Bring back British Restaurants to help feed struggling families

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Professor Bryce Evans from Liverpool Hope University tells the Leicester Mercury:

"Make no mistake, we’re facing a national emergency which I don’t think has truly bitten yet. The Government must think creatively about how we enable people to eat cheaply and to eat well and it has to be something more sustainable than what we saw with Eat Out to Help Out or the basic food bank."

The "something more" he suggests is a revival of the British Restaurants that were set up by the government during the Second World War and run by local government or voluntary agencies. They catered for people who had been bombed out of their homes, had run out of ration coupons or otherwise needed help.

Our solution today to the problem of people who cannot feed themselves is the food bank, Evans sees problems with them:

"Many food banks require a referral in order to be able to access them and it means there’s an unfortunate, almost Dickensian, stigma attached to using them. You have to present as the 'deserving poor'. And I find that extremely uncomfortable, particularly when you see that working people are using food banks.

"There’s also the issue that sometimes a food bank user might not actually be able to afford the fuel bill or possess the skills to be able to cook the food that they're given."

And don't run away with the idea that British Restaurants were necessarily drab. Evans says:

"For a lot of working-class people, the national kitchens were their first taste of eating out in a restaurant. And these were often nice places to visit.

"There were tablecloths, pianos and gramophones. Buckingham Palace even loaned priceless pieces from the Royal collection to hang on the walls at social restaurants in Croydon. It was incredible. The whole atmosphere was a lot less stigmatising than it is today and it was a real melting-pot where you’d often see diners of every class."

Ridicule this idea if you wish, but I think the coming cost-of-living crisis will require this sort of radical thinking. After all, it was fine for the the state to subsidise middle-class diners under the 'Eat Out to Help Out' scheme.