A single mother college graduate who used to work as an accountant has reduced her daily food intake to “leftovers at dinner” to feed her three children as the cost of living crisis escalates, the Evening Standard can reveal.
Amina, who worked three days a week as the financial manager of a charity before being made redundant during the pandemic, said she has “trained” herself to eat once a day to enable her to have enough to feed her children, aged six, four and one.
The 42-year-old said: “The kids have Rice Krispies for breakfast but I have trained myself to hold back because I need the cereal and milk to last. I don’t have lunch. For dinner, I usually cook rice or pasta with beans. I let my children eat first and I have what’s left over.”
She added: “Sometimes they ask, ‘mummy, why are you not eating?’ I tell them I already ate. If there is nothing left, I drink my tea and go to sleep hungry. At first, my body was craving things. It was incredibly hard.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she spoke: “My body has got used to it but mentally it’s been traumatic. I have lost 10kg in a few months. People stop me in the street and comment on how much weight I’ve lost. Some even do so admiringly. Little do they know. You can’t tell them that you don’t eat because you sacrifice for your children and that there is not enough money to buy food for everyone. You can’t knock on people’s doors and ask for food because they will judge you.”
Amina worried about escalating heating bills. “We are on a pre-paid meter which is the most expensive,” she said. “If you don’t have energy, you can’t cook. Buying pre-cooked food is too expensive. I wish I could go back to work but my youngest is too little and childcare costs are crazy.”
Amina attends a weekly food bank at Spring Community Hub near her south London flat in Peckham to help her top up. She is on universal credit and her two oldest get free school meals. She doesn’t know how she would cope without this support, she said.
“Kids need three meals a day to manage. They’re too young to notice that I am not eating and I would never allow them to. That would break my heart. I never ever want them to feel hungry. Or guilty.” Felicia Boshorin, chief executive of Spring Community Hub, said she regularly took calls from mothers like Amina desperate for “pre-cooked food” because “they don’t have the cash to pay the gas or electricity to cook it”. “It’s awful, we’re seeing more and more working people now and people with degrees and qualifications.”
‘Mum, they said I couldn’t have lunch today’
Another graduate mother who frequents Spring Community Hub food bank, a full-time mother married with four children, said that she had got herself into “school lunch debt” with the catering company at her sons’ secondary school.
Samantha (not her real name), 44, said: “My younger two get free school meals because we live in Southwark and they are one of the four boroughs that provide universal free school meals to all primary school children, but the two older boys are in high school and don’t get a free lunch. I have savings from when I worked which puts me above the £16,000 threshold so I don’t get universal credit, but with my husband now unemployed for two years, we live entirely off our savings and we are struggling. School lunches cost us £2.70 each a day.”
She added: “Sometimes I have to call the school because the catering company refuse my son a meal because we are in arrears. My boys come home and tell me, ‘mum, they said I couldn’t have lunch today.’ It cuts me up. Sometimes they don’t have breakfast at home because we run out or they leave the little that’s there for the younger ones or they’re in a rush. It means they won’t have eaten all day. They usually come home with headaches.”
Samantha has a degree in criminology and worked for the police and prisons as an outreach and probation worker but stopped because it was “too stressful to combine with mothering”. She said: “We live on the fourth floor of an estate, seven of us in a three-bedroom because my brother-in-law lives with us as well.
“I got three boys all sharing one room while our daughter sleeps with me and my husband. We spend around £250 on food a month but it’s not enough, it’s just not enough.”
