There was a time, ten or so years ago, when the existence of food banks in the UK was shocking. Newspaper articles would report steadily increasing numbers of people using food banks and readers, who thought of themselves as liberal or progressive, would view this with horror: How could this rich country fail its citizens so badly? Where was the welfare state?
In 2023, this surprise at the number of people using food banks has long evaporated. Those working in the anti-poverty sector battle for even just the basics to be guaranteed – no luxuries, no holidays, no arts, nothing that really makes life worth living – just the basics, while the food charity sector, and the corporate partnerships that buttress it, expand.
Today, food charity is a key component of the British welfare state, working in partnership and often funded by local authorities to distribute food. But, despite its ever-deepening position as an arm of the state, there remains little oversight or regulation of food charity. Governance, internal operations and accountability are surprisingly opaque and unexamined. We regularly hear the good news stories but less often the bad. Emma, a parent in Bradford, told me:
“You go upstairs and talk to them so they get all your details, then you’ve got to take your voucher, go outside, around the back . . . So you go upstairs and they stamp your voucher and then you take it outside and around the back. This is the plan, you’ve got the thing there, you get your food and that’s it, you’re left on your own.”
While for Tina, living with her children in York, the food provided was not only unhelpful but bordering on offensive:
“My first visit to a food bank, I was given some pasta and some chopped tomatoes; I was given some passata, and I was basically given tomato puree and then loads of beans and things. And I went home and I cried! I cried! I thought, how am I meant to feed my family on that? What, what, what are we gonna do!? So I thought, right, I’ll have a look on the internet and I started scouring the internet but every recipe needed either meat or fresh veg, and I thought well, this is just, you know, ludicrous, what am I gonna do?”
Experiences within food charity, itself ranging from community gardens and pay-as-you-feel cafés to Trussell Trust food banks and soup kitchens, will inevitably be multifaceted and varied but there are some consistent structural issues within the sector that jeopardise its inclusivity and progressivism. I have written about some of these issues in books published last year by Policy Press, Hunger, Whiteness and Religion in Neoliberal Britain, and, co-authored with Ruth Patrick and Changing Realities, A Year Like No Other.
The first is power. How food is received, what food is available, and even who receives food are largely not in the control of people living in poverty and needing to use food charity. This is most acute in Trussell Trust (and some independent) food banks in which people are monitored and controlled through bureaucratised processes of food distribution. The system by which someone is ‘referred’ to the food bank by a third party, such as the Jobcentre, a health worker or Citizens Advice gives physical form – the food bank voucher – to the age-old notion of the deserving and the undeserving poor and clearly demarcates those using from those providing the service. These systems complicate the development of solidarity among people seeking food, and between those providing and using services.
The second is religion. Food charity in the UK is dominated by Christian organisations. Food banks, soup kitchens and community cafés are situated in churches and run by Christian groups, while the largest provider of food banks in the UK, the Trussell Trust, is motivated by Christian ethics. By adopting responsibility for poverty, destitution and population welfare, religious charities, like their secular counterparts, are colluding with state retrenchment under the framework of ‘austerity’. Religious food charities believe they bring unique, positive attributes to charitable food distribution. They build relationships with and care for those in need, living out Christianity’s ethos of egalitarianism and hospitality through food aid and, on occasion, they may seek to offer physical and spiritual salvation to hungry people through food and opportunities for reform in accordance with the (Calvinist) ethics of modern, global post-industrial capitalism.
The third is race. Food charities in the UK exist within a highly racist and racially inequitable social and economic context. Against this background, they have evolved into entities which can – and arguably unintentionally – uphold White privilege. Whiteness is often the default identity, informing the nature of the food distributed, and represented in staff, users and senior management, as well as the standard against which the Other is measured. The marked absence of culturally appropriate food in many food charities subliminally contributes to a narrative that a White ethnocentric ‘healthy’ diet is the only healthy diet that exists. This omission of culturally appropriate foods motivates the question: who is and who is not in the decision-making position to determine what foods are available for people seeking food aid? White ethnicity nonetheless remains invisible and unexamined in debates on UK food charity and food insecurity. It is seen as neither problematic (as a potential source of racism) nor as a mode of marginalising and stigmatising those ‘poor’ Whites – see Owen Jones’s 2011 book Chavs – who represent an undesirable form of Whiteness.
The fourth is cash. It is interesting to note that, despite the clear relationship between food insecurity and income poverty in the UK, the predominant voluntary sector response to rising food insecurity has been food- rather than cash-based. Why is this? Why give someone a prescribed parcel of food or a pre-prepared meal when their reason for needing that food is a lack of money to buy food rather than the absence of food itself? For people who have a home and a kitchen, however limited, but do not have money to buy food or pay for electricity, the most logical response is to give these people money, with which they can go to the shops or to a café, and buy the food they would choose to eat, like everyone else. Nevertheless, this cash-based response is not necessarily considered the most logical approach; rather, poverty is medicalised, reconstructed as a question of nutrition – as food insecurity – which must necessarily be responded to with food. The Independent Food Aid Network and the Trussell Trust have made considerable progress in recent years, shifting the debate away from food-based third-sector solutions to food insecurity to responses which incorporate ‘cash-first’ approaches. These approaches aim to assist people using food banks in accessing any available government financial entitlements through advice and support (such as local authority hardship funds intended to provide immediate cash grants to people in urgent need) via distributing cash-first referral leaflets in food banks and elsewhere. These resources, co-developed with local communities, indicate where and how someone can access financial support and are intended as an alternative to emergency food assistance. While this pioneering cash-first approach has been adopted by many food banks across the UK, there remains resistance among some food charities and their donors to distributing money rather than food parcels direct to service users.
There are also positive stories to be told, of food charities being sites of mutual aid, political conversations, solidarity and hope, but if we ignore the more uncomfortable characteristics of food charity, we turn a deaf ear to the realities of people forced to turn to them for help.
Maddy Power is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York.
Hunger, Whiteness and Religion in Neoliberal Britain by Maddy Power is available here for £26.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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