Read on Twitter
The Great Food Bank Dilemma (a thread): "Coteau often wonders if food banks are a mistake... if it would be better to shut food banks down entirely, and force the government to provide. But would it?" (1) https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/10/half-term-hardship-and-heartbreak-one-month-in-the-life-of-a-food-bank-manager
Food banks collapse from lack of food, money or volunteers. I'm of aware of just one foodbank, however, that shut its doors in principled protest at being cynically co-opted as the informal back stop for a welfare system hell-bent on cutting benefits (2) https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/busy-nottingham-food-bank-close-protest-harsh-council-cuts-9885641.html
Food banks generally keep on keeping on. And yet... demand for charity food keeps growing. I wrote seven years ago about a group of veteran Canadian foodbank volunteers, who basically wondered if they had inadvertently created a monster. (3) https://www.theguardian.com/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2013/may/28/poverty-50-ways-to-close-a-food-bank-uk
After two decades as volunteers, this group - caricatured by a local paper as "the little old ladies who run the neighbourhood church food pantry" - concluded food banks were stigmatising and inefficient and didn't solve poverty or food insecurity. (4) https://www.theguardian.com/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2013/may/28/poverty-50-ways-to-close-a-food-bank-uk
Aged mainly in their sixties and seventies, they were looking "before they reached the age of 90" to make obsolete a food charity system they had thought was a temporary stopgap but had become permanent, increasingly unjust and unsustainable. (5) https://www.theguardian.com/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2013/may/28/poverty-50-ways-to-close-a-food-bank-uk
Postscript: Sudbury, Ontario, food bank is still thriving after 29 years: "The Food Bank [is] the only solution for large numbers of our population," it says. "It is unlikely that the need for Food Banks... is going to disappear any time soon." (ends) https://www.sudburyfoodbank.ca/about-us/a-message-from-our-executive-director/
