Jayne Dowle: Small coalfield town in vanguard of a food revolution

A little town in South Yorkshire, decimated by the demise of the mining industry. Since the pits went, it’s been famous – or infamous – mostly for its chronic unemployment, ill-health, poor housing and social deprivation.

Until now. Goldthorpe is the location of the United Kingdom’s very first social supermarket. The Community Shop takes unwanted stock from major food retailers, including Asda, Morrisons and M&S, and sells it with discounts
of up to 70 per cent. A loaf of bread for 20p? Who could say no to that?

There’s a catch though. It’s only open to a limited number of people living on certain benefits. And it is membership only. You have to be invited. The parent company leafleted residents in 50 roads targeted as having particularly high levels of deprivation. Inevitably, there have been mutterings about this being “unfair” to those who live elsewhere but are struggling to make ends meet. And of course, there are plenty not on those certain benefits who would also benefit from cheap groceries.

It would be naïve to ignore those cavils. However, let’s put them aside for a minute and look to the good points. The Community Shop helps people in the direst of need. It also goes one further than the charitable food banks which have sprung up in recent years. It is not about handing out free food; it’s about providing a cheaper alternative to the supermarkets.

There are plans to offer shoppers advice about how to shop for
and cook basic healthy meals.

A good idea, as long as it is undertaken without preaching or patronising.

It’s a tricky one to pull off altogether, to be honest. If you lived in Goldthorpe, would you be embarrassed to think your neighbourhood needed this initiative? Some locals have indicated they wouldn’t be seen dead in there. Let me tell you this though – there is no shame in shopping at a social supermarket. I’d do it, if I had the chance. In fact, why shouldn’t it be a source of pride?

We all moan about the cost of food shopping. Yet how many of us think about exactly where we get our food from? The Community Shop is designed to benefit those in need. However, it should also make us all consider how much money we spend, and where we spend that money. Do we seriously look for alternatives to the weekly internet order or the run to Tesco or Sainsbury?

Do we use local shops as much as we could? Explore properly our markets and seek out the stalls to find fresh food at frugal prices?

If we don’t, then we should. Food does not have to be expensive to be good for us. In global terms, we face the very real prospect of shortages in coming years. Even the smallest steps taken now to address our own personal habits will help us to cope in the future.

We should also question just how much food we waste. Tesco boss Matt Simister says that customers are too fussy and reject edible bananas and suchlike because they aren’t perfect.

That’s a bit rich coming from a company which hammers us with the bulk-buy hard-sell, but he has a point. The Love Food, Hate Waste campaign says that the average British household throws away food worth up to £470 every year. That probably equals the cost of an average month’s food shopping for a family.

If the supermarkets are prepared to pass on what they don’t need or want to initiatives such as the Community Shop, we, too, should look to our own habits. What can we reuse and recycle? How can we learn to trust our own judgement over what is still good to eat and what should be put out for the birds? I fear that too many of us have lost these innate survival skills. I think it’s time we all rediscovered them.

And let’s not be snobby or parochial. There are already 800 social supermarkets,in France, and more in Austria, Belgium
and Switzerland. Rather than being the exception, the Community Shop should become the norm nationwide.

There is already talk of a social supermarket opening in London next year. Imagine that. A little town in South Yorkshire showing the rest of the country how to carry on. For this we should all be proud.