Let them eat fruit-cake!

New studies show that low income families bought 30% less fruit and vegetables last year. That is not surprising with food prices going up almost 20% last year. An average family is now spending £24.50 on food a week, which is 11.5% of its income, a low income family even spends as much as 15.8%, just on food! Of course with rising costs the first things to drop out of the shopping baskets are relatively pricy food items, such as fresh vegetables and fruits.

It doesn’t take a scientist to tell you that healthy nutrition is the key to health in general, which is especially true for children. But last year, children from low income families only got an average of 2.7 units of fruit and veg a day. This is almost half of the recommended 5 units a day. Now even school meals have gone up by 4-5 pence a day, a rise which seems tiny. However, if your budget is already stretched to the max-something more and more working class families are experiencing-even a little can be too much. Therefore, many parents cannot afford letting their children eat at school anymore and have to give them less nutritional meals.

Far away seem the dark days where people were suffering from the effects of malnutrition, at least in the Western World. But due to the rise in food prices and the resulting shortage in healthy nutrition, more and more people in Britain (sadly, the majority of which are children) are diagnosed with cases of mal- or even undernourishment. Of course the bourgeois press isn’t short of constantly portraying the “bad parenting” of working class families as the main cause of this development. But what are working class parents supposed to do when healthy options just do not fit into the budget? After all they don’t have the nice fat pay check of a tabloid journalist.

All this shows once more what a failure the capitalist system is. The cause for the rise in food prices is not shortage (in fact, the world is producing more food today than at any other time in history) but speculation on food prices. And as we know, when eggs are rare, eggs are dear. So to keep their profits high the capitalists create a shortage of their own! Half of the worlds’ food production is wasted, most of it before it actually lands on a shelf in the shop. This system is pure madness, and there is no reason why we should let it go on like this.