Spanish Soup Kitchens Makes the News

It made the news in the United Kingdom today that Spanish workers in a once prosperous area are needing to use soup kitchens. The soup kitchen is having problems serving all the people and are using a temporary solution sounds a lot like a food bank. And we all know how temporary became once they were established in Canada.

Workers inside the kitchen said things were becoming dramatically worse. "We can only feed 122 people at a time," said social worker Lucía Capilla, adding that most of the newcomers were legal immigrants. "In November we started handing out food in bags because we could not get everyone into the dining room. Yesterday we had to hand out 30 bags." Charity workers blame a creaking social support system and mortgages taken out to buy overpriced houses for the emergence of a new kind of poverty. Crucially, they say, Spain's 10% of immigrants cannot turn to their families for support.

Reading this article was a total surprise. A story about a soup kitchen? I don't know of a major city in Canada that doesn't have several. Also, when was the last time we read a report about a soup kitchen needing to start up a food bank because it couldn't serve enough people? It happens but it doesn't generally make the news.

It was a surprise that the article was even interesting enough for The Observer to pick up. Who would have thought that soup kitchens and food banks are not a common concept---different enough to be picked up by The Observer anyway.

Food banks and Soup Kitchens are common fare in Canada. Frequently When people talk of European social services they point out not all of Europe is Scandinavia, and that the rest of the countries aren't all that different from Canada. This story makes clear how wrong that assumption is.