Stealing food should not

be "necessary" in order to eat. This is not the 1800's. 

I am conscious of places like the Foodbank and the van which feeds some of the homeless. When the Senior Cat was alive and going to church each Sunday I would hand him items of food or toiletries to go in the box which was taken to the Magdalen Centre in the city.There it would be distributed to people in need.

I have tried to go on doing that. Now I wait until I have a box full and then a friend takes it up to the church for me or D...., the priest, will call in for more timber from the shed and take it with him. No, I am not "rich" in the sense that I can buy a lot but I am careful. I can budget. In that way I consider myself to be fortunate.

My mother was good at doing this. My grandmothers were good at doing it too. My maternal grandmother needed to do it. My maternal grandfather was not a good provider. He could have been, indeed should have been, but the money often went elsewhere. My mother was taught how to manage on very little. We had very little when I was young. Teachers did not earn much and the Senior Cat was paying fees to do his university degree as well. 

My early memories of food are of endless meals of lamb stew made from the cheapest cuts of meat or cheap minced beef with lots of rice or potato. There were other vegetables from the garden and fruit from the trees at my paternal grandparents' home. School lunches were often a Vegemite sandwich - the cheapest possible filling. As children we didn't expect anything better and I think it is likely that children right around us were eating much the same way. 

But, we ate. We grew. There were probably children who were going hungry but I strongly believe that almost all children came to school with something much the same as me to eat. There were even children who bought their lunch from the tuck shop on a regular basis. Their fathers were probably the well paid "wharfies", men who worked on the docks. 

When we moved to the country it was not much different. The bread was generally home made because there was no bakery in any of the places we lived in. The sandwich fillings became mutton from the Sunday roast, wallaby or kangaroo, or Vegemite again. Fruit was more scarce. We all found the quandongs too sour to eat without sugar. My mother would give us a few dried apricots or a dozen or so sultanas along with an apple bought at a shop in a town some distance away. Any other fresh fruit was very expensive, far too expensive for most people.

At night people ate mutton and more mutton. It was killed on the farm. We got our share from a local farmer - a hind quarter one week, a forequarter the next. Mum would make it last. She added potatoes, pumpkin and carrots. The peas came from a packet labelled "Surprise". It was a monotonous diet but we accepted it.

Now I wonder about the people here in the city who, according to the article in this morning's paper, are stealing food to survive. I have no doubt that some of them are very short of money. I have no doubt they are really struggling to survive and feed their children but I wonder how well they would survive if they were put out into the remote areas we lived in and had only the food my mother and the other mothers had. Those remote farms did not have much in the way of vegetable gardens. There was no water for that sort of thing. You had a bath once a week and all washed in the same water. 

Here there is plenty of food on the shelves in the supermarket and much of it is "own brand" now. Occasionally I have looked at things I might need to buy if I was feeding a family. I think I could feed them quite well on a very limited budget. The problem is that it would take time and knowledge to prepare the food. It is something many people no longer have. It would also mean having a family willing to eat a diet which many people would find dull now, which children might resent. There wouldn't be pizza or other fast food. 

Nobody should be going hungry here but whether some of them are able to prepare and willing to eat what we ate may be something that needs thinking about. If they were it might leave more for those who are in really desperate need.