Introduction

In 2016/17, The Trussell Trust Foodbank Network – the UK's largest food bank organisation – gave food to adults and children a total of 1,182,954 times, up from 128,697 in 2011/12 (The Trussell Trust, 2017). This growth in food bank use has been interpreted as a symbol of the failure of the unprecedented welfare state reform and public finance austerity implemented in the UK over the same period.

In response to the rise in food bank use, there has been an increase in public and professional interest in hunger and voluntary emergency food provision generally since 2010. The national newspaper The Guardian declared 2012 to be ‘the year of the food bank’ (Moore, 2012), and many of the country's leading news and media outlets have presented stories about hunger and the proliferation of food banks (Morris, 2013; Boyle, 2014; Galluzzo, 2014; Mould, 2014; Wells and Caraher, 2014). In national politics, food banks have been debated in Parliament, sparked the establishment of two All-Party Parliamentary Groups and been the subject of a parliamentary inquiry in 2014 (Hansard, 2013; All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty, 2014; Register of All-Party Parliamentary Groups, 2017). This inquiry was followed by a Commission on Food and Poverty led by the Fabian Society – a prominent UK think tank (Tait, 2015). Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and emergency food charities themselves – including The Trussell Trust, FareShare and the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN) – have widely publicised their statistics, commissioned research (for example, Perry et al, 2014; Loopstra and Lalor, 2017) and formed campaigning groups (such as End Hunger UK).

Research into the issue has burgeoned. When the UK government first commissioned a review of the evidence on food aid, there was very little peer-reviewed literature on the topic in the UK (Lambie-Mumford et al, 2014). Now, leading social policy journals have published important studies on the drivers of contemporary food aid provision, and recent reforms to welfare entitlements, which have increased conditionality and reduced state provision, have been identified as key drivers of food aid use. Social and cultural geographers have explored the complexities of interactions and embedded contestations in food aid projects (Williams et al, 2016), and health geographers have described the lived experiences of food bank users with health conditions who are unable to access an adequate diet (Garthwaite et al, 2015).