What does a loaf of bread cost? Or a pack of butter? Go to the food bank at the Kapitein Hatterasstraat in Tilburg on a Wednesday afternoon and they can tell you exactly. “Last month I got a bottle of cheap orange juice. It was always sixty cents. Now just put down one and a half euros,” says Louise Kohler. She has been joining the food bank for a year now. She and her fellow sufferers feel the pain of rising prices: “It’s always hope that you get through the day.”
Around half past eleven a group of people is ready for the food bank that opens soon. Louise has been coming here for a year: “Before that I could easily manage. But the bills got too high, everything got more expensive. But I was rejected, so I have a benefit and it remains the same.”
It is becoming increasingly difficult for Louise to make ends meet: “With my husband and my two dogs I have fifty euros a week to spend. Go to the store, buy a loaf of bread: two euros that much. A packet of butter, which used to be seventy cents, is now also over the euro. You can’t make it anymore.”
“The middle class can still choose, we have nothing left.”
“In the news you now hear a lot about the middle class, that it is so hard because they can no longer buy everything,” says a woman who prefers to remain anonymous. “But people who walk at the food bank don’t have a choice. The middle class could always pay A brands, but can now choose B and C brands. We always had to buy C brands before inflation and now we have nothing.”
Meanwhile, Marieke Verhoeven settles in behind a desk at the entrance. Just after twelve o’clock she checks the customer’s data. The Tilburg food bank has six hundred clients, 130 of whom come to do their shopping this day. If everything is in order, they join the queue and are allowed to do their shopping for free.
Despite the price rises and high energy costs, it is not really storming yet. “We do think that a new wave is coming,” says Marieke, “but the step to aid, to the food bank, is a big one. People try to make ends meet as long as possible.”
“I only eat bread anymore.”
It no longer works for Ancilla Klootwijk. She’s here for the first time. “I have a minimum income and I can’t make it anymore,” she explains. “I have 150 euros a month to live on. I only eat bread. Everything is so very expensive. That breaks up.” She is not ashamed of the fact that she now has to go to the food bank: “I’m glad this is there, that we have food to eat. Because otherwise it will be over.”
Ancilla has had a lot of adversity in her life. “I’ve been widowed twice, lost parents, divorced,” she sums up. “I had nightmares because I couldn’t make it anymore. But I sought help.” The future? “I can’t say anything about that yet. I’m quite strong. But all I do is survive. But I’m still here.”
Natasja Verhoeven also faces an uncertain future: “I’ll be in debt restructuring for a few more years now. And I just hope I’m done with it after that. But with all those rising prices, I’m looking bleak. It really is no longer affordable. We don’t go to the food bank for nothing.”
