[George Carey’s] …latest tour de force, in The Times, comes in response to the 27 Anglican bishops who have advised David Cameron that the rise of the food bank represents a “national crisis”, and that with more than 5,000 admitted to hospital last year with malnutrition, he has “a moral duty” to address the hideous effects of benefit cuts.
With wonted grace, Carey concedes that mass hunger is a seemly matter for clerical concern. Where he and his brethren differ is over the analysis of the cause. Carey believes that the root of the problem is nothing as fanciful as people not having the money to buy food; but the breakdown of family networks, “in which such basic skills such as cooking”¦ are no longer passed down the generations”.
Perhaps he is right. Perhaps those people became malnourished after spending weeks bemusedly shifting their glance between a prime rib of beef and the oven, vaguely aware the two might somehow work together to produce a meal, but wholly baffled as to how.