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As winter sets in, reality bites for Orange students, pensioners, unemployed and working poor
June 16, 2022
Peter Holmes
Their bellies are about to be full again.
It is a few minutes shy of 10:30am Wednesday, and already a handful of people are waiting out the front of Foodcare on March Street.
Clutching reusable shopping bags, they stand patiently, pace about, or amuse their young children.
Inside, some of the 60 volunteers who make this crucial service viable are making final checks before opening up.
At the entrance to Foodcare are tables laid out with fresh fruit and vegetables, and a rack with loaves of bread. These items are all free.
The first of the customers takes a trolley and makes their way around what is a very small DIY supermarket stocked with a limited number of products. Essentials, and a few treats.
There are jars of tomato sauces for pasta, Chokito chocolate bars, one-litre cardboard boxes of milk, meat, cheese, margarine. The prices for these items are significantly lower than in supermarkets.
At the “check out”, the customer pays a volunteer via EFTPOS.
Foodcare president Bev Williams says the need for free or heavily discounted food in Orange is growing. And it’s not just here.
“There are food pantries all throughout the Central West,” says Williams. “They’ve got them at Molong, Lithgow, Bathurst, they're everywhere.
“The thing is, a lot of the community don’t realise or understand that there is a cohort of people that are really struggling, and if it’s not in the circle of people you mix with, and if people aren't volunteering in certain organisations, they have no idea of the number of people in most towns in the Central West that are really struggling to get through the week.”
Foodcare, which receives no government funding and relies entirely on donations, is open Tuesday to Thursday from 10:30am to 1pm, and on Thursday afternoons from 4:30pm to 6pm.
Williams has noticed that the inflationary hike in supermarket prices appears to have had an immediate effect on the number of shoppers at Foodcare.
On Tuesdays, she said, there is usually “quite a long queue because that’s the first day of the week the shop is open”.
On her most recent Tuesday shift about 50 people had shopped.
The number is typically lower on a Wednesday, but the following day there were another 50.
“We’re noticing the numbers go up.”
Across the week Williams estimates 130 to 150 people are now coming to Foodcare to make sure they can put food on the table.
As Orange and surrounding towns and villages settle into winter, those at the bottom of the financial pyramid start to worry about the utility bills that are coming. How bad will they be? How much do I need to put aside each week or fortnight?
They worry about their rent increasing as Orange becomes an appealing destination for more and more people.
And they worry about the recent hike in the cost of fruit, vegetables, meat and groceries.
So who is shopping at Foodcare? Williams describes customers as a “wide variety”.
“They might be pensioners who are really struggling to get through the fortnight; we get people that might only have very little casual employment, and they struggle to put food on the table for their families.
“Then we get people who are in dire circumstances - they may be homeless or leaving very difficult circumstances; and there are some students who struggle to feed themselves, especially if they're supporting themselves through their degree.”
Williams believes the numbers will continue to increase “while ever it’s difficult for people to heat their homes because of the cost of heating and food”.
Foodcare gets its food and groceries from a range of sources including a local butcher, local supermarkets and shops, public donations and the Foodbank charity.
Foodbank describes itself as “Australia’s largest food relief organisation, operating on a scale that makes it crucial to the work of the front line charities that are feeding vulnerable Australians”.
It provides 88 million meals a year to more than 2,950 charities and 2,890 schools around the country.
Foodcare in Orange has used cash donations made at the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020 to buy extra food to help meet demand.
“We spent $200 a week and we’ve increased it to $250 buying produce just to make sure we’ve got enough to feed people when they come through.
“We have shoppers who find themselves completely out of food and their next payment mightn’t come for 10 days.”
One of the ways people can pay for their Foodcare items is with vouchers.
“There are people who apply to various organisations that buy our Foodcare vouchers, and when they come through we give them one or two [extra] items that Foodcare covers the cost of, so they don't have to use their voucher for those.
“[Those donations] are a finite resource, and at some stage we won’t be able to continue doing that, but we will whilst ever we can.”
The Foodbank Hunger Report 2022 revealed that one in six adults in Australia haven’t had enough to eat, and 1.2 million children have gone hungry, in the past year.
“Food insecurity is a predicament largely hidden by stigma and shame, but the reality is we’re all likely to know someone who is affected,” says Foodbank.
“It’s not just people on the street, but people in your street.”
To find out about shopping, free transport or donating, go to www.foodcareorange.org.au
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