Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

a U-shape at the end opposite the doors, and there are people, mostly young people in jeans and boots like those worn by my students, taking food out of large cardboard boxes and arranging it on the tables. There are crates piled as high as my head. There is milk, bags of sliced bread, bags of potatoes, boxes of eggs, skyr, yoghurt, buttermilk. The basics of the Icelandic diet. Some frozen chickens, and then oddments; a few packs of sliced mushrooms, something in a sachet claiming to be ‘guacamole mix’. Behind the counter at the end of the tables are some mini Easter eggs, children’s toothpaste and baby-shampoo. Ásgerður Jona calls for silence and tells everyone that they are to speak freely to me. Then she takes us into a back room, crowded with more crates and boxes, where other people are sitting around a table drinking coffee and sharing home-made cake, and says it again. Einar and I wander around, chatting to busy people. Almost everyone speaks English. The charity has to buy the food, so several of the volunteers spend most of the week trying to source the cheapest bulk deals. The number of people coming has risen steadily for a couple of years; last year, it was a busy week in which they gave out 200 parcels. Now, especially at the end of the month, it’s usually over 400. The numbers are small, I think, 400 households in a city of around 200,000 people, but if these are people who can’t afford to eat and need to be given potatoes, then something has indeed gone badly wrong. The needy get benefits, but the benefits aren’t enough to live on, not by the time people have paid their foreign currency mortgages and car loans. About half of them can’t work because of disability. Fjölskylduhjálp aims to give each family about half of their weekly food. There’s nothing fresh, I murmur to Einar, no fruit or vegetables. They probably can’t store them, he says. Onions, I think, apples. Easier to store than milk. I’m distracted by the kinds of food available, by what it says about the Icelandic idea of necessities, how different it might be in China or Nigeria or France. For Icelanders, the answer seems to be dairy produce and potatoes.

We meet the man who manages the logistics of distribution. He takes us over to his computer and shows us his spreadsheet. There are social security numbers, names, numbers of adults and children in each household. Data protection, I think, identity theft! But no-one in Iceland worries much about data protection. You have to give your social security number, your kennitala, to the vendors of electrical goods to validate basic consumer rights. (The kennitala incorporates your date of birth and also gives access to tax records, held in real time and online using information supplied by the bank, the Icelandic version of the DVLA, the insurance company, the Ministry of Immigration and your employer.) Bank tellers often request my PIN. Students hand in assessments blazoned not only with their names but with their kennitala. CVs, I will discover, routinely state not only age but marital status and number and age of children. You can’t be anonymous in Iceland anyway, says Matthew, when I complain about this state of affairs. There’s no point pretending people don’t know who you are, and who you’re married to, and who you slept with when you were in high school and how your degree was classified and why you crashed your car. But identity theft would be impossible for the same reasons. No, I think, impersonation might be difficult but the theft of someone’s official identity would be rather easy.

‘We give cards to the regulars,’ the man explains. ‘People present themselves at the desks where the computers are, we print out a list of what they can have and then they are given it at the tables.’

‘In what state are the people who come here?’ I ask. ‘Are they really starving?’

‘Several people I know have been hungry for quite a while before coming here. Months. It’s been changing a little because of all the media coverage of this place. People are a little less ashamed. But no-one wants to be seen here.’

‘Are you carrying them through a short-term crisis, or are they dependent on you for a long time?’

He begins to unpack cheese. ‘Quite a lot of the Icelanders who come here are disabled, so that’s not going to change. Most of the foreigners are unemployed, and that’s not going to change either. Unless they go home.’

‘Migrant workers probably wouldn’t be here if there were jobs at home,’ I point out. This is not the moment to argue that for some of the ‘foreigners’, this is home.

He shrugs. ‘OK. So that’s not a short-term problem either. And we’ve no steady income, it’s just donations. We’re a charity with no state support. And food prices are going up, and there are more and more people coming here. We’re running out of money. We’ll probably be closed by December.’

‘Do the supermarkets give you anything?’ Einar asks. ‘Do you have to buy it all?’

The man explains about food distribution chains, in which supermarkets have to return unsold produce to the supplier. But the supermarkets give them whatever discounts they can. ‘It’s a lot of work, chasing these bulk buys and special deals, and there’s only one person here full-time, everyone else just volunteers two or three days a week.’

‘How far do people come?’ I ask. ‘I noticed on your database, there are people from outside the city.’ From towns over a hundred kilometres away.

‘Yes, from all over. We’ve been giving people who come from more than fifty kilometres away one-and-a-half times the usual amount.’

‘Doesn’t the petrol to get here cost more than the food would?’ I wonder, knowing the prices of both.

‘Yes, the price of gas is ridiculous now.’

The question I always ask in Iceland, and one that clearly doesn’t make sense in some way