In 1909, Maud Pember Reeves, a bank manager’s daughter with a big house in Kensington, came up with a plan to make British poverty less lethal. She would cross the river, enter the houses of the poor in Lambeth, and preach — in her words — the gospel of porridge.
Reeves was an energetic and successful socialist campaigner. In New Zealand, she’d helped secure votes for women. In London, where she moved in 1896, she founded the Fabian Women’s Group in her front room in Brunswick Gardens and, appalled by the disparities in child mortality rates across the city, decided to investigate. She and her fellow Fabian Dr Ethel Bentham recruited a cohort of 42 mothers and encouraged them to keep records of their domestic expenditure, with a particular emphasis on diet. Some were not literate, but their children were. Their spelling was often touchingly hard to decipher. Reeves scratched her head at references to items such as “dryaddick”, “sewuitt” and “currince”.1
Reeves and her Fabian comrades wanted to answer questions that attended the discussion of poverty in the Edwardian age, and are still asked today. Why did the working poor spend so much on the wrong things? (Lavish funerals, it seems, were the Sky boxes of 1909.) Why did they eat unhealthy food? Why, for instance, did they have bread and margarine for breakfast when a nice bowl of porridge was cheaper and more nutritious? “The women of Lambeth listened patiently,” wrote Reeves, “according to their way, agreed to all that was said, and did not begin to feed their families on porridge.”
Over a century later, the preaching goes on. At the end of last month, the staff at my local food bank used Twitter to issue a statement about confectionery:
Some followers have raised concern about us putting certain items on our shopping lists (eg crisps & chocolate). Let me clarify – whilst we agree that they are of little nutritional value, we also believe in blessing our clients with a treat from time to time. (1 of 2)
— Lewisham Foodbank (@lewishamfood) June 25, 2020
The announcement provoked an indignant report in the Lewisham News Shopper and a convulsion of disgust on Twitter — which was quickly converted into pledges of Milkybars and Curly Wurlys.
Human emotions are historically contingent. Nobody today is plagued by acedia, the form of religious despair felt by fourth-century Christian desert hermits between 11am and 4pm. Others are culturally specific. Only the Ilongot group of the Philippines feel liget, an angry enthusiasm that pushes them to great feats of activity – sometimes agricultural, sometimes murderous. So what’s the nature of the concern felt by those donors who complained about the presence of chocolate in the parcels sent out by the Lewisham food bank?
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