Why teaching a man how to fish wont solve food poverty
[Music]
give a man a fish
he eats for a day teach him how to fish
he eats for a lifetime
simple right but what if
that man or woman for that matter hadn’t
eaten
in three days and was too hungry to
learn how to fish
or what if they couldn’t get hold of a
fishing rod or had
no fuel to cook the fish and what if
they don’t even
like to eat fish perhaps
not so simple today i’m going to share
with you my story
and what i’ve learned from working
closely with people
experiencing food poverty my story
begins in lebanon as a student studying
to become a dietitian
at that time war in my home country
syria was unfolding
and my walks to class would become
distracted by news on social media
trying to find out
how many lives have we lost today and
how many homes
have been destroyed this week and by
unanswered questions that i still have
to this day like what
have i done to deserve to be safe
right now and what can i do to fix this
i was desperate to use my skills to help
and that’s what led me
to my first job at an organization that
was supporting
syrian refugees arriving to lebanon as a
dietitian i was to focus
on what they’re eating and i spent the
first few weeks
on the job looking at research and
resources trying to understand what are
some of the challenges the refugees
typically struggle with
and what are some of the meaningful
helpful solutions that i could help with
and i thought because i was syrian it
was going to help
i was going to build a connection with
them and get that message across
more easily
one day is particularly etched in my
memory
it was the day i met bassima a 52 year
old woman who welcomed me into her tent
where she was hosting one of her usual
social gatherings
and it was one of the first times that
i’d had the chance to sit down with a
group of women and talk to them about
what they’re eating
this time we were talking about the food
vouchers they were receiving and what a
good
balanced food shop might look like
i went through all of the information i
had and they were really kind and
generous
they even offered me tea even though it
was one of the few things they had
i got to the end any questions i asked
silence and then a
flood of questions like
can you help us get running water or
toilets installed
i’ve been feeding my baby tea for the
past six weeks can you
help us get formula
i it was
it was like we were having two different
conversation i felt
overwhelmed paralyzed even and mostly
frustrated that i couldn’t help that
this wasn’t my remit
i tried to explain that and basima
turned to me and said
habibti sweetheart
you’re welcome here anytime we really
enjoyed having you but your
advice doesn’t work for us how can
someone like you
understand what we are going through
and i realized she was right i didn’t
understand
even though i too assyrian and i too had
been forced to leave home
are at our experience of that was very
different
i was an expert in my subject not
in their lives and even though some of
what i knew could help
it wasn’t what they wanted or needed
at that time
a few months later and as the war
worsened my husband and i made a very
hard decision one of
the hardest in our lives to leave
everything behind
and moved to london and my first job
here was supporting
young homeless people and again as a
dietitian i was to support them with
what they’re eating
and i was really excited about this role
i i thought it was going to be easier
after all i’d been toughened up by my
previous experience there was a robust
health and social care system in the uk
that was supporting
this group and this was a really
creative and innovative approach we
did lots of cooking and food shopping
with young people
but for a lot of young people that i
worked with my
no matter how creative i got with my
block of six sessions
something just didn’t feel right young
people came to me with a weight
of the world on their shoulders and it
often felt like i was
handing them a flimsy umbrella
and asking them to walk through the
storm that is their life
and keep dry
i remember sitting down with ben to work
out his food budget for the week
and coming to minus three pounds
and jess who was in disbelief to
know that she could take home the
shepherd’s pie we’d cooked together and
the three
leftover potatoes that we didn’t use in
the session
she said that that was going to get her
through the week
this happened with young people over and
over again and
it soon became clear that the food the
young people were taking away was the
reason they were coming to the session
at all and i felt like i was back in
that tent
with the group of women in lebanon
feeling frustrated and overwhelmed that
what i was here to do wasn’t what they
wanted or needed at that time
so i needed some answers so i naturally
went back to the books to the evidence
that would perhaps
give me some guidance
and i was surprised there was very
little there
this issue of food poverty and this
group young homeless people was very
underrepresented in research so
we decided to do it ourselves and we did
lots of surveys
and interviews to get to the bottom of
what this group actually
needed from us and the results
were shocking
in the prior month 60 percent of our
young people
had skipped meals or gone to sleep
hungry
because they had no money
in one of the interviews a young person
said i’d be hungry but i wouldn’t eat
because i knew if i ate any more today i
would have nothing
left tomorrow i had to ration
my food
i’d expected this group to need some
support with budgeting or
some tips on cooking for less but
nothing nothing had prepared me for the
level
of food poverty they were experiencing
and while i knew that food poverty is a
global issue it touches millions of
people’s lives around the world
i was shocked that it was happening here
in the uk
one of the richest countries in the
world
and angry that it was happening as the
food industry
throws away 250 000 tons
of food that’s good quality and edible
each year that’s enough to feed a meal
to the uk population almost 10
times over
do you remember the last time you had to
delay your lunch
perhaps a meeting ran over
and you were running late didn’t have
time to grab a sandwich
we often joke about the feeling of being
hangry the combination of hunger
and anger now imagine that feeling
on repeat indefinitely
when someone’s hungry for a long period
of time not only are they
more nutritionally at risk their immune
system becomes more at risk their mental
health suffers it’s
hard to concentrate and remember things
energy is slow as
the body switching to survival mode
and while that is a really useful
adaptation if we were facing a famine
there is no place for it in our world
today
so why was no one around me talking
about this
how were we expecting young people to go
to things like math classes and english
classes that we put on
when they were hungry
food poverty in the uk is
real and it’s on the rise
and we cannot talk about food poverty
without
talking about the wider issue of poverty
in the uk
and let me share with you some numbers
to get this issue into perspective
in the uk nine children in a classroom
of 30
are in poverty one in five adults
is experiencing some level of food
insecurity from worrying about food
all the way to going full days without
eating
and in this past year alone 700
000 people have been pushed into poverty
and these
numbers are rising
and you’ll find
a few official definitions of what
poverty means and they’re usually along
the lines of
not having the financial means for a
minimum standard of living
but let me share with you what poverty
really means to the people i worked with
poverty is having to make hard decisions
on a daily basis like whether to
heat your home or feed your children
poverty is feeling anxious at the till
unsure whether or not you’ve got enough
money to pay for your groceries
it’s feeling guilty for having to tuck
your children
in bed on an empty stomach it’s being
in a constant state of crisis thinking
about the here
and now and having no head space to
think about your future
poverty is feeling
excluded and constantly judged by others
for what you can
and cannot buy and it’s feeling
frustrated at a system that has failed
you and is
constantly making you feel like it’s
your
fault poverty
is knowing that you’re on the wrong side
of
injustice and that there’s nothing
you’ve done to deserve this and nothing
you could have done to prevent it
so what was our role in tackling
all of this how can i help james the 19
year old who in the past week has seen
his
social worker support worker gp
therapist
and now me his dietitian and is still
going to sleep hungry
and what about lana who yes would rather
go hungry than go to the nearest
food bank where she might run into her
abusive
ex-boyfriend these questions
would keep me up at night and vasima’s
words
would ring in my memory your advice
doesn’t work for us
it felt like we held one small piece
of a big complex puzzle and without
finding the rest of those pieces
we had no chance at making a meaningful
difference
so our now team of two dietitians were
on a mission we wanted our young people
to be eating well
and with dignity and we wanted a zero
tolerance to hunger in our organization
and we went out and had a conversation
with anybody that would talk to us
our colleagues researchers food waste
charities
and most importantly the young people
that were experiencing this
together we started to come up with
solutions
to think about how things could be
different
and while we didn’t always agree and had
to navigate lots of ifs and buts and
jump through
many bureaucratic hoops it
finally felt like those pieces of the
puzzle were coming together and the
picture
was becoming clearer
and the result a social supermarket
we transformed one of our kitchens to
a supermarket we stocked the shelves up
with
food that’s been rescued by food waste
charities good quality
fresh frozen and long life food
young people volunteers and dietitians
ran the shop
together and next door we had a space
for young
for people to sit down and have a meal
together
we even had a michelin star chef
volunteer
and what started as a way to provide
access to good quality food to this
group
became something far greater this was
a safe space where young people could
come as they are no judgment
no expectations this was about
connection
inclusion choice and dignity
young people’s eyes lit up when they
were handed a shopping basket
and it made a real difference to lots of
people’s lives from
those young people who regained weight
they’d lost after
months of being malnourished to others
who fell in love with cooking and
started
and even took it up as a career
my favorite moments were when young
people tried new things for the first
time like
tom who at 19 tried butternut squash for
the first time and loved it and started
to make it every week
and amani who tried dried apricots for
the first time at 19
and hated them she was still happy she
tried them at least now
she had an opinion about it she said
we found that we were at capacity each
week and we left physically exhausted
but our hearts
full to see and hear the difference
that the supermarket was making
now i’m not here to say that a social
supermarket is the answer to food
poverty this
isn’t a long-term solution nor does it
tackle the root causes of food poverty
this is a solution that worked for this
group
at that point in time and working on it
gave me a great
deal of clarity it made me question
where we tend to look for answers for
those complex problems that our world
faces like
food poverty groups
like homeless people and refugees are
often
labeled and singled out as having
complex needs
and that’s always made me uncomfortable
people are complex we all are that’s
what makes us human
and tackling issues that touch human
lives so closely like the
food we eat should account for that
today i work in an innovation foundation
bringing people together in all their
wonderful complexity
to come up with solutions to problems
that our world faces like
food poverty and i’ve seen firsthand
the power of that i now know
that those moms those women in the
refugee camp
held a piece of the puzzle that no one
else holds
and so does each of you whether you’re a
researcher
a practitioner a chief exec a
policymaker
you cannot tackle this challenge on your
own
and others cannot tackle it without you
so let’s use our collective power
to tackle food poverty with
the complexity and humanity that it
needs
and i’m asking you from the bottom of my
heart three things
firstly find the food poverty that’s
hiding
in plain sight in your community
understand how many people you’re
interacting with on a day-to-day basis
that are worrying about their next meal
secondly figure out what you can do
about this
whether it’s having a different kind of
conversation supporting your
local food bank or rewriting the rules
we need all of it and finally
unlock the power of having people
like bassima lana james and amani
around the table people with lived
experience
who are the unrivaled experts
in their lives thank you