The publication of The rise of food charity in Europe is at once distressing yet hugely encouraging. It is distressing because of the necessity for such a book in today's wealthy but austerity-driven Europe, where widespread food poverty and food charity remain entrenched. Indeed, I first began writing about food charity in Canada in the early 1980s as a primary response to food insecurity, the official euphemism for hunger, as Janet Poppendieck once wrote. US-style food banking was quickly adopted and followed by its transatlantic spread to Europe and beyond. As Fernand Braudel, the eminent French historian wrote at the time: ‘today's society is capable of feeding its poor. To do otherwise is an error of government’ (1985). What lessons have gone unlearned?

An urgent reminder to rethink the food charity phenomenon was a Guardian letter dated 24 March 2019. Headlined ‘Food banks are no solution to poverty’, it was signed by 58 academics and campaigners from the UK, Finland and North America, and declared that ‘charitable food aid is a sticking plaster on a gaping wound of systemic inequality in our societies’. It was responding to an international summit in London organised by the US-based and ‘big food’-backed Global Foodbanking Network (GFN), founded in 2006. GFN now operates in more than 30 countries across the world, partnering with the European Food Bank Association (FEBA), established in 1986. Food banking, they claim, is the link between food waste and food poverty reduction, promoting the corporate food charity as the ‘green’ intervention reducing food waste while promising zero hunger. The questioning of the corporate capture of food charity as an effective response to rich world hunger was welcome news.

Likewise, in recent years, the burgeoning increase in interdisciplinary research and writing about the food charity phenomenon in journal articles, book chapters and national reports is heartening and much needed. Certainly, previous texts have examined the growth of food banking within the Anglo-Saxon ‘liberal’ welfare states across selected First World countries and the industrialised Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Similarly, there is an established literature on food policy, food sovereignty, food systems and health and food inequalities.