Talking Early Years: What have Food Banks got to do with the Early Years?
Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things Podcast Series
This year, LEYF is celebrating 120 years of history. In doing so, we are reflecting on what was in order to look towards the future. As an organisation, we have always been involved with issues of poverty and it was interesting to find that back in 1926 we were involved with the National Cookery School of Cookery which is a slightly different twist to what we are doing now. Our organisation then was known as the City of Westminster Society of Health and was helping parents to learn how to cook to support their children’s health. Children were dying from malnutrition because they had too little to eat whilst today, children from poorer families are suffering from obesity resulting from a diet of poor-quality food high in fat, sugar and salt. Early Years is a highly political space where powerful issues of finance, education, employment, health, housing, and care all collide and we have to navigate through this with children’s futures central to the debate. Today, we are helping by training our chefs as part of the LEYF Early Years Chef Academy, running food banks and partnering with food pantries and food distribution organisations such as City Harvest.
In this podcast, I am talking to two inspirational LEYF managers who have each gone that extra mile in the name of helping to tackle food poverty and supporting their local community. With at least 2.1 million people having used a food bank in the year to March 2022 (according to official Government figures), I ask what’s next for food banks as the cost-of-living crisis continues to create “a tsunami of need” across a struggling population?
