As a child in poverty, the institutional food I was served saved my life. Today's kids need the same

The special food issue of the Big Issue magazine (on sale now) brings back to me my troubled dietary history. I was not breastfed, as my mother preferred that the marketplace provide me with the liquor of life. We know babies of all species need milk but the one I imbibed was cow’s milk – probably provided by my father who was a milkman. He had a horse and cart, and the horse was called Dobbin. But added to my milk, which I loved, was tea and sugar. 

That this milk was given to me for my first two years, and that nearly eight decades later I still remember the experience, is often questioned by doubters. But I stick to my story that, from probably 18 months, I have strong memories from among the blackened houses of the slums of London’s Notting Hill. It was a particularly unhappy brew to start a baby’s life on, destined to create dental rot and a tendency to desire sugar. Which of course it did.

What it showed was the poverty of our circumstances, and the thinking that went with it. Postwar Britain, with its new abrasive socialist regime would have rejected my mother’s much-loved concoction, along with the stringy greens with Bisto gravy and the water-soaked potato mashed with margarine to cater for my young tastes. But the socialist state-sponsored dietary advice was available in newspapers and on posters in doctors’ surgeries, not in our slummy abodes. The welfare state, imposed when I was two, was just an idea for most of us. 

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It was only once we were in school that we could be improved by example. By playground exercises and fresh milk without the taint of sugar, by magic capsules and castor oil to give us some jet fuel – so to speak – to propel us free of poverty’s distortions. Dental inspections became part of the yearly round of education, along with the ‘cough and drop’ test for boys, to check for ruptures. And school dinners that gave us a well-cooked variety. 

On a recent visit to Liverpool, I was told that 50% of children’s visits to the Alder Hey Hospital were due to dental-related illnesses. This profound reality suggests we may have returned to my own ‘bad old days’. Days when poverty so distorted one’s life it was a toss-up whether you were killed by ignorance or by neglect. I and my brothers were blessed by the break-up of our family and our being placed in a Catholic orphanage for a few years.

It may have saved our lives, for the food we were given had goodness in it and was not determined by poor wages. And you had to eat everything on your plate. The most unsavoury of puddings was like eating snot and it was called tapioca. 

Read more:

• The only way forward is to split the poverty atom
• The modernisers of postwar Britain forgot one vital ingredient
• Marmot principles should be applied to government departments for ending poverty

We survived the orphanage gastronomically, and returned to a Fulham council flat and the continuation of too many mouths and not enough wages. It was bleak days until my mother got a job as a bus conductor. Then the sweets and food multiplied for the short period she worked on Central London’s buses. And in the summer holidays she made a special arrangement with the smallest cafe in Fulham, opposite our block of council flats. What a joyous feast. Beans on toast and a fried egg and a KitKat and two cups of tea.

School dinners, which were not free, provided solid growing food and stuff like the rude-sounding but popular spotted dick with custard. And then the kindly, thoughtful innovation of school dinners throughout the summer holidays. When the big buzzing kitchens and canteen were like an oasis of socialistic good sense. Happy summers flowed when we were left to our own devices, knowing that we could go to a school – not our own school – at lunchtime and indulge in large amounts of grub. 

As did every poor person in the 1950s and 60s we gobbled up what was put before us. In the same way that the better classes went for fondues and French cheeses that smelt of rotten socks, we acclimatised to starch, sugar and salt. Our class-divided menus generally meant a hit to our later health. Decades of poor food produced a great strain on the NHS. Thank god for the state rescue of us from the paucity of food that goes with poverty.

There are four million rescue operations needed at the moment, roughly the number of children living in abject poverty. Each of them needs more than just government initiatives. A seismic change is long overdue. It must be made central to all our efforts. I was blessed early on by institutional eating. After school it was correctional institutions for the badly behaved that helped me into health. But institutional food has suffered a decline in quality since my ‘rosy’ food days. We hope our special food issue will stir the government and all of us to put food at the centre of our social renaissance. 

One of my favourite experiences in the early days of Big Issue was going to a restaurant de coeur (‘of the heart’) in Lisieux, France, with the local chief of police. To eat with the needy, the public servants, the public of all levels of prosperity. It was an eye opener. A decent meal for all. And a level of solidarity we need to emulate. 

Would it not be a renaissance of sorts if we helped create, through the good offices of a child’s stomach, those four million exit strategies out of poverty? Laying the foundation stones for later good health. Though I would suggest that a complete change in our food thinking needs to spread across all social divides. The fact that you’ve got money today doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not eating shit.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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