Living in the US for a number of years, I used to feel – I’m now ashamed to say – quite smug about coming from the UK, a country with a proper social security system. I used to view the very public provision of food aid – in soup kitchens and food banks – as a powerful signal of something rotten at the heart of America. The US's refusal, by the state and by its citizens, to protect the health and wellbeing of all its citizens, particularly the most vulnerable, felt uncivilised, almost Victorian, as if its democracy had not yet grown up enough to recognise its responsibilities. It was all of a piece with the US's non-provision of universal access to health care or of paid maternity leave, its refusal to sign the international Convention on the Rights of the Child (putting it in the same camp as Somalia and South Sudan, the only other countries not to have signed). It looked like the unpleasant underbelly of American exceptionalism.

I was, therefore, shocked to come home to the UK in the 2000s and find a very different society from the one I had left in the 1980s. I returned in the time of New Labour, having missed many of the Thatcher and all of the Major years, and the changes to British life were glaringly obvious. America no longer seemed exceptional: the UK was beginning to resemble the US in myriad unpleasant ways. Inequality had risen dramatically; whole regions had been devastated and left behind after the loss of manufacturing and the decline of trade unions. Council housing and other public assets had been sold off, utilities and transport companies privatised. Public services and local government had been marketised, managerialised and underfunded. Although public spending boomed for a while under New Labour, and pensioner and child poverty were reduced, there was never a serious reversal of the Thatcherite legacy; the Britain I came home to was still firmly astride the neoliberal bandwagon.

The contemporary public discourse around hunger in the UK is often focused on its being a new problem, a post-2010 problem, an austerity problem.