Foodbank tesimony
September 15, 2011
Tarik’s story
As you might expect the Coventry foodbank project elicits many comments and opinions from the general public, sometimes not positive. We frequently collect at supermarkets around the city and shoppers will stop and have conversations with us about the project.
The most common question is ‘who is this food going to?’
I quite instinctively know where this conversation is going. A recent Daily Mail article about the plight of 23 families whose children go Frederick Bird highlighted the prejudice. The article twisted a genuine need for food by 150 people into a jingoistic article on benefit scroungers. The article (which will be the subject of a press complaint) was a malicious twist of the truth into a lie.
Who is the food going to? Well the simple answer is; people in crisis in Coventry. 2,000 mouths fed in the first six months. And no you haven’t misread that, there isn’t an extra ‘0’ here. But sometime… [more]