Food bank
Likewise, the inflation and economic crisis of the 2020s has exponentially driven low and even some middle income class consumers to at least partially get their food.
[5] [3] Food insecure individuals living in low-income communities experience higher rates of chronic disease, leading to healthcare costs which create more financial hardships.
[7] In the US, Australia and to an extent in Canada, the standard model is for food banks to act as warehouses rather than as suppliers to the end user, though there are exceptions.
Sometimes farmers will allow food banks to send gleaners to salvage leftover crops for free once their primary harvest is complete.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, food banks were established in South America, Africa, and Asia, in several cases with van Hengel acting as a consultant.
In 1965, while volunteering for a community dining room, van Hengel learned that grocery stores often had to throw away food that had damaged packaging or was near expiration.
According to Poppendieck, welfare was widely considered preferable to grassroots efforts, as the latter could be unreliable and did not give recipients consumer-style choice in the same way as did food stamps.
In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan's administration scaled back welfare provision, leading to a rapid rise in activity from grassroots hunger relief agencies.
[19][23] Demand for the services of US food banks increased further in the late 1990s, after the "end of welfare as we know it" with Bill Clinton's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act.
Food insecure individuals, who live in low-income communities experience higher rates of chronic disease, leading to healthcare costs which create more financial hardships.
[44] The number of food banks has increased rapidly in Germany, a country that weathered the crisis relatively well, and did not implement severe austerity measures.
The FEAD program has a wider scope than the MDP, helping deprived people not just with food aid, but with social inclusion projects and housing.
[48] The increase in the dependency on food banks has been blamed by some, such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot,[52] on the 2008 recession and the Conservative government's austerity policies.
[54] The OECD found that the number of people who answered yes to the question 'Have there been times in the past 12 months when you did not have enough money to buy food that you or your family needed?'
We need ongoing national survey monitoring to understand the scale of food insecurity, who is at risk, and the implications for child and adult health and wellbeing.
[57] As of January 2014, the largest group co-ordinating UK food banks was The Trussell Trust, a Christian charity based organization in Salisbury.
The Trussell Trust had aimed to provide short-term support for people whose needs have not yet been addressed by official state welfare provision; those who had been "falling into the cracks in the system".
Vouchers are handed out to those in need by various sorts of frontline care professionals, such as social workers, health visitors, Citizens Advice Bureaux, Jobcentres and housing officials.
[62][65][74][75] The Trussell Trust revealed a 47% increase in several three-day emergency supplies provided by their food banks in December 2016 compared to the monthly average for the 2016–17 financial year.
Reasons why people have difficulty getting enough to eat include redundancy, sickness, delays over receiving benefits, domestic violence, family breakdown, debt, and additional fuel costs in winter.
Several councils have begun looking at funding food banks to increase their capability, as cuts to their budgets mean they will be less able to help vulnerable people directly.
Many feel they are firefighting, finding a way to deal with the logistics of feeding more and more people, with no time to advocate for changes that would eradicate the need for food banks in the first place.
[102]Haroon Siddiqui said that the rise in food bank use coincided with the imposition of austerity and feels the government is reluctant to admit the obvious link.
"[65] Cookery writer and poverty campaigner Jack Monroe wrote that those referred to food banks or given vouchers were "the lucky ones with a good doctor or health visitor who knows us well enough to recognize that something has gone seriously wrong" and expressed concern for those who lack this support.
[110] Several Asian places have begun to use food banks; these include Nepal, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan[15] and Singapore.
[116] In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are charity-run food banks that operate on a semi-commercial system that differs from both the more common "warehouse" and "frontline" models.
For it is said that "not only do they provide a solution to the problem of hunger that does not require resources from the state", but they can be viewed "as evidence of increasing community spirit and of active, caring citizenship".
In the UK for example, Patrick Butler, society editor for The Guardian, has said that: "Many politicians and campaigners are fascinated by the possibilities of food banks.
[123] Elizabeth Dowler, Professor of Food & Social Policy at Warwick University, said that most British people prefer the state to take responsibility for helping the hungry.
He has reminded the governments of the advanced economies in Europe and Canada that they have a "duty to protect" their citizens from hunger, and suggested that leaving such an obligation to food banks may be an abuse of human rights.
