The ghost of Mr. Micawber

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and six pence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." So said Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield. Although painfully simplistic, this message resonates today as much as it ever did.

A survey for the consumer magazine Which today revealed that one household in five is borrowing money or eating in to their savings to pay for their food bills. From a purely Maslowian perspective, the need to eat is basic. I wonder though how many people reading this are happy that they are eating enough rather than too much? The Which survey reveals that the average food bill per head stands at £76 per week. Food prices are reported to have increased by 4% since last year. Sixty per cent of those surveyed admitted to experiencing difficulty on their current income. In April, nearly a third revealed that they had borrowed money from family and friends to buy food.

"So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began to contract a quantity of debt." So said the profligate Pip who was wining and dining his way around London in Great Expectations. As things stand, food waste costs the average British family £40 per month. The Which figures don't tell us how much waste is being generated by the people being surveyed and I'm sure they wouldn't like to reveal how much if asked anyway. Put simply, waste in all its forms is the scourge of our age. At a time when the finite nature of our resources has seldom been more scrutinised, we continue to throw things away with scarcely a care in the world.

There is no doubt that we find ourselves in hard times (excuse the obvious reference). A key component of waste is compromise. If people were prepared to compromise more on those parts of life which are actually luxuries, few would need to borrow to eat. Furthermore, the supermarkets continue to throw away mountains of food in the skips at the rear of their shops. It is morally repugnant to consider the waste being generated by the supermarkets. There is absolutely no justification for good food to be thrown away. Casting aside snobbery and false standards, the food destined for their skips ought to be offered out to food banks at the very least. Given the profit orientated nature of their business, wouldn't it make more sense for them to realise 10% of something rather than 100% of nothing? I would have thought it obvious. Add to this the good such a gesture would do for their image and it makes me wonder why they aren't doing it already.

It was Oscar Wilde who defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. It appears we have become overly cynical and need to revisit the warnings of Dickens in order to reclaim some core values. We learned last week that up to a million mortgages will mature a decade hence with no vehicle in place with which to repay them. Buy now, pay tomorrow. While the banks were undeniably culpable for selling mortgages to just about anybody irrespective of income, the people who engaged with them were equally to blame. As ever, it will all end in tears.

If Mr. Micawber was with us today, I think there would be tutting a-plenty..