Letter from the Foodbank

It’s our foodbank’s first winter. We started collecting food and giving it to people who haven’t got any in August. Since then we have had to open two more distribution centres in our corner of Norfolk, and we have two more planned for the near future. When we started, we were the 194th UK foodbank to be founded under our parent charity, the Trussell Trust. Since then, 80 more have been set up. Between us, we have given three days’ worth of food to 100,000 hungry people in the last six months. Ours is a success story. But what sort of society needs that sort of success?

The vast majority of the food that we distribute is given by individuals, much of it at supermarket collections, when we invite shoppers to buy an extra item and give it to us as they leave. I was manning the collection boxes outside Morrisons one day when an ancient couple shuffled out, pushing a trolley stacked high with trays of cat food. They looked as if they would have fallen over if they hadn’t had something to hang on to, but as they approached the exit, the old man disengaged himself, unhooked a plastic bag that I hadn’t seen hanging on the back of the trolley, hobbled across, smiled, and gave it to me. I thanked him, and he hobbled back to his cat food and his wife. After three or four steps, they stopped, and the man made his unsteady way back to me. This time, his expression was anxious. ‘Those people you are looking after —’ he said, ‘they will be all right, won’t they?’