20 The Sunday Times February 6, 2022NEWS REVIEW
There is such a thing as a free lunch — just click here
pinching “freegan”
revolution.
Olio is a food-sharing app
that helps the affluent get a
free fix of anything from a full
board of cheeses to artisan
muffins. Users and businesses
(including Pret, Tesco and
Selfridges) list items that
would otherwise go to waste.
Once an item is listed, others
can request it and fix a time to
collect. The app is free and no
money changes hands — and
it’s worth noting that Olio
accepts no responsibility if
you pick up a bout of food
poisoning.
“I am evangelical about it,”
says 61-year-old Lesley Bound
from Rotherhithe, southeast
London, who has been using
Olio a few times a week for
two years. “Just last night I
picked up some Danish
pastries from the Amazon
Fresh shop,” she says.
Bound, who left her job
as a property manager in
2015, says she is
“comfortable”financially. Through Olio she
has tried everything from
gourmet veggie burgers and
vegan cheese from Planet
Organic to Pret A Manger
sandwiches and pastries.
According to the app, she
has saved £1,343, which is
helping fund her hobby of
travelling the world to watch
solar eclipses. “I grew up with
a generation where the motto
was ‘waste not, want not’,
Bound says. “For me it’s all
about saving food from going
in the bin.”
And she needn’t worry
about taking food away from
food banks — Olio says this is
fresh food that wouldn’t last.
Pret also gives surplus food to
homeless shelters, but goods
that are going off that day are
destined for the bin.
A quick glance at the Olio
homepage
shows photos
of a half-B
eing a freeloader used
to be a bad thing. In the
heady days before the
cost of living rose, the
shame of sponging off
others was something many
of us found too much to bear.
Charity, handouts, yellow-
sticker mark-downs — not for
me, thank you.
But these days even the
posher echelons of society
are getting twitchy.
Aristocrats are on television
whingeing about how they
can’t afford the heating bills;
soy milk, elderflower presse
and port and sherry prices
are rising. And that mortgage
bill isn’t going away.
Desperate times indeed.
The good news is that there
is a glut of apps that take the
shame out of loitering beside
the Marks & Spencer man
with the sticker gun marking
down chocolate eclairs 15
minutes before closing time —
and we’re downloading them
in their droves. We are all
signing up for the penny-In straitened times, more and more
of us are tucking into ‘freeganism’ via
apps that give away unwanted food.
Katie Gatens goes on the scroungef food
about it,”
ey Bound
outheast
en using
eek for
night I
ish
mazon
s.
er job
gerinA quick glance at the Olio
homepage
shows photos
of a half-eaten “(almost) sugar-free
chocolate cake” being given
away by the slice, a “Detox
Kitchen salmon poke bowl”
and some vegan pea and mint
raviolini — which beats a
dented tin of beans.
Too Good to Go is an app
on which restaurants and
businesses sell highly
discounted “magic bags” for a
few pounds at the end of the
day. The contents are potSummer socialising was limited, with the young largely following Covid rulesSaasha Celestial-One,
far left, and Tessa Clarke
are co-founders of OlioRory Brimmer, 28, is also a
fan. He works at a start-up
business, and is training for
the Paris marathon in April.
Extra training means extra
calories and the app has
been useful for carb-loading.
He may be getting cheap food
but he still pays £200 a month
for a posh gym membership.
“Anyone can want to save
money, right?” says Brimmer,
who lives in Peckham,
southeast London, and is
saving for a house. His
favourite restaurants on the
app are the Lebanese
restaurant Sababa in Soho
and Cool Caribbean in
Peckham. “Most of the time
when I go into a restaurant to
pick up a meal, I can see on
the menu that they’re still
selling it for sometimes three
times the price,” he says. “It’s
very satisfying to turn up and
get handed a bag of stuff I’ve
paid less than a fiver for.”
His best find? A Starbucks
in Soho. “I couldn’t believe
how much free stuff they gave
me,” he says. “Cake,
flapjacks, fondants, scones
with jam and cream. It was
incredible.”
It beats passing off a pack
of rump steaks as a lemon at
the self-service checkout in
Waitrose.You can get a
full meal for a
few pounds
at day’s endluck: they could be a couple
of leftover croissants, or a
meal with dessert. In 12
months, it has gone from
having four million users in
the UK to 7.7 million.
Businesses taking part
include YO Sushi!, the posh
chocolate brand Prestat and
Planet Organic.
“Quite often I’ll use it to
pick up a cake at a bakery
before going round to afriend’s to watch The Great
British Bake Off,” says Callum
Donnelly, 30, who lives with
his wife in Canterbury. He
owns a business that puts on
private cinema shows.
“I have to travel across the
country a lot for work and I
will go out of my way to pick
up a bag if I can see
somewhere on the app. It’s
great trying new food — like
Hungarian curries.”S REVIEW
L
ate last year, Bobby Duffy, a
professor at King’s College Lon-
don, commissioned a survey
that posed the question: “Do
you think, on balance, that the
young have been selfish or self-
less in their conduct during the
pandemic?” Duffy, who was
writing a book about relations
between the generations, had a
hunch about how it would play out, but
also reams of data that pointed to a pretty
clear answer. Young people have been
extraordinarily, almost implausibly, self-
less.
In the face of a pandemic that carries
little risk for them of serious illness or
death, they sacrificed their social lives,
educations, livelihoods and, we are
increasingly learning, their mental
health. Although some newspapers pub-
lished distorted long-lens photographs
implying a lack of social distancing in
parks and on beaches, surveys and other
data revealed that young people, by and
large, followed the rules. They obeyed the
lockdowns, they wore masks as reli-
giously as other age groups and they
avoided physical contact like everyone
else.
“It was enormously selfless,” says
Duffy, 49. “Astoundingly so. It just shows
the strength of connection, not just
between different generations within
families, but across society more widely.”
The degree of sacrifice is all the more
striking when you consider that younger
people were considerably more likely to
face unemployment and furlough than
most other age groups. They were more
likely to work in the worst-hit sectors,
such as hospitality. Those in education
lost months of face-to-face learning and
were forced to self-isolate when they most
needed contact with their peers: duringThere is
a serious
risk that a
populist
politician
could corral
the anger of
a generationthe formative and fragile years when you
begin to discover who you are. No genera-
tion alive, save perhaps those growing up
during the Second World War, has experi-
enced disruption like it.
We have become used to the age profile
of Covid-19 victims, but it was by no
means inevitable. The Russian flu epi-
demic of 1977 — so-called because the first
case was reported in the Soviet Union —
almost exclusively affected those under- A century or so ago, “Spanish” influ-
enza took its greatest toll on men in the
prime of life; for this group the peak age of
death was 28. The median victim of
Covid, on the other hand, is in their mid-
eighties.
To help protect these people, the UK
spent enormous sums. As Tom Calver put
it starkly in The Sunday Times a few
weeks ago, we have spent £370 billion to
save perhaps 350,000 mostly elderly peo-
ple. Whether you believe that was a price
worth paying, it is nonetheless a debt that
will take many years to pay off, and it will
mostly be paid off not by those whose
lives were saved but by future genera-
tions, either in the form of debt interest or
inflation.
It is hard, in other words, not to con-
clude that young people bore a significant
economic and social burden. That takes
us back to Duffy’s question: have the
young acted selfishly or selflessly during
the pandemic?
Here is what the survey found: 54 per
cent of baby boomers voted for “selfish”.
Strikingly, 47 per cent of millennials
(those born between roughly 1980 and
the mid-1990s) agreed, compared with 33
per cent who thought them selfless. The
numbers for the “zoomers” of Genera-
tion Z — born from the mid-1990s
onwards — were roughly the same (self-
ish: 46 per cent; selfless: 32 per cent). In
short, everyone thought the young were
selfish — including the young themselves.
On top of that, the vast majority of people
surveyed thought that
the young had ignored
Covid restrictions. They
also believed older gen-
erations would suffer the
worst effects from the pan-
demic in the long term.L
et’s take these in turn.
First, while compliance
with Covid rules might
have been slightly lower
among younger genera-
tions, survey after survey has found sur-
prisingly little difference between age
groups. Perhaps those long-lens photos
and occasional stories of wild parties
punched through to public opinion in a
way the empirical evidence never could.
As for who will face longer-term effects,
that rather depends on what you’re talk-
ing about.
For much of Covid, it looked as though
younger people would suffer particular
economic punishment. As of early 2021,
the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who had
fallen out of the workforce and into eco-
nomic inactivity was about 200,000 —
higher than any other age group. Things
did indeed look dire, especially given the
many studies showing that when people
lose their jobs or cannot find work early in
their career, they are significantly more
likely never to rejoin the labour market.
For a period, it looked as though those in
their late teens and early twenties might
be permanently scarred.
But then, in the following months, the
numbers reversed: re-employment rates
among the young rebounded faster than
after any recession in recent memory.
Today, according to the latest labour
market data, economic inactivity among
the young is barely higher than at the start
of the pandemic, while those seeing thebiggest loss of work are 50 to 64-year-
olds. In other words, through this lens,
the young have come out of this surpris-
ingly unscathed. But this is only one lens.
Look elsewhere and the picture is
bleak. Paul Johnson, director of the Insti-
tute for Fiscal Studies, points to another
two scars that will take longer to heal, if
they ever do.
“One is the loss of education — particu-
larly among the less well-off kids,” he says.
“There is quite a lot of evidence that some
of those from the bottom of [income] dis-
tribution have become completely disen-
tangled from the education system, and
despite the talk about levelling up, the
numbers suggest that’s especially evident
in the north of England.”
Quantifying these effects is difficult,
but the early signs are that levels of
numeracy and literacy could be perma-
nently damaged in these age cohorts.
That could lead to poorer career
prospects for many years. The impact is
likely to be greatest among those in pri-
mary and secondary school, but spare a
thought for those who went to university
expecting the time of their lives and were
instead locked in their halls of residence
for a year or two of distance learning. And
all for the price of the tuition fees their
parents never had to pay when they were
students.
Then there is the question of the kind
of workplace these young people are set
to graduate into. In her new book The
Nowhere Office, Julia Hobsbawm argues
that working from home will become
institutionalised; there will be no return
to office life as we knew it.
In such a world, how much more diffi-
cult will it be for fresh entrants to estab-
lish themselves, find mentors, distinguish
themselves from their peers and benefit
from the kinds of serendipitous encoun-
ters that help forge a career? The short
answer is that no one knows. Perhaps
such things can be replicated in what the
company formerly known as Facebook
calls the “metaverse”, its pitch for a virtu-
al-reality world.
Or perhaps, as others suggest, the dim-
inution of face-to-face working marks yet
another milestone towards mental obliv-
ion. It does not help that many younger
people’s first encounter of professional
life has been so different in financial
terms as well. Between 1990 and 2008,
real post-tax labour income hadn’t fallen
in a single year. But then, in 2008, this
critical measure of standard of living
dropped into negative territory. Then, in
2011, it happened again. Now, according
to a startling prediction last week from
the Bank of England, it is expected to fall
for two successive years, at the fastest rate
on record. All generations will feel the
cost-of-living crisis, but for some younger
people it is beginning to feel less like an
aberration and more like the norm.
The second scar identified by Johnson
comes down to the relationship between
inflation and interest rates. The higher
the inflation rate, and the lower interest
rates, the more asset prices are pushed
up. “It’s yet another ratchet: great for peo-
ple who’ve got wealth, terrible for people
who don’t,” he says.In the past year of Covid restrictions, the average young
person earned a salary of £23,250 — and made huge
sacrifices to protect older people — while the price of the
average house rose by £24,600. So, asks Ed Conway ...Should we
reimburse
the young?
With inflation heading above 7 per cent
and interest rates close to historic lows,
even after last week’s increase, that
dynamic is only intensifying. Long before
the pandemic, younger people were less
likely than their parents to get on the
housing ladder in their twenties. They
faced lower real earnings than their par-
ents did. They were more likely to live
with their parents until later; more reliant
on inheritances and family wealth; more
likely to face student debt. Covid has put a
rocket beneath these disquieting trends.
Consider this startling fact, buried in
the latest official data: in the past year, the
average house has earned more than the
average youngster. UK house prices are
up by £24,600, while the median earn-
ings for 18 to 29-year-olds stand at
£23,250.
This is before one recalls the moun-
tains of cash added to the national debt, to
be paid off long after the main beneficia-
ries of lockdowns are in their graves.
Many of the remedies proposed by the
chancellor to begin paying off this debt
serve to widen the gap between the asset-
rich and everyone else — mostly the
young. There is the new health and social
care levy, which, while it applies to pen-
sioners as well as people of working age, is
nonetheless a tax on earnings rather than
on assets. There is the decision,
announced this past week, to freeze the
repayment threshold for student loans,
which will increase the amount recent
graduates have to fork out each month in
loan repayments. What tax cuts there
have been have tended to inflate assets —
the stamp duty holiday is one example.
According to Deutsche Bank econo-
mists Jim Reid and Luke Templeman:
“The Covid crisis should be the catalyst
that policymakers use to level-up the gen-
erations. In fact, if we do not act now,
there is a serious risk that over the coming
decade, when the younger generation of
voters begins to outnumber the older gen-
eration, a populist politician could corral
the anger of the young. That could lead to
sudden and seismic shifts in the estab-
lished capitalist order.”
Their remedy sounds a lot like Jeremy
Corbyn’s last manifesto: more taxes on
assets such as property and stocks; subsi-
dies to ease the pain of tuition fees for
those in higher education; tear down the
planning system and build more homes.
“To save capitalism we must help the
young,” say Reid and Templeman.
Other suggestions include age-based
taxation. Some argue that those leaving
education should be given a grant to com-
pensate them for the past few years; oth-
ers advocate a capital levy, a one-off tax
on assets. Yet none of these remedies
seems especially likely, at least in this
political climate. Nor is it clear that a
majority even of young people would
favour them.
According to Duffy, we are all too prone
to clichés and stereotypes when it comes
to different generations. It is not espe-
cially apparent that cohesiveness or
respect between age groups is any differ-
ent from how it always was. By the same
token, though, it is hard to find another
period in modern history when the eco-
nomic gaps were as big as they are now.
And it is hard to think of another episode
that has so starkly demonstrated the eco-
nomic gulf as Covid has.
Ed Conway is economics and data editor at
Sky News