useful for the household in other ways seems like a brilliant plan to me - a few "wealthy & sorted" types must have some spare land they could donate 🧐 🤷🙏
Another thing - I don't have a problem with giving tinned tomatoes as I choose to buy them myself, unless I want them to slice in a sandwich, as a very nutritious & low cost tasty base/addition to many meals, and they don't go "off" or rot if you don't eat them in time or get squashed in the bag, or contribute to the plastic waste problem by needing packaging to prevent them being squashed 🤷 White bread on the other hand 😱
Also, the criticism from some as to these garden projects not giving instant food - I like baby Kale & Spinach, & others Lettuce leaves - within an hour of bringing home seedlings ($3 a punnet of 6 plants) I can harvest individual leaves to add to meals, and although not substantial they raise the nutritive value of the meal. I have planted some out to grow to full size, but continue to harvest leaves from the rest & they continue to grow new ones almost overnight. All my outdoor veges are grown in raised beds where the lawn used to be, plus several smaller pots & border gardens with a mix of berries, grapes, herbs, & flowering plants for insects. Obviously growing from seeds takes longer for eating, but as the famous saying goes "the best time to plant a tree was 200 yrs ago - the next best time is NOW!" - and "give a man a fish & he eats for a day, teach him to fish & he can feed himself forever" (state of the planet remaining fishable of course 👀)
Thank you for your comment and for sharing your own experiences. Just to clarify - I was making a tongue-in-cheek argument for paying taxes, as taxes are a far more effective way of providing support than reliance on charity!
Yes. The carefully curated messaging around charitable food 'donations' always gives the impression that food is available to anyone in 'need' or experiencing 'difficulty'. The expectation of thankfulness and gratitude makes donors and packing volunteers glow with righteous love for the carefully curated recipients. I reckon tax-free income up to 25k would help, increasing benefits would help, giving people food grants automatically because their rent is more than 50% of their income would help, taxing much much more above 130k would help, deglobalising and decolonising food systems would also help, landback would be incredibly practical and effective too. Working in the hunger sector holds many lessons for how broken our wealth driven society is.
Thank you for this article, you've put my thoughts into a much more articulate argument. I firmly believe charities shouldn't need to exist. Billionaires sit on their hoarded wealth and decide which charity is deserving of a few bucks and then get the tax breaks and kudos for it. If we had a small wealth tax on the insanely rich we'd have enough to feed, educate and provide healthcare to everyone. I was incredibly pissed off at the last election to see women in our community advocate for ACT and then get feel good vibes from running a charity drive to collect back to school packs from the community for those in need. Most people don't see the hypocrisy.
I can’t remember who said it, or when - it was the late eighties, early nineties - it was a church leader innNew Plymouth but they may have been quoting someone else, but I still recall them saying that starting food banks was a mistake because it meant the government got away with not doing its fundamental job of ensuring people had the basics of life. It was a Catch 22 of not wanting people to go hungry so filling a gap that shouldn’t have existed (the baseline principle of unemployment benefits was they should cover a family’s basic needs and this was before the 1990 benefit cuts and was mainly due to housing costs as well as inflation)
Indeed. At what point do organised foodbanks end up acting in collusion and collaboration with the (oppressive) state? Some of the rhetoric food charities use is indistinguishable from the arguments state actors use to block support for those in need - and it makes me deeply uncomfortable (to understate things a bit!)
YES YES! I have said this for a long time: in a good, fair and equitable society there should be no need for dozens and dozens of food banks, to me it is fundamentally unjust that so many "good" people think that the answer is bags of white bread, tinned tomatoes and teaching the poor to cook and grow their own vegetables ( never mind that we know how to cook and waiting twelve weeks for the potatoes and carrots to grow in a plastic pot on the concrete doorstep is a lesson in futility)
Way back in the days of Ruth, (she of the mother of all budgets) I had to feed my kids on what was left of my benefit after paying 2/3 into my mortgage, the father having left and locked himself into a denial of family support obligation with Social Welfare which went on for years after the youngest had left home.
When a stray church offered charity I was humiliated, but accepted. Nothing like hungry kids to lower your pride. My own family looked down their nose and referred to me as a "dole bludger"
We as a nation are so much better than this, yet I fear that as more people think taxes are a personal insult and that their own accumulation of money is because they are somehow superior to others and don't want to lose that sense of self importance, assauge their guilt by donating inedible budget brand food to a charity, we are well on the road to the horror of deliberately sustaining a huge, deprived and desperate underclass.
I wait until the day the worm turns and gets to wear the silk pyjamas and pose innanely grinning whilst every self appointed political "expert" finally learns what humiliation and inequity really feels like.
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. We can do so much better than this as a society - but boy is it taking an awful lot of pushing and arguing just to shift the dial a tiny bit. Sigh. Still, onward we must!
Your post is a perfect statement of the arrogance and hypocrisy shown by the likes of ‘I’m rich so I’m sorted’ Luxons of this world.
And then to link their hypocrisy to religion, the source of so much war and confrontation, adds to my disgust of these people.
The uncaring, dishonest way they implement their right wing neoliberal ideology damages so many lives, I fail to understand how these people live with themselves.
Whenever I see good work being done by food banks etc I think of Dickensian England, with a tiny proportion of the rich dudes being ‘philanthropists’, but probably still running their sweat shops. I love the idea in your penultimate paragraph!
Heh, thank you! A bit tongue in cheek lol but it seems we must once more argue for these old ideas of taxation and state support.
Thankyou for articulating the situation so well Dr Bex. I choose to ration (underfeed myself) when my food stocks are scarce rather than expose myself to the shame, judgement, thoughts and prayers, and inappropriate foodstuffs that a trip to the food bank would give me. Ive even defended the tinned tomatoes and canned coconut milk in the past, but i think thats cos Ive been taught thay I must be grateful for what is given. Unfortunately ive got multiple food intolerances, and very little of a single person portioned charity food box is actually useful to me.
I did however share my bountiful plum tree excess with ny neighbours, and wished I was mentlaly well enough to set up or join a community harvest co-op cos getting help to pick my trees would benefit me (especially cos I cant reach up due to my brain injury, Im only picking the low branches) and id love more variety and community in my life, but my health condition and history of trauma means it wouldnt be safe for me to invite folks into my property. Its frustrating that i can be so poor in someways, and so rich in others, but unable to make the most of the riches due to health.
I see and have fixed a lot of typos, but my vision is very doubled so apols for any that ive left.
Thanks for you ongoing advocacy for folks experiencing food insecurity. It feels really good to read, gives me hope that at least a few good folks "get it" 🙏
Thank you for sharing your own experiences, these nuances and complexities are poorly captured in the simplistic narratives and stereotypes hey?! I like how you frame it - poor in some ways, rich in others, yet unable to make the most of things due to poor health. Totally agree around strangers and safety - paying someone to come and prune my trees comes with a higher degree of safety and security than relying on a well-meaning-but-potentially-unknown volunteer.
Aww Dr Bex, i cried. You get it and I hope I recover enough to be able to step into a lived experience role to support others stuck in the poverty of health and weath trap. Much appreciate your articles and response 🫶
I’m a little teary reading this, as you have put my thoughts into such an articulate piece. I too was so angry about that Luxon post before Christmas and have been writing a letter to him in my head ever since.
And with this article as inspiration I may well put my letter into action! Thank you, as ever, for your work.
Thank you so much for your kind words. I was too exhausted pre-Christmas break to be able to manage anything articulate - but like yourself, it has been ruminating away. The vacuousness of it all was quite something.
👍💯 THIS!!! EVERY SINGLE WORD!!! (except not sure about giving a govt dept a fund instead - I thought that was WHY I paid taxes 🤔)
In fact I was reading the other day (on the 1News site) about a Lower Hutt programme called "Seeds of Hope" where to summarise a community initiative has built more than 200 garden boxes in (mostly) private backyards from Upper Hutt to Wainuiomata, which supply fresh veges to 800 whanau at time of writiing. A small portion of each garden goes to the whanau whose garden it is grown in, and the rest goes to foodbanks & food rescue organisation Kaibosh to be distributed within the community. It was started by Oasis Church pastor Daryl Green 2+ years ago for precisely the reasons laid out in your newsletter - to give people agency in filling the food deficit of their whanau & share it around, making community connections along the way - should have saved the link but it is "Community kai initiative works from the ground up" written by Lauren Crimp of RNZ. They now have some govt funding to employ people to help build the raised gardens, get them started, care for & harvest the produce etc. & several workers & volunteers have gone on to paid work elsewhere, with the whanau feeling like they are contributing not taking. Using individual gardens means whanau don't have to travel to pop out & weed or plant or water etc. like with large community gardens ( but those have benefits too of course👏) Not everyone HAS a backyard, so utilising the ones that do where they are not being useful for the household in other ways seems like a brilliant plan to me - a few "wealthy & sorted" types must have some spare land they could donate 🧐 🤷🙏
Another thing - I don't have a problem with giving tinned tomatoes as I choose to buy them myself, unless I want them to slice in a sandwich, as a very nutritious & low cost tasty base/addition to many meals, and they don't go "off" or rot if you don't eat them in time or get squashed in the bag, or contribute to the plastic waste problem by needing packaging to prevent them being squashed 🤷 White bread on the other hand 😱
Also, the criticism from some as to these garden projects not giving instant food - I like baby Kale & Spinach, & others Lettuce leaves - within an hour of bringing home seedlings ($3 a punnet of 6 plants) I can harvest individual leaves to add to meals, and although not substantial they raise the nutritive value of the meal. I have planted some out to grow to full size, but continue to harvest leaves from the rest & they continue to grow new ones almost overnight. All my outdoor veges are grown in raised beds where the lawn used to be, plus several smaller pots & border gardens with a mix of berries, grapes, herbs, & flowering plants for insects. Obviously growing from seeds takes longer for eating, but as the famous saying goes "the best time to plant a tree was 200 yrs ago - the next best time is NOW!" - and "give a man a fish & he eats for a day, teach him to fish & he can feed himself forever" (state of the planet remaining fishable of course 👀)
Thank you for your comment and for sharing your own experiences. Just to clarify - I was making a tongue-in-cheek argument for paying taxes, as taxes are a far more effective way of providing support than reliance on charity!
😁😂🤷 Forgive me - the internet seems to be full of crazy ideas that are meant seriously, so it's hard to tell sometimes 😁
Yes. The carefully curated messaging around charitable food 'donations' always gives the impression that food is available to anyone in 'need' or experiencing 'difficulty'. The expectation of thankfulness and gratitude makes donors and packing volunteers glow with righteous love for the carefully curated recipients. I reckon tax-free income up to 25k would help, increasing benefits would help, giving people food grants automatically because their rent is more than 50% of their income would help, taxing much much more above 130k would help, deglobalising and decolonising food systems would also help, landback would be incredibly practical and effective too. Working in the hunger sector holds many lessons for how broken our wealth driven society is.
Thank you for this article, you've put my thoughts into a much more articulate argument. I firmly believe charities shouldn't need to exist. Billionaires sit on their hoarded wealth and decide which charity is deserving of a few bucks and then get the tax breaks and kudos for it. If we had a small wealth tax on the insanely rich we'd have enough to feed, educate and provide healthcare to everyone. I was incredibly pissed off at the last election to see women in our community advocate for ACT and then get feel good vibes from running a charity drive to collect back to school packs from the community for those in need. Most people don't see the hypocrisy.