By Tim Murgatroyd

Is it just me who woke to the first weeks of a brand new year insulated by too much of last year’s flab? Given the statistics about how overweight we are becoming as a nation, I’m assured I’m not alone. The problem, I thought, is there’s too much food. And it’s too damn tasty.

The whole thing set me thinking about the world of my childhood. Were people in the 1970s and early 80s as overweight then? Memory can be the falsest of guides but I felt sure people were, well, just thinner, on the whole.

Does that mean people had less food back then? Well, nutrition took up a greater part of people’s disposable income, that’s true. Alcohol was certainly far more expensive – a fact my late teenage self regularly mourned before parties.

And here’s another thing that’s changed dramatically in the last 40 years. Consider the sheer variety of delicacies and cuisines available to tickle our palates.

We live in an age of food splendour unimaginable to even the wealthiest of our ancestors. Thai? Moroccan? No problem. Not to mention every kind of European menu, from Polish to Portuguese.

The issue with York so-called “Indian” restaurants is not finding a good one, but which region of the sub-continent you wish to patronise from a gourmet perspective: Nepalese, Gurkha, South Indian or Bangladeshi? I could go on.

So maybe too much food isn’t a problem at all. It just shows how rich we all are, doesn’t it? Go with the dough. Celebrate your groaning palate. And go large with abandon . . .

Except – and it’s a big except – thousands of people in York suffer the opposite problem.

York Press:

Doing a great job: Laura Chalmers at the York Foodbank. But how can it be right that in this day and age so many people rely on food handouts?

Take a trip to the website of York Foodbank. Sadly, you’ll get a large dollop of moral indigestion.

On the home page statistics are blazoned beneath photographs of people of all ages and backgrounds. Ordinary people like you and me and your brother or aunt - “3,268 three-day emergency food supplies given to people in crisis last year . . . £1,104 a month average rent in York . . . 1 in 5 of the UK population live below the poverty line . . .”

Now maths has never been my strongpoint but even I can work out such numbers do not add up to a healthy community. And I’m referring to not just physical health, though that is important and costs us all dearly through extra demands on the NHS, but moral health.

It makes me wonder if we are all complicit in the greed that lies behind such inequality. After all, what do most of us do to turn the situation around?

And it’s clearly not just one area of our city that’s affected. Acomb, Tang Hall, Huntington, Gillygate, all have the dubious distinction of needing to dish out bags of supplies to people in real want. (If you don’t believe me about the levels of need in our country, watch Ken Loach’s amazing film I, Daniel Blake. The scene in the food bank left me choked with baffled, angry tears).

“So what?”, you might say. The world’s inherently unfair, inequality is inevitable. And perhaps some unfairness is part of the human condition. What worries me when I look at the website of York Food Bank is the heartless level of inequality in our midst. It has got wider over the course of my lifetime and gets wider every year. Could a trip to the food bank happen to my own family? Will my own children have to go to a food bank one day? Is that so preposterous? How about you?

Unthinkable thoughts when you’re used to too much, not too little.

Of course, we tell ourselves, it couldn’t happen to me, I’m far too resourceful, healthy and clever. But no doubt the recipients of the 3,268 emergency food supplies in York last year thought it could never happen to them . . .

Is it just me who thinks, hopes, knows we can do better than this for ALL in our community?

  • Tim Murgatroyd is an English teacher at a York secondary school and a published novelist. He is the new weekly Wednesday columnist for The Press.