Feast or famine?

Rosalind Smith welcomes a new book on the gospel, food and austerity

‘Food for myself is a material issue: Food for my neighbour is a spiritual issue.’

- Leo Tolstoy

A small, easy to read book, Feast or Famine? How the Gospel challenges austerity, came to me at a time when most of us in Britain were celebrating the Christmas period, and when many of those celebrations consisted of the ‘food’ kind. In fact, we can safely say that there will have been a surfeit of food for many, as well as an unnecessary plethora of presents, a substantial amount of which were unwanted, unwelcomed and left to languish until, hopefully, given to charity shops. But that doesn’t include that significant proportion of the population who, for one reason or another, have slipped through the net of relative affluence and found themselves dependent on food banks and other charitable organisations, and who can’t afford heating, let alone Christmas goodies.

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