The usual list of the international Great and Good - but possibly logic deficient - take to the letters page of The Observer to tell us that food banks really just aren’t the thing:
The extraordinary efforts of food bank teams, increasingly backed by corporate involvement, should not blind us to the fact that an emergency food parcel cannot do more than temporarily alleviate hunger.
And there we were, thinking that hunger was itself a temporary thing. Solve it once and a few hours later it reappears. It rather definitionally being a thing that doesn’t have a permanent solution.
The latest plea for an essentials guarantee from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the Trussell Trust and others is testament to the reality that growing reliance on food banks, backed by surplus food redistribution, is an ineffective substitute for poverty-reducing policies.
This simply isn’t true. Food poverty is reduced by supplying people with food. Food banks supply people with food. Food banks are, therefore, a highly effective means of solving food poverty. To the extent that reducing food poverty reduces poverty then food banks are an excellent substitute.
We’ve long maintained the view that food banks are a new technology - a technology is just a way of doing something. Originating in the US, arriving in the UK just post- 2000, food banks do indeed alleviate food poverty. By the simple mechanism of providing food to people. Sounds absolutely great to us. The task is that hungry people get fed, why knock a system that feeds hungry people?
But the real complaint here is that this problem is being solved the wrong way. Just people organising things by themselves, charity, corporate involvement, waste food being redistributed - the little platoons doing their stuff. This is wrong. For it should be the State in all its inability to handle the details which does this. That’s what the moral insistence is here among said logically deficient:
Guaranteeing the right to food and a living income through real living wages, together with adequate social security provision, is essential to ending the need for charitable food aid in all societies.
We’re pragmatists. Extreme pragmatists perhaps but pragmatists all the same. Food banks feed hungry folk better than governments do. All Hail Food Banks.
All 38 member countries of the OECD now rely on a privatised charitable food aid model, often dependent on volunteer labour. The ubiquity of corporate food charity in high-income countries should provide a stark warning. The European Federation of Food Banks and the Global Foodbanking Network collectively operate in 76 countries, including low- and middle-income states. Their mission is to expand “the presence and influence of food banks all over the world”, further anchoring corporate charitable food aid provision as a means to address hunger through surplus food redistribution.
That’s exactly why this new technology has spread from the US to all of the richer countries. Because it works. The insistence from these Great and Good is that we should stop doing something that works and attempt what clearly doesn’t on moral grounds. Get rid of that nasty charity, cleanse the corporates from the system and accept the hunger as the cost of moral purity.
Err, no, be off with you. If the hungry are getting fed then we’ve solved the problem already.