The professors writing about the institutionalisation of food banks (Letters, 25 March) illuminate a familiar dilemma in all charitable activity: is it just a means of exonerating those authorities that should be making proper, state-funded provision? It is certainly a question that is understood by the volunteers I meet at our local food bank, who long for their own redundancy.
In the meantime, in the absence of longer-term, structural solutions, all recipients at this particular food bank are treated with humanity, dignity and, yes, friendship, as well as being offered opportunities to get appropriate help with benefits and with financial and employment advice.
Rob Davies
Pontesbury, Shropshire
• All those professors should know better. Providing emergency food for people in crisis and recognising the need for social and economic justice are not mutually exclusive objectives. That’s why organisations such as the Trussell Trust campaign to make our social security system fairer and draw attention to factors such as low income that bring people, unable to feed themselves, to the trust’s food banks.
At the same time it makes perfect sense for us to try to deal with the huge amount of food that goes to waste. Rather than being cynical about supermarkets and the food industry for trying to tackle this issue, the signatories should recognise that taking corporate responsibility in this way is to be welcomed.
I volunteer at Exeter food bank. Two weeks ago, a man leaving the food bank with food for his family thanked me. “It’s a life-saver,” he said. He wasn’t using a figure of speech. He meant it.
Jeff Skinner
Exeter
• I would like to say to such an august selection of signatories: “No shit, Sherlocks.” Of course food banks in the UK cannot solve poverty and indeed can be viewed (probably correctly) as just a sticking plaster on an enormous social problem.
I volunteer with a Trussell Trust food bank in London and am proud that the trust campaigns for all the societal improvements proposed by the original writers. No one who has ever volunteered with a food bank in the UK ever sought to be part of some institutionalised emergency food service – we just want to feed people and families in food poverty. And, for the record, the food we supply to an ever-increasing number of people is not “leftovers for the left-behind” but comes from public donations, week in week out – thankfully it still does. Until there is a vast change in UK social policy, that will have to do, sticking plaster or not!
Dave Newsome
London
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