Each Sunday I cook a meal for 20 people. I don’t have 20 friends: this meal is for the guests of the Street Food Project in Penzance. Its remit to is provide a hot meal 365 days of the year to anyone who needs it, and it has never failed to do so.
The Street Food Project is an arm of Growing Links, a community interest company which exists to promote an emotional connection between people and the food they eat.
It has transformed a few acres of scrub into a thriving market garden tended by volunteers, who revel in the joy of growing things.
Gardening is a pleasure but needs must. Since 2010 Conservative governments have outsourced feeding people to their own communities. In west Cornwall, one of the poorest areas of western Europe, the need is great, and it has exploded since the pandemic and what we euphemistically call the cost-of-living crisis.
The most cynical parliamentarians, looking at the numbers of foodbanks and the people who need them, dare to call this success. How so? When the Street Food Project, the brainchild of a woman called Lynne Dyer, began it fed 20 people a night. Now it feeds 50 and more.
The most cynical MPs, looking at the numbers of those who need foodbanks, dare to call this success
We feed the street homeless, who are most often cursed by ill luck. Lack of housing — from the tourist perspective, Cornwall is a paradise of Airbnbs — has increased their numbers. We feed people who sleep in their cars and vans. Homelessness is spun as bad character by bad actors but nothing could be further from the truth. They are often young men with clear eyes, boys really, children, camping on the cliffs in wind and rain. I don’t ask why they must live in tents: it’s bad enough that they must walk two miles for hot food. We give them clothing and bedding if we have it.
We feed the elderly and the unwell. We feed people living in emergency accommodation without kitchens and, increasingly, families: working families. The cost-of-living crisis, which really means a new normalcy of poverty in the sixth largest economy in the world, has decimated them: people without food are also without hope.
It has also affected volunteers, who are now less able to afford the food, the fuel, and the petrol to deliver these meals.
Donations are down. Need is up everywhere. I know a food share that used to feed remnants to pigs. Now there are no remnants. People do their best but the well is running dry. “Nothing is guaranteed,” Dyer tells me, “but rising numbers”.
All charities and community interest companies chase the same shrinking funds but who can live without food, a grinding, daily need? We try to raise money from holiday cottage owners and tourists, who sing the refrain that they love Cornwall. I think — which Cornwall? The one they invented? Or do they love, rather, the landscape of Cornwall, which doesn’t need people to compound its insane beauty?
I wonder if it is just easier for them not to see the hunger, and I wish more than anything that they could. I wish they would donate to Growing Links, and places like it. It is summer, you see, and they seem to possess a numbness, an unseeing — but winter is coming very soon.
The beautiful game
It’s a beautiful thing for a woman to watch the success of the Lionesses, now through to the semi-finals of the Women’s World Cup, where they will meet the tournament’s co-hosts, Australia. I am from a generation for whom women’s sport was a postscript, something given, not taken, and never the big show. In a mirror of the world beyond sport, it was accepted that, no matter their gifts, women would earn less money, and receive less attention than men.
This changed slowly and now quickly. The crucible was the UEFA Women’s Championships — the Euros — in 2022. The Lionesses played the game the men did, with one difference: they won. They are strong, skilful and feminine. Young girls are watching, and they are changed too. They see the most valuable thing a woman can have, and in the biggest arena possible: agency.
Tanya Gold is a columnist
