In the same vein we must seriously examine the role of food banking, which requires that we no longer praise its growth as a sign of our generosity and charity, but instead recognize it as a symbol of our society’s failure to hold government accountable for hunger, food insecurity and poverty. (Winne 2009)
Introduction
Food banks have gained both considerable public and policy attention in the UK over the last 10 years. They have emerged as a key provider of emergency food aid for many households. In a 2001 report (Hawkes and Webster 2001), there was only one formal food bank identified in the UK, although we argue that food banks have always existed in some format or other; what is now different is the scale and reach of them or what Riches and Silavasti call ‘the corporatization of food aid’ (Poppendieck 2014; Riches and Silvasti 2014b). In fact, up until 2007 reports of food banks in the media were often preceded by a description of what a food bank was and saying they were common in the United States (Wells and Caraher 2017). Now food banks have become synonymous with the new austerity and poverty in general and there is less need for newspaper or media reports to include an explanatory precursor (Wells and Caraher 2016). What is different is what we, as authors, call the business of foodbanking and how it has reached endemic proportions with most towns now having a food bank or charity outlets using waste or surplus food . Throughout this book, we will refer to Poppendieck’s magisterial review of US food charity and the seven associated deadly ‘ins’ of food banks namely: insufficiency; inappropriateness; nutritional inadequacy; instability; inaccessibility; inefficiency and indignity (Poppendieck 1998). To this we would add inequity . At various points in the book, we refer to these concepts to show the shortcomings of food banks and food aid in general. This list acts as our audit tool against which to judge the actions of food banks and food aid.
Yet despite this newness, there is an earlier history of food banks: during the miners’ strike of the mid-1980s, food banks were common; this can be seen in the film Pride (Warchus 2015) and by the fact that the American rock star, Bruce Springsteen , in his tour of the UK contributed money to the Durham Miners’ Wives Support Group who ran community food banks in the 1980s. His contribution earned the approbation of the Conservative Member of Parliament, Piers Merchant, who said:
“I think he was badly advised about the coal strike and the issues involved; it was an ill-judged decision,” Merchant told Gavin Martin of New Musical Express. “I don’t think he supports violence. The money will be going to miners who’ve been sacked, and they’ve been guilty of violence and vandalism. It’s a great shame because it was great to have him in Newcastle.” It turned out that this British version of George Will had in the past been supported by the fascist-style British National Movement and that Merchant had refused to disavow such support. (Marsh 2004)
More recent statements by Conservative politicians show support for food banks including contentions that they are the caring face of society. Jacob Rees-Moog, the MP for North East Somerset, said that he found food banks ‘rather uplifting’ and that the reasons for their increased use was related to the fact that people know where they are and that staff in Jobcentre Plus offices direct and refer people to them.1 This is a move from earlier statements from some politicians who rued that people were using food banks as the food was free and that some clients would travel miles to get something for free (Wells and Caraher 2016) or as the then Education Secretary Michael Gove said ‘[T]hey’ve only got themselves to blame for making bad decisions’ (Chorley 2013). The context for the rise in food banks are rises in ‘food poverty ’. Toby Young , a well-known media commentator, suggested that food bank use ‘was lower under the last Labour government because Labour refused to allow Job Centres to refer benefit claimants to food banks’ (Young 2015). So, by implication, the referral to and use of food banks are now indicators of caring concern and according to some ‘shows what a compassionate country we are’ (BBC website2). All this seems ignorant of the stigma and humiliation attached to the use of food banks (Garthwaite 2016b; van der Horst et al. 2014). The then United Nations ’ Special Rapporteur on food in a talk in London said:
Food assistance in the form of the right to social security, such as cash transfers, food stamps or vouchers, can be defined in terms of rights, whereas foodbanks are charity-based and depend on donations and good will. There can also be a sense of shame attached to foodbanks. (de Schutter 2013)
The growing crisis resulted in an All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) Inquiry into hunger and food bank use, which gathered and reported on evidence from frontline food providers, researchers and civil society organisations over 2014 (All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Hunger and Food Poverty 2014). While the report recommended over 70 actions to address food poverty , a major focus of the report was on enhancing the redistribution of surplus food , perhaps particularly because of the simultaneous focus on awareness of this issue. Driven by the ‘scandal’ that both food waste and hunger could exist at the same time in the UK, six of the APPG’s recommendations focused on strengthening infrastructure and systems to support the diversion of food surplus from food retailers to instead be used by charitable food providers. They wrote:
It is in harvesting from (the surplus or wasted food) that we believe the next big breakthrough will be made in eliminating hunger in this country.
This quote reflects a widely found tendency to link the issue of insecure and insufficient food access to that of food waste/surplus , often expressed with the verdict that the joint occurrence of these problems in the same country is scandalous.
The idea of linking surplus food from the food chain with meeting the needs of marginalised groups is not new, and there are numerous examples of these practices across high-income countries, which have been supported by legislative and technological developments. One example is Good Samaritan legislation, which is a set of regulations limiting liability for someone who provides emergency aid to another on a voluntary basis (i.e.) food donors. Such laws are already in place in Canada and the United States (Tarasuk and Eakin 2005). In France , laws have been passed; legislating governments to require supermarkets to donate food to charity and similar developments in Italy have resulted in the introduction of similar legislation via a law known as the ‘Gadda Law’ (Azzurro 2015).
Other campaigns have focused on the introduction of corporate tax credits for companies linked to the fair market value of the corporate surplus food donations made to food banks . This is already done in France and Spain (Azzurro 2015), and proposals for this legislation have been proposed by Food Banks Canada and debated in municipal councils across Canada. FareShare in the UK is proposing the establishment of a £15 million fund to compensate retailers for diverting 100,000 tonnes of food from anaerobic dig...