It was 2011 when I first went to a food bank to see what was going on, but the Trussell Trust had launched its first one more than a decade earlier. So, in a way, it was naive to think that this was a watershed political moment, but not unreasonable to think they were political in essence. We used to think of food aid as an American peculiarity, one of those degrading stopgaps they prefer to a social safety net. Was Britain, too, on its way to rejecting universal dignity as a principle, and replacing it with something materially meagre and philosophically ungenerous? Or was it just a cod Americanism that politics was trying out, the way singers try to sound like Shania Twain before they find their own voice? We got our answer to that soon enough: the story in 2011 was that food bank use had surged by 50%, with 61,000 people going to the Trussell Trust in a year. Last year that was 1.6 million.
One thing I never thought this was was a story about food. I didn’t even look inside the parcels; it would have felt incredibly intrusive, a little like poking through someone else’s shopping trolley. The first backlash moment I remember was when someone – a reader, I couldn’t possibly guess of which newspaper – spotted some Maldon sea salt on a food bank shelf. Thus was the truth unmasked: that these people were not hungry at all, they were just in it for the incredibly expensive salt. Jack Monroe, the Bootstrap Cook, who has done the extraordinary work of building a recipe encyclopaedia from the foods you might get at a food bank, pointed out that they were just working with whatever people had donated. Users may, occasionally, get some peaches in armagnac; that would not be proof positive that they weren’t destitute.
Despite making perfect sense, the point did not land: the new normal was that food had to be extremely basic, otherwise food bank users were somehow in breach of their “contract”. There is necessity and there is pleasure, and if they ever coexist, the need is a lie. Monroe has worked tirelessly against this, insisting on pleasure in whatever bag of lentils she chances upon, but she seems to be doing this almost singlehandedly. By 2017, some supermarkets were handing out suggested shopping lists if you wanted to donate: tinned meat, fish, fruit, veg, soup and pulses; UHT milk; tea, coffee, rice and pasta. Of course, they have to be tinned, since they can’t be perishable (although arguably, usage is so high now that shifting a few bananas wouldn’t be very hard).
Absent a can of condensed milk, this is exactly the food my mum used to keep in the cellar (she said in case we got snowed in, but really for the untoward event of a nuclear war). To give “austerity” its fullest meaning, this – minus the pasta – is a postwar shopping list, the food you would eat without complaint in the immediate aftermath of a national disaster. The Trussell Trust typically tries to include some biscuits, but its offering is still strikingly pared down. This is about more than what people happen to donate: there are conventions, now, around what you’re supposed to donate. So in Cardiff, two Christmases ago, there was a glut of baked beans and tea bags, but an urgent shortage of sponge puddings. That made perfect sense: if a food parcel is political, which it is, then its contents will be scrutinised, and somebody, somewhere, will call a pudding empty calories. Why would a person in genuine need eat an empty calorie? Beans? Now there’s an honest food. Basic enough that nobody is getting something for nothing.
It is actually the food itself, more than the widespread experience of hunger, that distils the difference between charity and social security. With charity comes the end of privacy, since your basket is everybody’s business. But it also builds a very functional view of the body, insofar as the least it requires to survive is also the most that it needs, as though you are talking about horses, or rabbits (dogs are exempt from this narrative; God knows how they got away with it, but it would be considered very inhumane never to give a dog a treat). And the fact that you can imagine all these foods on the basics list of a ration card, instead of ringing any alarm bells (hang on a second: we didn’t have a war; we don’t have a national food shortage), only serves to reinforce the notion that it is somehow character-building, because, you know, wars are.
