Livery Food Initiative Seminar
1st July 2024Drapers' Hall
I attended the Livery Food Initiative (LFI) seminar "Addressing Food Insecurity", at Drapers' Hall.
This was a very interesting but sobering discussion on the problems that certain parts of our society have in getting enough food, particularly of the right quality, and what the LFI is trying to do about it.
Some basic information put forward at the seminar:
- A healthy diet costs about twice as much as a cheap diet
- Given food inflation of over 25% since before Covid, lower income families find it very difficult to afford a healthy diet. They know what a healthy diet should be, but given the choices of paying the rent, the heating bill etc, they often cannot afford to get the right food.
- The average height of a 5 year old child has declined by 5cm in recent years. The UK is the only developed country where this has happened.
- Poor diet is one of the significant contributing causes to poor mental and physical health, which leads to people dropping out of the workforce
- The number of food banks in the country has exploded from almost nothing before the financial crash to nearly 3,000, the same as the number of stores that Tesco has in the UK.
- General food waste is too high
- Almost nothing of this subject has been dicussed during the election campaign by any party!
The LFI is helping organisations such as City Harvest, which collects surplus food from farms, supermarkets and food processing companies and distributes it to food banks. This year the LFI has helped provide a second truck which significantly increases the amount of surplus food that can be collected and distributed. This is absolutely necessary as demand for help with food far exceeds the amount that is currently collected.
Our Benevolent Fund is already contributing to the LFI and I suspect will have to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, so any additional donations that Company members can make to the Benevolent Fund will be more than welcome!