Josh Sutton - Food Worth Fighting for: From Food Riots to Food Banks

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6. CHAPTER ONE
   MARCH ON THE MARKETS THE WEST COUNTRY FOOD RIOTS OF 1766
   
7. CHAPTER TWO
   AGAINST THE GRAIN THE ELY AND LITTLEPORT BREAD AND BEER RIOTS OF 1816
   
8. CHAPTER THREE
   CAPTAIN SWING AND THE RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE (1830)
   
9. CHAPTER FOUR
   THE ORIGINAL FISH FIGHT THE NEWLYN FISH RIOTS OF 1896
   
10. CHAPTER FIVE
    PLENTY MORE FISH IN THE SEA THE COD WARS
    
11. CHAPTER SIX
    NOT ENOUGH TO GO ROUND RATIONING AS CROWD CONTROL IN A TIME OF WAR
    
12. CHAPTER SEVEN
    THE TIMES THEY ARE ACHANGING THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN FOOD SYSTEM AND THE GROWING BATTLE FOR FOOD SECURITY
    
13. CHAPTER EIGHT
    THE RISE OF THE SUPERMARKETS
    
14. CHAPTER NINE
    FOOD POVERTY AND FOOD CHARITY IN BRITAIN TODAY
    
15. CHAPTER TEN
    PROTEST AND THE RISE OF THE FOOD HERO
    
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Some years ago, I worked as a labourer in deepest rural Wiltshire. My wages at the time were one hundred and seventy five pounds, and two rabbits per week. The rabbits werent written into my contract, I didnt even have a contract, but my boss insisted that I should benefit from his sideline of nocturnal pest control for the local farmers. Though the freezer at home was fast filling with rabbits (two rabbits per week is a lot for a young single fellow to get through), on the weeks that they werent available, I found I would miss them. It felt as though I had been short-changed; it was akin to having my wages docked. Compensation came, from time to time, with a nice bit of wild venison, which my boss had accidentally managed to shoot while out hunting rabbits, so things probably balanced out in the end. However, as well as teaching me the finer points of skinning, butchering and cooking Leporidae, this direct relationship with food left me with a lasting appreciation of the importance of its availability. Perhaps more importantly, it gave me an insight into the effect that a lack of available food can have on the morale of the village labourer.

It is through the plight of the village labourer, the fisherman, the The connotations of rioting went far beyond mere lawbreaking and opened up possibilities for celebration and revelry.

With over a million people dependent on food banks, and an all party parliamentary group (APPG) set up to examine food poverty and hunger in Britain in 2014, it struck me that todays food system is still failing a huge swathe of British society. How is it that school teachers in modern Britain can raise concerns about their pupils capacity to learn, because children are going to school hungry in the morning? How do we explain the explosion in the numbers of local and national charities, as well as individuals, offering food aid to the less well off in this country? Some of those concerns were reflected by the Bishop of Truro, Tim Thornton in the introduction to the report Feeding Britain, published by the APPG in December of 2014:

The issues people face relating to hunger and food poverty are exacerbated and highlighted because there are hardly any of the ways and means that once did exist for people to support each other. We believe that the rise in the use of food banks is a sign of the breakdown of this core value in our society.

And the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, said in the Guardian in December 2015 that it was a tragedy that hunger still existed in the UK in the 21st century and he praised the work of charity food banks which he said were striving to make life bearable for people who are going hungry.

The leader of the church of England placed some of the blame for hunger on the government, singling out unnecessary problems caused by bureaucratic delays in welfare benefit payments and sanctions financial penalties imposed by job centres which left vulnerable claimants without money for food for weeks on end.

In an age where the vast majority of us carry out the weekly shop under one roof, we seem to have lost faith in the market place. Skips full of surplus food deliberately spoiled to prevent scavengers, the horsemeat scandal of 2013, and more recently the examples of creative accountancy at supermarket chain, Tesco, have shaken public confidence in our supermarkets. Yet rather than take to the streets to demand change, the majority of us continue to queue at the express checkout counter, tempted, and bought off with two-for-one offers and a price guarantee. Consumers and food producers alike, have become unsuspecting collateral damage in a never-ending supermarket price war as our food system has developed and grown, driven largely by commercial avarice. We have become casualties of a capitalist culture that undermines our right to food, a right which arguably dates back to the signing of the Magna Carta, and was more recently set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Our food system today has given rise to the paradox of soaring obesity rates, while others go hungry. Food poverty has hit the headlines. How can it be that a pint of milk can cost as little as 58p, yet families the length and breadth of Britain are referred to food banks on an almost daily basis?