Stop Donating to Food Banks

The Tin in the Trolley

You know the one. It sits just past the tills, somewhere between the lottery kiosk and the exit. A big plastic crate, a laminated sign, a cheerful volunteer in a tabard. You’ve done your shop, so you drop in a tin of chickpeas, maybe a jar of pasta sauce if you’re feeling flush, and you walk out to the car park with a small, warm glow in your chest.

I’ve done it. You probably have too. And I’m here to suggest, as gently as a man can while holding a crowbar, that we should stop.

Not because hungry people don’t matter. Because they matter far too much to be left to a plastic crate.

Food banks were meant to be the fire brigade… you call them when the house is burning. Somewhere along the way, in country after country, they quietly became the plumbing. And every time we top up the crate, we make it a little easier for the people who are actually responsible to keep looking the other way.

The Emergency That Never Ends

This isn’t a British quirk. Pick almost any wealthy democracy and you’ll find the same crate by the same tills, run by the same exhausted volunteers, reporting the same “record” numbers every single year.

Country	Main network	Latest figure	The direction of travel
United Kingdom	Trussell, plus at least 1,172 independent food banks	2.6 million+ emergency parcels in 2025, from 1,671 locations	Still 45% higher than before the pandemic (Trussell)
United States	Feeding America: 250+ food banks, 60,000+ partner agencies	5.9 billion meals in the year to June 2025	Rescued 4.3 billion pounds of food in the same year (Feeding America)
Canada	Food Banks Canada: 5,500 food banks and community groups	2.17 million visits in March 2025 alone	Doubled since 2019; one in five users has a job (Food Banks Canada)
Germany	Tafel Deutschland: 974 Tafeln	Around 77,000 volunteers	916 Tafeln in 2013, 974 in 2025 (Statista / Tafel)
Australia	Foodbank Australia	3.5 million households food insecure in the past year	Nearly one in two renting households (Foodbank)
Worldwide	The Global FoodBanking Network	About 2 billion meals to 40.5 million people in 47 countries, 2025	2.5 million more people than in 2024 (GFN)

Sit with Britain for a moment. There are now more food banks in the UK than McDonald’s restaurants. That’s not a sign of a generous country. It’s a sign of a country that has quietly franchised hunger relief.

Canada’s national count started in 1989, which means a food bank survey is now older than many of the people queuing at them. Germany’s first Tafel opened in 1993. America’s food bank network was built up through the 1980s. These things were all born as “temporary” responses. Temporary, it turns out, is the most permanent word in the English language.

The Unpaid Subcontractor

Here’s the bit nobody puts on the laminated sign. Every food parcel handed over is a small admission that the state has failed at something it promised to do. Wages didn’t cover it. Benefits didn’t cover it. Rent swallowed it. So a volunteer in a church hall fills the gap, and the gap stays exactly where it is.

Governments know this. They also know a good deal when they see one. Why fix the safety net when tens of thousands of decent people will knit a new one every week, unpaid, and thank you for the privilege of a photo op at Christmas? The British government calls food bank use “a blight on the country”, which is a bit like the landlord calling the damp regrettable.

And here’s what should really rattle you. The food banks themselves agree with me.

In Britain, Trussell and the Independent Food Aid Network say the goal is not fewer parcels but an end to all forms of charitable food aid. They want to put themselves out of business. (LabourList)
In Canada, Food Banks Canada concluded in 2025 that volunteers and donations alone cannot keep pace, and that only legislation can. (Food Banks Canada)
In Germany, the head of Tafel Deutschland describes the network as being in “permanent crisis mode”. Read that phrase twice. A crisis that is permanent isn’t a crisis. It’s a policy. (Aussiedlerbote)
In Australia, Foodbank’s own chief executive says hunger has gone mainstream and the federal government must act. (Foodbank Australia)

The people running the crates are begging us to look past the crate. And what do we do? We buy another tin of chickpeas and feel marvellous about it.

The Waste Disposal Deal

Now follow the food, because this is where it gets properly grubby.

In America, the anti-hunger campaigner Andy Fisher reckons roughly 70 to 80 per cent of the food in the food bank system comes from the private sector. (Duke podcast) His book Big Hunger lays out what the big donors get back: tax breaks, glowing publicity, and free disposal of surplus stock they would otherwise pay to bin. (Antipode review) Some of the same corporations whose low wages help send people to the food bank then collect the credit for stocking it.

It’s the perfect business model. Underpay the workforce. Overproduce the stock. Donate the overflow to feed the underpaid workforce. Claim the deduction. Put the whole thing in the annual sustainability report with a photo of a smiling volunteer.

Europe has its own version, and it’s somehow even cheekier. In Germany, a major supermarket chain ran a campaign inviting its own customers to buy ready-made €5 bags of long-life food and leave them at a collection point for the Tafel. (REWE) Read that again. The shop sells you the donation. The till rings. Everyone goes home feeling good, and the retailer has turned compassion into a product line.

To be fair to Fisher’s critics, some reviewers think his language is overheated, and plenty of food banks have changed how they work. (Antipode review) But even Britain’s Independent Food Aid Network wants an end to relying on surplus food as the answer to hunger. (IFAN) When the charities and the critics are singing from the same hymn sheet, perhaps it’s the congregation that needs to listen.

Before You Reach for the Pitchfork

Let me be very clear about what I’m not saying, because somebody will skim the headline and decide I want children to go hungry.

People need feeding tonight. Not after the next Budget, not once the policy paper lands… tonight. In Britain last year, more than 1.6 million parcels went to families with children. (Trussell) Parcels for people aged 65 and over went from about 26,000 in 2019 to over 90,000 in 2025. (Trussell) As a man on the far side of 65 myself, that number lands somewhere below the ribs. The volunteers who meet those people are some of the finest human beings this country produces, and nothing here is aimed at them.

And here’s a detail that should trouble the warm-glow brigade. In Australia, almost half of food-insecure households say embarrassment, stigma or shame stop them asking for help at all. (APO / Foodbank) The crate isn’t just failing to fix the problem. For a lot of people, it’s a door they can’t bring themselves to walk through.

So no, I’m not asking you to walk past the hungry. I’m asking you to stop pretending the tin is the answer, and start asking why the question keeps coming back.

So What Do We Do Instead?

The radical alternative turns out to be embarrassingly simple. Give people money.

Scotland has actually tried it. In 2023 the Scottish Government published a plan called Cash-First: Towards Ending the Need for Food Banks in Scotland, with nine actions running to 2026. (gov.scot) The idea is that someone in a crisis gets cash or a shopping voucher and buys their own food, like an adult, rather than queuing for a bag somebody else packed. In one cash-first group, more than three quarters of people hadn’t gone back to a food bank. (IFAN) Campaigners in the USA and Canada are watching closely. (Big Issue)

It’s not a magic wand, and even its supporters say cash-first only works alongside decent wages, benefits and housing. But it treats hunger as what it is… a shortage of money, not a shortage of chickpeas.

So here’s my suggestion for the next time you’re standing by that crate:

Give cash, not cans. If you must give, give money. The food bank can buy exactly what it needs, at better prices, and pay for the advice workers who help people claim what they’re owed.
Send a letter with every tin. For each donation, email your MP, member of Congress or local representative and ask one question: why is this still necessary? Make the crate cost them something.
Ask the shop about its wages. If a supermarket hosts a collection point, ask how many of its own staff use food banks. Watch the face.
Back cash-first schemes. Where your council or government is trialling them, support them loudly. Where it isn’t, ask why not.

The Question Before the Tin

I spent a good chunk of my working life in uniform, and one lesson stuck. If you keep responding to the same emergency in the same place, it stopped being an emergency a long time ago. Now it’s a system, and somebody is benefiting from it staying exactly as it is.

Food banks across the developed world have become exactly that. A permanent, volunteer-powered, corporate-subsidised patch over a hole that governments have decided not to fill, because we keep filling it for them. Our kindness has become their excuse.

So next time you’re at the till with a tin of chickpeas in your hand, I’m not asking you to put it back. I’m asking you to hold it a moment longer and ask yourself a slightly uncomfortable question.

Who is this tin really for… the family who’ll eat it, or the people who should never have let them go hungry in the first place?

Then go home and write the letter.