For millions of working-class families, the school holidays don’t mean rest. They mean another six weeks of worrying how to put food on the table.
A charity in Sussex and Surrey has warned that families are skipping meals to make ends meet because children lose access to free school meals over the summer break. Under capitalism, even a child’s right to eat is treated as conditional.
FareShare Sussex & Surrey says many parents simply can’t absorb the extra cost of feeding children throughout the holidays. Dan Slatter, the charity’s chief executive, described the scale of the crisis bluntly: there was a “mountain of need. There’s a growing number of people that are facing food insecurity or even more extreme hunger.”
He estimated that feeding a child during the six-week summer holiday costs parents around £200 extra. For households already struggling with soaring rents, energy bills and food prices, that’s enough to push families into crisis.
The state points to holiday food and activity schemes such as Surrey’s Club4 programme, funded through local authorities. But these schemes are only available to children who already qualify for benefit-related free school meals, leaving many struggling families outside the system. Means-testing has become another way capitalism rations basic necessities instead of guaranteeing them as rights.
The consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. The BBC found that hospitals across South East England are treating growing numbers of patients who are malnourished or suffering nutrient deficiencies. Admissions linked to malnutrition have doubled in recent years, while admissions for nutrient deficiencies have nearly tripled.
This isn’t the result of a poor harvest or a shortage of food. Britain produces and imports more than enough to feed its population. Hunger exists because food under capitalism is produced as a commodity for profit, not to satisfy human need. If people can’t pay, they don’t eat. The contradiction isn’t between supply and demand, but between social production and private ownership.
Charities like FareShare work tirelessly to keep people alive, not because capitalism has failed, but because it is functioning according to its own priorities. So long as private accumulation takes precedence over human need, charities will be expected to patch over the suffering that results.
Food banks and emergency food charities have become permanent institutions, normalising conditions that would once have been recognised as a social catastrophe. Their work highlights the solidarity of ordinary people, but it also exposes the inability of capitalism to guarantee even the most basic conditions of life for working people.
Marxists have long argued that capitalism creates a reserve army of labour: workers kept in precarious conditions to discipline the rest of the working class. Poverty isn’t an accident or the result of bad policy. It’s part of a system that depends on workers accepting low wages and insecure work because the alternative is hunger and homelessness. Every parent forced to skip meals so their child can eat is paying the price for that system.
The wealth to eliminate hunger already exists. British capitalism extracts enormous value from workers at home while benefiting from an imperialist world order that transfers wealth from the Global South into the imperialist countries. Yet even within one of the world’s richest economies, children still face hunger whenever school closes for the summer.
A society organised around human need wouldn’t leave children’s access to food dependent on school term dates, charity collections or means-tested schemes. As long as food remains a commodity and production remains organised for profit, working-class families will continue to face impossible choices while the ruling class insists there’s no alternative.
