Charitable food aid has become a first line of response for addressing rising rates of hunger in many high-income countries such as the United States (US), Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (UK). This can be seen in the soaring numbers of food banks, alongside other charitable projects such as community kitchens, resourced through volunteer labour and food donations from corporate retailers. In the US and Canada, food banks have been an institutionalised response to food poverty for 35 years, and in the UK they can be traced back to the introduction of economic austerity measures implemented in response to the 2008 financial crisis (Lambie-Mumford, 2019). In the UK, where 8.4 million people live in food poverty, the largest national food bank provider, The Trussell Trust, has grown its network from 65 food banks in 2011 to more than 1,200 in 2019 (Sosenko et al, 2019). Australia's largest food relief organisation, Foodbank, reports that during the 12 months leading up to 2019, the need for food relief increased by 22 per cent, with more than one in five people experiencing food insecurity. The organisation works with 2,400 charities to provide food relief but only 37 per cent reported that they were meeting the needs of those they assist (Foodbank, 2019).

Critical voices in research, policy and advocacy argue that charitable food aid forms part of the retrenchment of the welfare state, allowing governments to devolve their responsibilities onto the charitable sector and community groups (Lambie-Mumford and Dowler, 2014; Barbour et al, 2016). While alleviating the symptoms of food insecurity, food aid fails to address the structural causes, such as stagnating wages, welfare reforms and austerity policies. In March 2019, these concerns culminated in researchers and poverty campaigners publishing an open letter declaring that charitable food aid in the UK and US is ‘a sticking plaster on a gaping wound of systemic inequality in our societies’.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the connections between food and social inequality further. The wake of the pandemic attuned us to the dysfunctionality of a food aid system reliant on corporate philanthropy, with food aid donations dwindling due to the disruption of fragile just-in-time food supply chains caused by consumer stockpiling (Beacham and Willatt, 2020). The economic insecurities created by loss of income and employment have led to soaring rates of food insecurity.