After years of austerity, local pantries are starting to question whether food handouts get people out of poverty
Just over a year ago, with the cost of living crisis in full swing and levels of hardship and hunger rocketing in her deprived patch of east London, Denise Bentley shut down the food bank she founded more than a decade ago. “It was a difficult step to take,” she says, “but we realised the food bank was not the answer to the problem.”
At the time, demand for its food parcels was off the scale; food supplies were harder and harder to source; and staff and volunteers were burnt out. Bentley recalls: “The question was: do we spend £100,000 on buying food and stocking the warehouse? Or do we spend the money on transforming people’s lives?”
