Thirty Years of “Emergency” Food Aid in the US and Canada: Findings From Comparative Research to Inform UK Efforts to Tackle Food Poverty and the Need for Food Banks

Researchers observed how food providers in the United States and Canada have made changes during the decades of neoliberal policymaking that have seen food banking expand across North America and beyond. These changes, in part, reflect responses to critiques of food banking as an inadequate solution to food insecurity. Food charities have variously attempted to improve provision through healthier procurement, choice-based distribution models, diversified programming, and advocacy for policy solutions. Better food banking, however, does not negate the influence of corporate donors on food charities’ capacity to foster hunger-preventative change, such as the employment practices of those same donors. Meanwhile, grassroots organisers have pushed for systemic solutions to food insecurity and food waste, whether disillusioned volunteers or mutual aid providers. These often operate with far fewer resources than the corporate donors, government agencies, and philanthropists shaping food banking trajectories. Given the barriers to truly doing themselves out of a job, the chapter asks how far such changes address problems of institutionalised emergency food redistribution and what lessons these might yield for UK practitioners and decision-makers.