Life inside The Trussell Trust food bank in Dundee

But my anger can’t be sustained, so I just accept most people are either reading trash or colouring in pictures of wee wizards with stubby crayons and calling it reading, and I wonder what this is doing to our imagination? Surely those of us who avoid good fiction are denying our minds stories and escapism and new worlds, and this can’t be healthy. They’ll never be pushed to imagine themselves  in a new or challenging situation and this might cause imagination to dry up and empathy to shut down.

And this could be one of the reasons for the cruel attitude towards food bank users. For that reason I would love to see Iain Duncan Smith’s reading list: I would bet there’s no fiction on it. Perhaps there’s a colouring book sitting beside a box of grey Crayolas, for this man’s mind can’t have any vigour or imagination: everything is surely dim and uniform. Nothing unexpected intrudes and nothing unexpected happens. In his life every day is the same: wake up to enjoy his unearned wealth and be chauffeured into the office to plot new ways of removing money and support from the sick, depressed, troubled and disabled. Every day gloriously the same.

But imagination is needed when trying to understand food banks because everyone who crosses its threshold has arrived there via their own path and has their own story, and some are horrifying or just unbelievably sad, as this documentary, The Food Bank: Scotland’s Hidden Hunger (BBC1), showed.

There was the young man who was living an unremarkable life until one Christmas morning when his mother was found dead. Poisonous ripples extended outward and soon his father evicted him and, homeless and bereaved, with everything horribly changed and uncertain, he turned to heroin. Now he shuffles through the street to the foodbank wearing his tracksuit and baseball cap and the likes of Iain Duncan Smith, those without empathy and imagination, will dismiss him as a ned, a junkie, a scrounger. Look at his teeth! Look at his jogging trousers! There can be no story for such a person other than: NED. It does take effort to imagine a sad, human story behind his ruined face.

And there are also the smooth, uncracked and uncrackable judgements about how food banks work: Oh, these people, they just walk in off the street and soon they’re marching out with bags of shopping! So say the owners of the cookery and colouring-in books, but the volunteers who work there sort and arrange the food then act as mini social workers and have to arrange unique food parcels depending on the individual person’s circumstances. Some people can’t afford to pay their bills so have no electricity or gas, therefore there’s little point in giving them a tin of soup or a packet of noodles. The volunteers have to stop and think: “they can’t cook actual pasta”. That’s right: some people in Britain are so poor “they can’t cook actual pasta”.

This documentary shows how desperately people need food banks, and how every person who uses them is unique. And if each person in the documentary is unique then so is each person watching it. We’re equally unique, and so equally human and vulnerable, so we could end up down there collecting a carrier bag if we lost our job, or were without family, or fell ill and saw people lose patience and turn away. It could happen to most of us if only we had the mental courage to imagine it. But it’s hideous to imagine it, and so we distance ourselves by saying “it’s the neds, it’s the junkies”.

Admittedly, one of the people in the documentary had spent all his money on drink and also treated himself to Vans trainers and new jeans when his benefits came in. That, too, is reality. To think every food bank user will be angelic and apologetic, bent low and meek under suffering isn’t realistic. This programme reminds us of the reality, and how odd it is that we need imagination to understand reality.