Introduction: the rise of food charity?

In 2010, George Osborne, the privately educated, fresh-faced Chancellor of the Exchequer, gave his first speech to the Conservative party conference, promising a radical overhaul of the benefits system. He proclaimed to Conservative party politicians and members, affiliate groups and donors: ‘If someone believes that living on benefits is a lifestyle choice, then we need to make them think again. And we need to change completely the system that has allowed and encouraged them to make such a mistaken choice’ (Osborne, 2010). True to his word, the following decade encompassed eye-watering cuts, freezes to benefit levels, and wave after wave of welfare reform. In parallel with this punitive, albeit populist, programme, food banks expanded from an unknown form of charity, started by Paddy and Carol Henderson in their garden shed in Salisbury, to a major voluntary sector service provider. Today, thousands of food banks as well as thousands of other food aid providers – soup kitchens, pay-as-you-feel cafes, community kitchens, community supermarkets, community gardens, and many more – distribute food on a daily and weekly basis to desperate and hungry people.

This ‘contemporary’ phenomena is, however, perhaps more complex than it first appears. Community-based responses to poverty and hunger have long-existed in the UK, including the distribution of poor relief from monasteries prior to the Reformation; relief for those too ill or old to work in the form of the ‘parish loaf ‘ in the 15th century; basic provision of food in the workhouses of the 19th century; and the vastly more progressive British Restaurants, or communal kitchens, established in 1940 to help people who had been bombed out of their homes or had run out of ration coupons, and to equalise consumption across class lines (Vernon, 2007). The rising activity, expanding scope and sharp growth in the media and political profile of the Trussell Trust food bank network since 2010 has, however, created the impression that the provision of food assistance to help people in need is new (Wells and Caraher, 2014).

It is clear that today there are a multitude of organisations providing free or low-cost food that did not exist – or at least not in their present form – in 2010, with a notable expansion of provision initiated from March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (see Barker and Russell, 2020;