Corporate-backed food aid programs have become the standard response to hunger. However, Kayleigh Garthwaite argues that we must recognize these programs as a symptom of the systemic failures that produce hunger. At the same time, we must work to build a society based on prefigurative practices rooted in collective care, shared responsibility, and local control.
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Since 2020, demand for charitable food aid has risen sharply across North America and Europe. While we know food banks were in place long before the pandemic, the overlapping crises of the COVID‑19 pandemic, inflation, and widening global inequality dramatically accelerated their use and deepened their role and visibility in society. Corporate‑backed charitable food aid has expanded on a large scale, often reliant on donations of surplus food that can be unfit for purpose. As a result, governments have increasingly shifted responsibility for hunger onto a charitable system propped up by corporate donations.
Hunger is increasingly described as though it were a problem of coordination rather than a consequence of political and economic choice. Public discussion tends to frame it as an issue of surplus and shortage. From this perspective, the task appears largely logistical – improve distribution, strengthen partnerships, refine systems that better connect excess to need. Hunger becomes less about inequality and more about systems of distribution.
My latest book, “Hunger Inc.: Building Solidarity Beyond the Food Bank,” examines what this shift means for people, communities, and the future of food justice. It asks a simple but pressing question: what happens when charity becomes the default response to hunger in rich but unequal countries?
To explore this, I traveled across the United States, Canada, and Europe. I spent time with food banks, community kitchens, food co-ops, urban farms, and food justice organizations. I volunteered, observed, interviewed, and listened. Across all of the six countries and territories I visited, it was clear that while charitable food aid can alleviate immediate hardship temporarily, it can’t address the structural issues that produce food insecurity in the first place.
The politics of charitable food aid
Across the 90+ organizations I visited, almost all spoke the language of dignity, choice and community. Many spoke of a right to food. Yet the reality was often constrained by scarcity, stigma, and the power dynamics inherent in charity. Research, including my own, shows that food charity can leave people feeling judged or undeserving, and that these experiences are shaped by class, gender, disability, race, and immigration status.
At the same time, wider narratives can frame hunger as an individual problem – a matter of budgeting, cooking skills, or personal responsibility. These myths endure because they are politically convenient. They obscure the fact that food insecurity is driven by income, housing, social security and structural inequalities, not by personal ‘failings.’
Campaigns that celebrate volunteers as ‘heroes’ reinforce the idea that charity is an accepted response to poverty. But this narrative keeps us stuck. It normalizes a parallel food system for people experiencing poverty and allows governments to step back from their obligations.
This framing feels reassuring because it avoids conflict. It offers a way to respond to hunger without engaging directly with better wages, adequate social security, housing, or power. It allows governments, corporations, and charities to converge around solutions that promise efficiency and innovation rather than redistribution. Thus, hunger is increasingly positioned as something that can be managed without naming its causes.
When emergency becomes infrastructure
Food banks were once presented as temporary responses to crisis. They were framed as short‑term measures, intended to bridge periods of acute difficulty before people returned to stability. What has happened instead is that this emergency architecture has quietly become permanent. Food banks have expanded into schools, hospitals, universities, and workplaces. They have become embedded and are visible in everyday life.
Despite this institutionalization, the language surrounding charitable food aid has not shifted to reflect reality. Hunger continues to be framed as episodic and exceptional, even as it becomes routine. I understand this as the permanence of emergency, where a crisis response is normalized to such an extent that its existence is no longer questioned. Calling hunger an emergency obscures its structural nature, allowing chronic deprivation to be addressed through short-term fixes while its causes remain untouched.
The retreat of the state from social security provision has been accompanied by the increased presence of corporate actors in the charitable food system. Supermarkets donate surplus food while paying wages that leave many of their workers food insecure. Andy Fisher describes this dynamic as a “hunger industrial complex” in which large corporations are able to sponsor food banks, gain tax relief and enhance their public image, while the success of the system is measured through outputs like volume and reach rather than through outcomes such as reduced food insecurity.
Reframing the debate: The right to food
One of my central demands is that we must shift from a charity model to a rights‑based one. The Right to Food is a legally recognized human right, first set out in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. At its simplest, it means that everyone should have reliable, dignified access to adequate, nutritious and culturally appropriate food – not as charity, but as a legal entitlement.
This is the work I’ve been doing as a co-founder of the Global Solidarity Alliance for Food, Health and Social Justice (GSA), a network committed to challenging the dominance of charitable food aid and advancing rights‑based, justice‑oriented alternatives. The GSA brings together food bank workers, researchers, advocates and people with lived experience to reshape the narrative around hunger and push for systemic change.
Across the US and Europe, rights‑based movements are gaining momentum. In the EU the European Citizens’ Initiative Good Food For All reflects growing efforts to rethink food access as a right for all, beyond emergency measures, focusing instead on how good, affordable food might be organized as part of everyday social infrastructure rather than distributed through charity.
In the UK, the Right to Food Commission led by Ian Byrne MP is gathering evidence and building public pressure for the Right to Food to be enshrined in law, strengthening the case for systemic change. In West Virginia, Voices of Hunger is organizing people with lived experience to advocate for municipal Right to Food resolutions. Nourish Scotland’s work on public diners imagines a future where communal meals are part of national infrastructure. These initiatives illustrate how communities are beginning to move beyond short‑term crisis responses toward deeper, long‑term transformation.
Solidarity in practice
Therefore, we need to devote equal attention to diagnosing the structural problems that perpetuate charitable food aid and to the alternatives already being built. We need to spend as much time imagining what solidarity based alternatives can look like as we do analyzing why the current model fails.
Mutual aid groups, solidarity kitchens and food sovereignty movements are creating systems rooted in collective care, shared responsibility, and local control. These spaces are not perfect. Frontline workers and volunteers face burnout, funding precarity and political resistance – but they show what it looks like to practice a more just food system grounded in solidarity and rights, not charity.
While community responses matter, they can’t replace state responsibility. Ending hunger requires political will and structural change. That means:
- Adequate income guarantees, including exploring cash-first and Universal Basic Income models
- Robust social security systems
- Universal free school meals
- Legal recognition of the Right to Food
- Narrative change that challenges stigma and charity
These are not radical ideas. They are the minimum required to ensure that people do not have to rely on charity to meet their basic needs.
Towards a food bank free future
Calls to end food banks are often met with discomfort. What would happen to those who need food now? This objection misreads the argument. Ending food banks does not mean withdrawing support overnight. It means refusing to accept charity as the permanent mechanism for meeting basic needs.
Food banks should disappear because people no longer need them – not because hunger vanishes on its own, but because the conditions that require food banks are dismantled. That would require adequate incomes, secure housing, strong public services, and an enforceable right to food. None of these can be delivered through charity, however well designed it becomes.
Hunger is not inevitable. It is the result of decisions made without solidarity. The path forward requires honesty about the limitations of charitable approaches and momentum to imagine alternatives. This won’t be found in bigger and more efficient models of food charity, but from reimagining our relationship to food, community, and care.
Rather than treating charitable food aid as a standard fallback response, we need to acknowledge it as a symptom of underlying systemic failures and instead build a society in which people only rely on charity in a true emergency. Doing so requires commitment from policymakers, energy from advocates, and solidarity across communities. It involves rethinking longstanding practices and narratives, challenging entrenched interests, and envisioning a society that places human rights above corporate profits.