A genealogy of the food bank: Historicising the rise of food charity in the UK

It is widely supposed that food banks and key aspects of the UK’s wider food banking system – referral networks, eligibility tests, food vouchers, corporate sponsorship, and the close entanglement of food charity with local and national government – are new to the UK, either imported from North America or emerging ex nihilio with the Trussell Trust in the early 2000s. Drawing on local and national newspaper archives and data from Companies House, the Charity Commission, and internet archiving website the WayBack Machine, we present a genealogy that challenges these origins and situates UK food banking in a set of historically contingent practices, alliances, and struggles, many of which are nowadays forgotten. Contributing to work on policy mobilities in

through a network of care professionals who refer clients for emergency food support. All food is donated by individuals, churches, groups and industrial over-production. (Trussell Trust, 2006, p. 4) The rapid growth of food banks across the globe has been the subject of growing scholarly attention. Much of this has focused on the limited potential of food banks to tackle food insecurity (Riches, 2018) and their role (as an outlet for food "waste") in the reproduction of an inequitable and environmentally damaging capitalist food system (Fisher, 2017) and in helping shore up insufficient and increasingly punitive state welfare regimes (Horst et al., 2014). In contrast to US and many European food banks that warehouse and redistribute (surplus) food to charitable organisations, UK "food banks" refer to centres that collect, store, and distribute food to people directly (Lambie-Mumford & Silvasti, 2021). Here a dramatic growth in the number of food banks (now more than 2400 nationally) and in the financial value of agreements between corporate retailers, the surplus food redistribution charity FareShare, and the UK's largest food bank franchise The Trussell Trust, alongside a continued rise in levels of food insecurity (IFAN, 2021), have raised fears over an emergent "food bank industry" (Garthwaite et al., 2019). 1 Concerns have also emerged about the constructions of deservedness and dependency underlying the organisational practices of many UK food banks (Möller, 2021;Strong, 2019). For example, food banks affiliated to Christian charity The Trussell Trust require people to be assessed by a local "welfare professional" to ensure they are in "genuine need" before they can exchange their referral voucher for a three-day food parcel of ambient and tinned food -made up using food mostly sourced from donations from the public and the food industry -at the food bank. Recipients are allowed only three vouchers in a six-month period, with further support at the discretion of the food bank manager. With General Practitioners and Job Centre staff among these referral agents, and with some food banks now receiving direct funding from national and local government, fears are also emerging over the possibility of food banks becoming a permanent feature of the UK's depleted welfare apparatus (Lambie-Mumford, 2019). Despite acknowledging the long history of ad hoc and informal forms of food charity, the absence of detailed historical research on UK food banking has meant its origins are commonly traced to the development of FareShare in 1994 or the opening of The Trussell Trust's first Foodbank in 2001 (Hansard, 2013;Riches, 2018), whose franchised model of referral systems, corporate food drives, the use of food vouchers, and pre-packaged food parcels quickly became adopted by churches and community groups across the UK responding to austerity-induced poverty (Garthwaite, 2016;Lambie-Mumford, 2013). But this foreshortens the history of UK food banking. It also leaves unanswered why UK food banks take the forms they do and how the organisational practices and the discourses that underpin them have become the preeminent form of charitable food provision in the UK today. To try to answer these questions, we provide a genealogy of UK food banks, contextualising their key features as by-products of distinct historical social practices, alliances, and struggles.
Genealogy is a "historical perspective and investigative method" that seeks to de-naturalise and render contingent what is taken-for-granted in the present day to provide "an intrinsic critique of the present" (Crowley, 2009, p. 341). With Garland (2014), we aim to reveal "a series of troublesome associations and lineages -[to show] that institutions and practices we value and take for granted today are actually more problematic or more 'dangerous' than they otherwise appear" (p.372). In a similar vein, Mitchell has helped expose the "uncritical assumptions that underlie common-sense understandings of humanitarianism [and] charity" (Mitchell, 2017a, p.350), andMidgley (2013) the discursive and institutional networks that led to the recent construction of a particular form of "household food insecurity" among UK policymakers. Building on this, we seek to problematise the discourses and practices permeating contemporary UK food banking by tracing their linkages to specific entanglements of charitable, state, and corporate power in the period reaching from the 1880s to the present-day.
In constructing this genealogy, we recognise it would be possible to go further back and to trace developments further afield. For example, distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor found in the Christian scriptures were first codified by the state and tied to the allocation of "outdoor relief" in the Elizabethan era (Hindle, 2004) and Nally (2011) has shown how the global provisioning systems designed to ensure food security for Britain's poor in the 18th and 19th centuries produced hunger -and in the case of Ireland (in the 1840s and 1850s) and India (in the 1870s and 1890s) famine -overseas. But rather than a "complete" history of UK food banking, and eschewing any simple causation, our genealogy is a "selective search for injustice and subjection" (Kearins & Hooper, 2002, p. 733). For reasons of space, we have begun it in a period when several of the key technologies of contemporary food banking (vouchers, rationing, and referral systems, public appeals for donations, and corporate sponsorship) first emerged in the UK. 2 For context, we begin by providing a brief history of charitable food provision in the UK from the late Victorian period to the late 20th century. We then return to selected moments in that history to examine the changing role of local and central government actors in the distribution of charitable food, and the history of corporate involvement in UK food banking. Throughout, we show how some of the more regressive elements of these developments were contested and in the final section we outline examples of more progressive forms of food aid structured by the politics of mutualism rather than charity (White & Williams, 2012).
The resultant genealogy contributes to an emerging literature on voluntary sector organisations as "vehicle[s] for policy mobilities" (DeVerteuil et al., 2020, p. 930). Existing scholarship in this field includes accounts of the travel and contextual translation of harm-reduction policies (McCann & Temenos, 2015), Housing First and homeless governance (Baker & Evans, 2016), and immigration and asylum activism (Squire, 2011). We add to this by detailing the discursive, technological, institutional, and embodied movements and connections that have shaped the development of food banking in the UK. By doing so we hope to disrupt the rationalities and "regime(s) of acceptability" (Gordon, 1980, p. 158) that underpin and maintain the modus operandi of many current-day food banks and recalibrate discussions of the institutionalisation of charitable food provision in the UK.
As Reich and Turnball note, the genealogical approach is at root a highly empirical one, though there is "no clearly stated, well-defined or prescribed methodology for investigations" (2018, pp. 2-3). To construct our genealogy, we searched keywords such as "food bank," "food surplus," "food donations," "food parcel," and "food vouchers" on the digital collections of the British Newspaper Archive, British Library Newspapers, Nexis UK, Daily Mail Historical Archive, Times Digital Archive, and Daily Mirror Digital Archive from the period 1880 to 2020. The names of individuals and organisations revealed by these searches were cross-referenced against Companies House and the Charity Commission database. Notwithstanding the ways in which debates over food banking have become much more politicised in recent years (Wells & Caraher, 2014), our newspaper search revealed several tropes in the historical accounts of charitable food provision that chime with contemporary discourse (Strong, 2021), including the absence of the voices of recipients, categorisations of deservedness, and a certain self-congratulatory tone concerning charitable donations. But we are less interested in these representational tropes per se than in what "conditions, limits and institutionalises [the] discursive formations" such accounts reveal (Reich & Turnbull, 2018, p. 3). To that end we also reviewed Trustee Financial Reports of charities -including The Trussell Trust, 2006 the WayBack Machine, an internet archiving tool, to access historical website data of charities, retailers, and corporate funders to search for connections between food bank organisations and their funders that are otherwise no longer visible (Supporting Information S1).

| ORIGIN STORIES: A REVISED HISTORY OF UK FOOD BANKING
The origins of modern food surplus redistribution schemes, and of food banks, are commonly traced to the use of US farm surplus as food aid during the Great Depression (Poppendieck, 1998) and to the pioneering work of St Mary's Food Bank, also in the United States, in the 1960s (Fisher, 2017;Riches, 2018). Founded in 1967 by a retired businessman (John Hengel) and a Catholic Deacon (Robert McCarty), St Mary's provided a place where "individuals and companies with excess food could 'deposit' it, and those in need could 'withdraw' it" (St Mary's Food Bank, 2021, n.p.). This became a model for others to follow and federal government funded Second Harvest, a project attached to St Mary's, to "spread the food banking gospel". In 1979, Second Harvest (now Feeding America) became a national non-government organisation, channelling large-scale corporate donations across its network (Poppendieck, 1998), and in 1983 Hengel established Food Banking Inc. (now The Global Food Banking Network (GFN)) to develop food banks across the world. Riches (2018) provides a rich account of the policy mobilities involved in the global spread of Second Harvest's model. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hengel went to Canada, Mexico, France, and Belgium, whose food banks were key in establishing the GFN and the European Federation of Food Banks (FEBA), while McCarty visited Canada to provide advice in setting up food banks in Calgary, Edmonton, and Regina. Second Harvest-style food banks also travelled to Australia through the work of Jeanne Rockey, philanthropist Charles Scarf, and the Catholic charity St Vincent de Paul. Meanwhile, Germany's food bank association, Die Tafel, founded in 1995, was closely based on New York's City Harvest surplus food model.
Within this narrative the UK is cast as a "relative late arrival to the food bank nations club" (Riches, 2018, p. 45), with scholarship claiming that as late as the year "2000 there was only one reported food bank in the UK (Hawkes & Webster, 2000)" (Wells & Caraher, 2014, p. 1426. But this is to overlook a much longer history of food banking and of the redistribution of food surplus in the UK. In fact, the current dispositif (Foucault, 1980) of UK food banking -the ensemble of discourses, institutions, material practices, and administrative mechanisms that constitute this system -was neither "imported" from North America nor built from scratch by The Trussell Trust. Rather, it occupies a space created by, and draws legitimacy from, a conjuncture of specific historical and cultural practices within and without the UK reaching back at least 140 years.
Most obviously, it has become commonplace to frame the growing reliance on food banks in Britain today as "Dickensian" (Cooper, 2013): a description designed to draw attention to the apparent "return" of the miserly provision and discretionary judgements, and many of the basic technologies, of Victorian welfare. For example, as with today's food banks, Victorian paternalism favoured food over cash doles to reassure benefactors that support was not wasted on "tobacco and brandy" and organisations like the Charity Organisation Society (COS) (1869) were established to rationalise outdoor relief and "professionalise" almsgiving. In line with the "new" philanthropic and anti-mendicity thinking circulating at the time -the mantra of the London Mendicity Society (est. 1818) was "no relief without enquiry" -the COS advocated greater investigative casework to prevent duplicity and abuse (Humphreys, 2001). By the 1880s, the operational practices of most soup kitchens incorporated elements of altruism, nutritionism, and the repression of mendicity with people "seeking relief " first having to register at the town hall to obtain the "thick pink paper" ticket that would be checked on arrival at a soup kitchen (Carstairs, 2017, pp. 918-919). Among other things, the COS championed the development of stricter referral networks: restricting the distribution of food tickets to COS committee members and District Relieving Officers who they felt were best placed to help inculcate the necessary skills (in "household management," for example) needed to tackle the "root causes" of poverty and move people away from a reliance on charity (Humphreys, 2001). To prevent dependency, restrictions were also put on the number of tickets that could be issued to any one individual and the COS debated the merits of time-limited support and problems of "repeat users," with calls to withhold food as a means of reforming the character of "paupers" and "misdemeanours". One soup kitchen is reported to have closed following "abuse of the kitchen … [by] people at the bottom of Pilgrim Street [who] had for weeks together kept their lodgers with the soup from the soup kitchen" (Carstairs, 2017, p. 914). Much of this charitable work was driven by Christian morality, and Prochaska has documented the work of Victorian "Visiting Societies" that went "door to door to combat the evils of poverty, disease, and irreligion" (2006, p. 62), with "Bible in one hand and food ticket in the other" (2006, p. 68).
It is important not to paint too crude a picture of Victorian charity. For example, The Salvation Army (also Christian) provided free and heavily subsidised food to striking dockworkers and their families in East London in the 1880s without the discrimination of "deservedness" central to the COS (Bailey, 1984). Nor are we claiming that present-day food banks draw direct inspiration from Victorian philanthropy. Our argument is that individualised understandings of poverty, a fundamental mistrust of those seeking relief, distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor, and fears of dependency have shaped both statutory and voluntary welfare provision in the UK for so long they might be considered to have assumed the level of doxa.
Given this history, it is not surprising that several of the food banks in Britain that predate the Trussell Trust also operated voucher and referral systems designed to monitor and control the distribution charitable food. For example, Lincoln Community Larder (est. 1989), The Lord's Larder, Yeovil (est. 1991), Welcome Centre, Huddersfield (est. 1995, and Southampton's Basics Bank (est. 1996), to name only a few, all worked with statutory and other "recognised referral agencies" who collected food on a client's behalf or made a voucher/telephone referral for people to collect a food parcel (SI 2).
Coordinated food drives and funding appeals, often with links to local grocers and celebrating their donor's charitable endeavours, also have a long history. In 1892, Charles Thompson's Mission in Birkenhead appealed for food donations to be distributed to the poor and needy, while newspapers of the time ran financial appeals to fund the distribution of food parcels to "erstwhile hard-working families" in East London who "through no fault of their own, are in absolute want" (Leeds Mercury, 1887, n.p.). With parallels to current debates about the charitable use of food surplus, workhouses purchased "second best" food from large and small businesses (Brown, 2016), and in the 1880s Marks and Spencer provided financial support to soup kitchens (Carstairs, 2017).
The use of non-perishable food parcels consisting of a range of tinned and dried goods appears to have first become commonplace in the First World War. During the war, tinned food made up the bulk of military rations, but the British Red Cross also sent over 2.5 million food parcels to prisoners of war (British Red Cross, 2020) and families could send parcels through registered shops (Exeter & Plymouth Gazette, 1917). Charitable food parcels, food tickets, and donation appeals remained commonplace in the interwar period and continued after the Second World War (SI 3). Even at the zenith of the British welfare state in the 1960s, newspapers report use of "emergency food stores" such as the church-run "food larder for needy pensioners" in East Ham (Chelsea News & General Advertiser, 1965), and the work of the British Legion whose use of vouchers and distinctions between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor carried clear echoes of the previous century, with a representative recounting that they "assist needy cases which come to us, with immediate assistance such as food vouchers, clothing vouchers, and it is a fact that as long as a case is a genuine one we never turn it down" (Harrow Observer, 1969, n.p.).
Temporary "food banks" also became a common feature of Christmas appeals for the "elderly" and "needy" throughout the 1970s and 1980s ( Figure 1) with Rotary clubs and other charities organising "collection bins" in large shops for Christmas shoppers to fill with donated food (Lichfield Mercury, 1971), and newspapers printing "shopping lists" for donors (SI 4).
National and local businesses also contributed. For example, in 1986 the Liverpool Echo's Christmas appeal received donations of both food and cash (£1000) from Kellogg's (Liverpool Echo, 1986). Some supermarkets donated gift vouchers (Middlesex Chronicle, 1989) and cash directly to food charities (Aberdeen Evening Express, 1998), and supermarket collection points soon became a year-round feature. In April 1990, the Instant Neighbour Trust in Aberdeen established a network of collection points at which people could leave tinned food for redistribution in the form of "family packs of food to give to parents unable to feed their children". It also ran a press campaign in which it noted -just as Paddy Henderson of the Trussell Trust was to do a decade later when asking "everyone in Salisbury … to give … one tin" (Henderson, 2014, n.p.) -that "if everyone in a big company brought in one tin of food to work that could mean thousands of tins" (Evening Express, 1990, n.p.).
Like Riches (2018), some schemes describe being influenced by developments in North America. For example, a "share your shopping scheme" in Liverpool was reported as having the backing of several major stores to "open 'food F I G U R E 1 Food bank for needy (East Kent Times Broadstairs Mail, 1979) banks' on their premises, where shoppers can deposit items for distribution … similar [to] schemes [that] are already in operation in Canada, and it was following a recent visit there that Mrs Carroll [the organiser of the scheme] decided to get one off the ground on Merseyside" (Liverpool Echo, 1983). In 1993, the West Lancashire Community Voluntary Service set up an American-style food bank "working with the food industry and local retailers to provide free food to charities" (Liverpool Echo, 1993, n.p.). In 1995, the project became the South and West Lancashire Food Bank and was once the UK's only member of the FEBA, possibly because the founder -Father Michael Moss -had previously worked at Dublin City Food Bank, a longstanding member of FEBA (SI 5).
Cambridge Foodbank, founded in 2001 by Emmaus Cambridge and Jimmy's Assessment Centre, also drew inspiration from overseas. Emmaus Cambridge is part of a federation of Emmaus communities supporting homeless people which was founded in 1949 by Father Henri-Antoine Groues, better known as the Abbé Pierre, a Catholic priest. In 1984, Abbé Pierre publicly spoke out against "the scandal of the destruction of agricultural surpluses" and worked with Sister Cécile Bigot, Secours Catholique, and The Salvation Army to help set up the first French food bank along similar lines to food banks in the USA and Canada (Castaing, 1984). Again, transnational religious networks played a key role in spreading the "food bank gospel," as Sister Bigot first heard about the concept through Francis Lopez, an associate of The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and founding member of Edmonton Food Bank in Canada (Riches, 2018), leading Bigot to contact Bernard Dandrel (Secours Catholique) to coordinate with Emmaus and The Salvation Army.
Alongside transnational networks, the discourses and practices of UK food banking were also configured by a domestic homelessness crisis and by a variety of international humanitarian initiatives. The homelessness crisis of the 1980s and 1990s saw numerous appeals for food, most of them, like the one reported in the Nottingham Evening Post, asking people to donate non-perishable and tinned food to an "emergency food store … to make up food parcels and emergency food packs" (1990, np) but included calls for the channelling of agricultural surplus to homeless charities (Buckingham Emergency Food Appeal, est. 1985). Elsewhere, cross-subsidiary networks, both secular and religious, developed with residents in wealthier areas collecting tinned food and other items for inner-city homeless projects (Bristol Post, 1997) and night shelters (The Sentinel, 1998), with donated food parcels given out to homeless people by both voluntary and statutory housing agencies (Leicester Mercury, 1998). At a time when several national homeless charities ran "diverted giving schemes," encouraging the public not to give money directly to homeless people on the streets lest they inadvertently helped further entrench a "street lifestyle" (Cloke et al., 2010), some of these appeals activated a familiar logic concerning the preference of food to cash payments (Gloucester Citizen, 1998).
Following the appeal of Operation Baby Love in 1981 (Sunday Mirror, 1981) and Band Aid in 1984, community-led international humanitarian food drives also proliferated in the 1990s. In 1990, the Lena Appeal called on every UK schoolchild "to donate a tin of food to Soviet children" (Preston, 1990, n.p.). Other appeals saw tinned food, clothes, and toys transported by lorry and train to Ukraine (Western Daily Press, 1998), Albania (Marsh, 1999), Moldova (Fergus, 1999), andKosovo (Marsh, 1999). Some appeals were led by secular organisations, others by Christian charities. In 1990, Operation Christmas Child, a Christian charity based in North Wales, began sending shoeboxes filled with toys, "packed with love and fuelled by prayer," to children across the world. It claims that since then "more than 186 million children in over 160 countries have experienced God's love through the power of simple shoebox gifts" (Samaritans Purse, 2021; for a critique see Toynbee, 2018). In 1993, Operation Christmas Child merged with the evangelical charity Samaritan's Purse, founded by the charismatic American preacher Billy Graham, and in the same year the evangelical charity Blythswood Care began distributing shoeboxes containing toys, clothes, and a Christian message to people in Albania, Serbia, and Pakistan (Webster, 2013). The Trussell Trust participated in these activities and continues to send shoeboxes to Romania and Bulgaria through its sister charity Foundation for Social Change and Inclusion. In 2001, Blythswood Care became a "significant partner of the Trussell Trust, both with the Food Bank Franchise and Bulgaria projects" (Trussell Trust website, 2001) and, when the Trust launched its Foodbank franchise in 2004, Blythswood Care provided the seed funding (Trussell Trust, 2007, p. 4).
These campaigns arguably left an imprint on the ethical imagination, so much so that organisations running food drives in the 2000s were not only able to draw on their memory to legitimate their own appeals, but to generate widespread public support galvanised by the "shock" that food donations were needed for families in the UK rather than abroad. Similarly, the use of voucher and referral systems to establish eligibility and deter dependency, and the turn to corporate sponsors and supermarket food drives, appear to be deeply engrained in the history of food charity, so much so that by the early 1990s several established food banks were already using many of what were to become key elements of the Trust's procedures (SI 6), including close partnership with the state, to which we now turn.

| STATE ENTANGLEMENTS
As we have already intimated, collaboration between the state and charitable food providers, and the use of food tickets and vouchers by state officials, are by no means new. Workhouse authorities were known to issue paper and copper tokens to paupers to buy food (Withers, 1999), for example, and District Relieving Officers, working on behalf of local Poor Law Unions, were a central point in the distribution of food tickets for the COS. The close relations between state welfare officials and food charities continued through the inter-war years and were still evident even at the height of the "universal" welfare state of the 1960s and 1970s (for an account of the continuing role of charities in the British welfare state see Finlayson, 1994; for critiques of the welfare state's apparent universality and inclusion, see Dornan, 2008;Jacobs, 1985). For example, the Hammersmith & Shepherds Bush Gazette reported on the vetting of charitable food vouchers by the area's Local Welfare Committee in 1964 and other newspaper reports show the role that local state welfare institutions continued to play through the 1970s and into recent times by providing lists of "needy people" to local charitable appeals at Christmas (SI 7).
The use of food vouchers rather than cash by state welfare agencies as a safeguard against "abuse" and as a way of disciplining the poor also continued to form part of broader anti-welfare discourse and practice in the UK, both before and after the key reforms to state welfare after the Second World War. In 1929, the Nottingham Board of Guardians is said to have issued 184,259 monetary payments and 45,254 food vouchers (Nottingham Evening Post, 1930). While this constituted a public (though means-restricted) entitlement rather than charity, and recipients were able to exchange vouchers at grocery stores for a wider choice of items than a charitable food parcel, the use of vouchers rather than cash benefits was deeply unpopular and often contested. Under new regulations introduced in the 1930s, applicants for unemployment benefit were obliged to use any and all savings, and to sell any personal items they could to raise money, before they became eligible for benefits (Ward, 2013). Even when made, payments were insufficient to cover basic costs such as food and clothing and Public Committees began distributing food vouchers in addition to and/or in the place of cash payments. Parliamentary records show heated exchanges as Ministers calling for food vouchers to be distributed in part payment of unemployment benefit invoked moralist arguments that unemployment benefit was being "utilised for purposes with which I do not think the Government would agree" (Hansard, 1930, n.p.). The move was met by public demonstrations and resistance grew focused, first on Local Committees and, following the centralised administration of the Means Test under the Unemployment Assistance Board in 1935, then on the government till the test was abolished in 1941 (Fraserburgh Herald & Northern Counties' Advertiser, 1957). In the 1932 Belfast Outdoor Relief Strike, workingclass Protestants and Catholics united against the Poor Law and its system of working for relief (still not then abolished in Northern Ireland), while on 3 October of the same year 2,000 relief workers went on strike demanding the abolition of task work, increase in relief payments, and for all payments to be in cash rather than in kind (Mitchell, 2017b).
Despite these associations, the use of food vouchers continued in the second half of the 20th century. In 1967, the Marylebone Mercury published a piece calling for "food vouchers instead of [unemployment] allowances". In 1986, a local employer told the Reading Evening Post he believed the unemployed were "getting too much money for nothing … [and that] if we return to something like the pre-war years, where there were checks on how much people have got, and give out food tokens, the situation would change overnight" (Reading Evening Post, 1986, n.p.). And in 1989, people applying for Department of Social Security (DSS) crisis loans were given food vouchers instead, with stipulations that the money could only be spent at named stores within a week of its issue, and not on tobacco, alcohol, or sweets (Hansard, 1988(Hansard, , 1989. The discretionary judgements of welfare officials also played a key role here, with one benefit office in Newcastle city centre reported to have issued 206 food vouchers in a six-month period in 1989, compared to four from the Newcastle East office and none from the Newcastle West Office (Lothian, 1990). Branding voucher welfare "a return to the 1930s," Jim Cousins, Labour MP for Newcastle Central, led a campaign that prompted the DSS to issue new guidance about "the correct use of vouchers" to all benefit offices (SI 9).
In 1996, the Conservative government's Asylum and Immigration Act barred in-country asylum applicants and those appealing a decision from claiming cash benefits -leading the Red Cross, The Salvation Army, and communities and churches across the country to provide food parcels and meals to asylum seekers and their families (Brown, 1996) (SI 8). Despite this opposition, in 1999 New Labour extended the scheme. Their Immigration and Asylum Act excluded all asylum seekers from mainstream social security benefits, with claimants receiving between one half and two thirds of the cash benefits previously allocated to them in the form of vouchers for food and clothing which could not be used to purchase cigarettes or alcohol and -to incentivise large retailers to join the scheme -did not give change (Mynott, 2001).
Food vouchers were also issued by social workers throughout the 1980s and 1990s as part of Section 1 monies of the Child Care Act 1980 and Section 18 of the Children's Act 1989 and were used alongside cash payments to maintain the income of families to prevent children coming into or continuing to be in care (Dowling, 1993). Dowling's experience of this underlines again the discretionary moral judgement of state officials: "[team leader] not keen to give [them] more (than a £20 food voucher) as he feels the children should go back to their parents in Skegness," and that vouchers "appeared to users to be more degrading than cash … I never had anyone throw a food voucher back in my face before!" (Dowling, 1993, p. 163).
Finally, while the British state has been understood as reluctant to engage directly with the redistribution of surplus food in the ways seen in the USA and Europe (Riches, 2018), its relationship to surplus food distribution is more complex. As we show below, both central government departments and local authorities have funded charitable intermediaries involved in the redistribution of surplus food (also see Lambie-Mumford, 2019). Lesser known, perhaps, is the longer if tentative history of the British state's direct involvement in shaping the humanitarian logics of "food banking". For example, in 1943 a British delegation chaired by Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Richard Law, proposed the establishment of a "world food bank" to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Conference in Hot Springs, Virginia (Daily Mirror, 1943;Porter, 1943). In 1945, Sir John Boyd-Orr, a key influence in this earlier debate, became the first Director-General of the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organization and quickly moved to set up a "world food larder from which surpluses can be distributed to needy areas, stabilising prices and supplying needy nations, who are unable to pay, with the food they require" (Derby Daily Telegraph, 1947, n.p.). The British and US governments voted against the proposals and Boyd-Orr resigned in 1948, but the redistribution of "surplus food" soon became a mainstay of humanitarian aid and Cold-War geopolitics (SI 10) and it would be surprising if international deliberations throughout the 1950s and 1960s of how to deal with "glut" and "scarcity" and the establishment of a "world food bank" -did not shape the ethical imagination of domestic food charities in Britain as in North America at this time (SI 10).
British government interest in food banks re-emerged -this time for domestic use -in 1987, when Conservative MEP for Somerset andWest Dorset (1984-1994) Margaret Daly suggested that she would like to see (Mid Somerset Series, 1987): More investigation into the food bank schemes they have in France and Belgium … far more sensible than storing surplus stocks in warehouses at tremendous cost and … certainly better than selling butter to Russia.
(Mid Somerset Series, 1987, n.p.) Daly's intervention -shaped again in part by Cold War geopolitics -was part of a wider campaign by Conservative MEPs Christopher Prout, James Elles, and Edward McMillian-Scott to establish a "year around" "food-bank" to distribute European Economic Community (EEC) food surplus (Owen, 1987;Smith, 1987) (SI 11). This followed a decision by the then Conservative Government to ask charities to distribute surplus butter, cheese, and meat created by the Common Agricultural Policy to loosely defined "disadvantaged groups" in the UK (Wainwright, 1991). In keeping with the more limited state regulation of charitable welfare in this period (May et al., 2005), there was little central oversight, with Government leaving it to the charities to publicise and coordinate the scheme. In notable contrast to contemporary food banks, it was also the frontline charities themselves, rather than local "welfare professionals," who were understood to be "best placed" to assess need. In fact the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) restricted local offices from "giv[ing] any information to claimants or to the charities to define those eligible" (Kirvan & Tuckman, 1987, p. 82).
Under pressure from Conservative MEPs, in 1987 the government (reluctantly) extended the scheme and between 1987 and 1998 an average of 60,000 people received free food (worth a total of £10 million) each year (Landale, 1998). In Scotland alone, 149 organisations took part (Aberdeen Evening Express, 1994) and across the UK demand was so high that by 1991 some local councils and charities withdrew, citing "chaotic food queues" and "verbal abuse of volunteers handing out the food and threats from people who had queued but were found ineligible" (Wainwright, 1991, n.p.). In fact, later that same year supplies received a boost when the government announced that in light of the end of the Cold War it was scrapping the stockpile of 200,000 tons of emergency food supplies it had kept since the 1950s in case of attack on the UK, with the food to be sold, returned to manufacturers, or handed out to charities working in the UK and overseas (Radowitz, 1993). By 1998 -the last year the scheme ran -10 million cans (about 3000 tonnes) of beef were distributed and eligibility had been extended to anyone "homeless or destitute, or receiving income support, family credit, disability working allowance, jobseeker's allowance, or living in a welfare hostel," with eligible people receiving "between 12 and 24 free cans a year" (Landale, 1998). When the scheme was closed by New Labour, citing a lack of uptake by charities, Conservative Members of Parliament "protested that the poor would suffer" (Landale, 1998, n.p.) and Newcastle's Evening Chronicle reported the closure of 27 local distribution centres across the city region, with 3,500 people losing out on a supply of "much needed food" (Dronfield, 1998).
Scholars have raised concerns over the growing incorporation of food banks into the UK's statutory welfare system, with Lambie-Mumford noting that "[g]rant funding, food bank referral mechanisms and the incorporation of food banks into the administration of emergency welfare schemes at a local level all highlight how increasingly interlocked food banks are becoming in local welfare landscapes" (2019, p. 16). We share these concerns. Not least because the current convergence of state and charitable welfare institutions  is only part of a recurring trend. Local state welfare officials -District Relieving Officers, Local Welfare Committees, and Social Services -have acted as gatekeepers to charitable food for more than 100 years, even at the apogee of the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state. At different points in that period, both local and central welfare departments have also adopted the technologies of food charity for themselves -using food vouchers rather than cash payments to monitor and discipline the poor, "problem families," and asylum seekers -and, though now largely forgotten, in the 1980s and 1990s the British Government facilitated the redistribution of hundreds of thousands of tons of surplus food through food banks and other outlets.

| CORPORATE ENTANGLEMENTS
In contrast, the history of corporate involvement in UK food banking is significantly less longstanding (though see SI 12). While charitable food providers in the UK have sought the financial support of local businesses since at least the 1880s when Marks and Spencer first donated to soup kitchens (Carstairs, 2017), citing health and safety concerns, UK retailers were slow to follow international efforts to provide surplus food to charities. Once again, Marks and Spencer was an early pioneer and in the 1970s began providing perishable food from its stores to locally nominated charities (Fulham Chronicle, 1979). By the 1990s, other supermarkets were making similar arrangements (Uxbridge & W. Drayton, 1995), while the humanitarian appeals outlined above also tightened links between charity and the food industry, with examples of supermarkets donating food directly to appeals (Mansfield Sutton Recorder, 1993).
A key moment came in 1992 when representatives of the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD), whose members include most major UK food manufacturers and retailers, made two visits to the USA and reported they believed "the UK food industry can set up depots similar to the 200 which exist in the US" (The Grocer, 2000, n.p.). Backed by Crisis at Christmas and The Salvation Army -possibly following their experience of distributing EEC surplus food -several manufacturers and supermarkets proposed the creation of a network of food banks to distribute "unwanted" non-perishable food to "the poor and homeless" (Ford, 1992). Commenting on these developments, the Mail on Sunday reported that: The supermarkets [Tesco, Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer, Gateway, Asda, Safeway and Waitrose] will coordinate the US-style food banks with major food groups such as Rank Hovis McDougall, Unilever, Heinz, Kellogg's and Nabisco. With their nationwide distribution networks, they plan to use the Salvation Army and other charities to organise the handout. The project will be on the lines of the Chicago-based charity Second Harvest, which has a network of 180 food bank warehouses using 42,000 local charities stretching from Alaska to Florida … Dr John Beaumont, the industry think-tank's chief executive, who has just returned from studying the US project, last night rejected suggestions that the scheme would mean "second class food for second class citizens". (Leake, 1992, n.p.) In April 1993, a pilot project -Provision (now renamed Grocery Aid in 1999) -was set up in Manchester and concentrated on redistributing "unmerchantable" food, trial products, and items advertising outdated offers with donated food from Kellogg's, United Biscuits, Heinz and more than 50 other major food companies. By 2000, Grocery Aid had distributed £15m of products from its five depots to almost 400 charities nationwide (The Grocer, 2000). A year later, Sainsbury's partnered with the homeless charity Crisis to establish "Crisis FareShare" in London, later developing regional centres across the UK through its social franchise and becoming an independent charity, FareShare, in 2004. Distributing mainly to other charities, FareShare quickly became the largest distributor of "surplus" food in the UK and several centres in its network attracted funding from the local state, as did similar projects inspired by FareShare such as FoodDelivery (est. 1996 by Portsmouth City Council) (Hawkes & Webster, 2000;SI 13).
In 2012, FareShare ran its first national donation scheme in partnership with Tesco and the Trussell Trust, though it is the relationship between Tesco and the Trussell Trust which has garnered most attention in the food banking literature (Garthwaite et al., 2019). In an interview in 2017, the Trussell Trust's Network Director reported the idea for a national partnership with Tesco came from the Trust following requests from its members to broker a deal with the supermarket to facilitate food drives. After several years of trying, they finally reached an agreement in 2012 in which Tesco gave an additional financial donation of 20% of the value of any items donated by its customers to the Trust: Part of the model was to collect food outside supermarkets, and it was hard for individual foodbanks to always get a collection in their local stores. So, foodbanks asked the Trussell Trust to contact Tesco, to see if they could have some form of national agreement to do that. Over the years and years of trying, eventually, that did happen, and the Trussell Trust has a partnership with Tesco. (Trussell Trust Network Director, 2017) Whatever the details of these negotiations, the Trust may have been pushing at something of an open door. Tesco's plans for food banks predate its work with the Trust by almost 20 years. As President of the IGD, but also then Chairman of Tesco, Sir Ian MacLarin was a leading figure in the development of Grocery Aid in 1993. In 1996, Tesco ran Christmas food collections for food banks in Poland and it seems it was this work which was particularly influential in encouraging Tesco to explore a possible relationship with the Trust: Our work with food charities began in Poland over ten years ago … with the Federation of Polish Food Banks. In 200 stores throughout Poland we collected a total of 162 tonnes and distributed it to those in need this year. Their work, along with similar efforts in Hungary, triggered us to explore what we can do in the UK and across the Group. (Tesco, 2013, p. 47) Tesco's work in East Central Europe continues. Aided by tax exemptions for food delivered free of charge to registered charities in Poland (European Commission, 2020), in 2013 Tesco formally partnered with the Federation of Polish Food Banks (FPFB) (est. 1997) and Caritas Polska (Tesco, 2018). Successive CEOs have consolidated this work, strengthening connections with the GFN and Champions 12.3, a global coalition of government, businesses, research, and civil society representatives dedicated to accelerating progress toward achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to halve food waste by 2030 (Lewis, 2019). In 2014, Tesco Central Europe formed a strategic partnership with The Hungarian Food Bank Association (founded in 2005 along the Second Harvest template) that also included the 20% top up and has since developed relationships with the Hungarian Red Cross and with food banks in Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Tesco, 2018).

| Technological integration, IT surveillance, and travelling software
North American tech companies have also played a key role in building the infrastructure necessary to expanding charitable food provision in the UK and elsewhere and here the Trussell Trust has indeed been a key innovator. In 2019, the Trust announced that as part of its "mission to end hunger and poverty in the UK" (Trussell Trust, 2021a, n.p.) it would henceforth be working in partnership with the American tech firm Cisco which would help it: In the fight against hunger and poverty; from having a clearer understanding of stock levels, to connecting food banks to each other and to food retailers, and understanding who visits a food bank and the ways in which they can be supported.
(Trussell Trust website, 2021a, n.p.) The announcement made no mention of an earlier relationship with Aidmatrix -a US supply chain software developer and major partner in America's Second Harvest, GFN, and FEBA. Aidmatrix became a named partner of the Trust in 2007, though it is very difficult to find details of the work it did for the charity (Aidmatrix, 2008(Aidmatrix, , 2012aTrussell Trust, 2008) and it no longer appear as one of the Trust's corporate partners (Trussel Trust Website, 2021b). Aidmatrix take "solutions from the business world and apply them to the non-profit world" (Aidmatrix, 2008, n.p.). Aidmatrix is sponsored by the US Chamber of Commerce, the UN World Food Programme, and several corporations, including Dell, Oracle, Accenture, and UPS. In 2008, Aidmatrix claimed its supply chain technology "mobilizes over 50% of all corporate and government food products donated in America to Hunger Relief initiatives" (Aidmatrix, 2008, n.p.). In 2009, Accenture's Corporate Social Responsibility group provided resources to help FareShare standardise the charity's regional database processes through a two-year national-rollout of Aidmatrix's Online Warehouse system (Aidmatrix, 2012b) enabling FareShare a real-time and single view of all its warehouse inventory across all of its depots in the UK. Alongside helping with "KPI reporting to food suppliers," this meant "FareShare will be able to serve even more people-in-need, more quickly and efficiently than ever before thereby supporting their mission [like that of the Trussell Trust] to end hunger in the UK" (Aidmatrix, 2012b, n.p.). In a written statement that is telling for its foregrounding of its role in serving the needs of the food industry as well as its charitable clients, FareShare's Director of Operations said: With the development and implementation of the Aidmatrix Network™, FareShare is taking another major step to scale up its operations and improve and grow its infrastructure so it can deliver an improved service to the food industry and the community organisations that rely on its service. (Aidmatrix, 2010, n.p.) In 2015, Aidmatrix merged with TechBridge. TechBridge's software now underpins the landscape of US food bank operations, with over 60 Feeding America food banks and 19,481 other food aid providers (soup kitchens and pantries) using the AgencyExpress™ food ordering platform, while its DonorExpress™ platform allows "large corporations to donate their distressed goods to Feeding America" (TechBridge, 2020, np; emphasis added).
In its 2020-2025 strategy, the Trussell Trust proclaims its "vision for a UK without the need for food banks". But whatever the vision, it is clear that in bringing business solutions to the problems of hunger, Aidmatrix and Cisco have accelerated the spread of food banks around the world. For example, Aidmatrix's technology played a key role in the establishment of the India Food Banking Network in 2012 (Aidmatrix, 2013). In 2019, another client of Aidmatrix, GFN, added members in Africa (Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, and Nigeria), Asia (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam), and Latin America (Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Uruguay) (GFN, 2020) and it is reported that they are: Keen to expand into poorer countries that still lack the retail consolidation, infrastructure and food surplus that make food banks possible on the scale of North America … [places on] the frontiers of food insecurity [which] also happen to be target growth regions for many of its corporate partners. (Spring, 2020, n.p.)

| RECLAIMING FOOD "AID"
The turn to electronic databases and registration systems developed by companies like Aidmatrix and Cisco do more than enable "a clearer understanding of stock levels" (Trussell Trust website, 2021a, n.p.). They also enable much closer surveillance of both clients and the agencies referring clients to a food bank -guarding against classic problems of improvidence and dependency that so exercised the COS. For example, in its Referral Agency Guide to E-referral (n.d.), the Trussell Trust outlines some of the benefits of e-referral as being able to: See the client's history of foodbank referrals … [including whether] … the client has been getting vouchers from other agencies, in case you need to take that into account … [Y]ou will be alerted if the client has already had more than 3 vouchers in the last 6 months. This message does not stop you issuing another voucher; but there should be good reason to do so … We may wish to get in touch to discuss the clients' continuing needs and will sometimes need to put a limit on the number of vouchers a client can have. (Trussell Trust,n.d.,pp. 2,6) While such systems make it harder for clients to get access to all the food they need, and for sympathetic food bank staff to find "workarounds" to enable that access , it is important to recognise they are not (yet) universally adopted, especially among food banks operating independently of the Trust many of which deliberately eschew referral-based and time-limited support (Loopstra et al., 2019).
The history of food banking -in the UK and elsewhere -is also replete with examples of more progressive forms of food "aid" moving around the politics of mutualism rather than charity, including Black Panther breakfast clubs (Heynen, 2009), Food Not Bombs (Heynen, 2010), and food banks run by labour unions in Canada in the 1980s that took a rights-based approach to food access (Riches, 1986). More recently, grassroot food banks in Spain (Gómez Gomez Garrido et al., 2019) and Greece (Theodossopoulos, 2016) have explicitly allied with anti-austerity movements.
The provision of free or subsidised food has also played a crucial part in community survival and resistance in the UK, most obviously perhaps during the General Strike of 1926 and in the 1984-5 Miner's Strike (SI 14). Though in the 1960s and 1970s the DHSS had given money to mothers in striking families for children's clothes and food, with the aim of starving the miners back to work, Clause 6 of the Social Security Act 1980 removed all entitlement to single strikers and significantly reduced the supplementary benefit of their dependants (Jones & Novak, 1985). With echoes of the Means Test of the 1930s, in 1984 DHSS staff were instructed to "deduct all 'notional resources' such as food parcels, vouchers (including local authority meal vouchers for children) or anything to which a value could be attributed from the benefits to be paid to strikers' dependents" (Winterton & Winterton, 1989, p. 150).
In this context, food parcels became a site of resistance against state-enforced hunger during the 1984-1985 strike and catalysed a diverse set of solidarities reaching across social and geographical boundaries. Food collections became an integral aspect of trans-local solidarity between striking miners and political groups (for example, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners), community organisations, and charities across the UK, with over 300 organisations helping "sustain over 150,000 miners and their families for a year through collecting food and money" (Labour Research Department, 1985, cited in Kelliher, 2017. Jones (2016) documents the transnational networks of support developed during the strike, including a 35-lorry convoy delivering 400 tonnes of food and medical supplies sent from French Mining unions, and 200 tonnes of food and humanitarian aid sent from the World Federation of Trade Unions paid for by workplace collections in the Soviet Union and Central Europe. Importantly, this history is one of reciprocity between unions in different countries, with the National Union of Miners also sending food parcels to comrades in Poland in 1982, for example (Rugeley Times, 1982).
Whether the provision by Sikh temples of free food to South Asian workers in the Midlands during the Foundry Strikes of the 1960s and 1970s (Sivanandan, 1981) or the food banks set up in several UK cities in the 1990s specifically to support people on a low income who were HIV positive (Fagan, 2004;SI 15), other equally progressive examples of the sharing of food as a form of solidarity can be traced and doing so is important to problematise too singular a categorisation of food aid and of food banks as always and necessarily regressive. At the very least, this helps reveal how localised practices and experiences of food banking are potentially co-constituted by the very place-based cultures of solidarity and mutual aid that are threatened by corporatised food charity (see Atkinson-Phillips et al., 2020).

| CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have employed a genealogical method to recast the origin stories of UK food banking, examining the discursive, embodied, technological, and institutional configurations that have shaped relations between charities, business, and the state, and the development of food banks over the past 140 years. This is not meant to be a "complete" history. Our aim is only to demonstrate that -far from new -many of the organisational practices (the use of voucher and referral systems, food parcels, corporate sponsors, funding, and food drives) and accompanying discourses of "deservedness" and "dependency" central to UK food banking are historically situated in specific practices, alliances, and struggles (and geographical connections), some of which are nowadays forgotten. In this vein, we have traced (some of) the roots of UK food banking to: Victorian technologies of vouchers and referrals that lived on in the inter-war and post-war periods through the work of secular and religious charities but also Public Assistance Committees and social workers; attempts in the 1980s by the UK state and food industry to establish permanent food banks as a way of addressing problems of overproduction and waste in the capitalist food system; responses to a domestic crisis of homelessness and international humanitarian initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s; and the role of US tech companies in building the infrastructure necessary to an increasingly global food banking system.
In other words, far from being a product of neoliberal welfare, emerging directly from the USA, or fluidly on the heels of austerity, the UK's contemporary food banking system draws on longstanding dispositifs of food charity that have come to delineate its modus operandi. But at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a huge surge in the use of food banks across the UK , newfound concerns over the permanent institutionalisation -and the heightened power of corporates as financiers and beneficiaries -of the food charity system in the UK are well founded. Since March 2020, more than £40 million in corporate donations (including from leading supermarkets Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, and Co-op) have been made to FareShare and The Trussell . In the financial year ending March 2021, FareShare alone received a total of £21,242,000 in corporate funding and £30,433,000 in statutory income, of which £27,600,000 came from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (2020: £729,000) (FareShare, 2021). The Trust's income rose to £57,780,000 in the same period, with a total expenditure of £18,720,000. It has also recently announced a new partnership with Bank of America. Bank of America is also a major funder of Feeding America and in 2014 was ordered to pay US$17 billion to the US Federal Securities and Exchange Commission for its role in the sub-prime lending that sparked the 2008 financial crisis (Horwitz, 2014) and paved the way to austerity.
Such developments suggest that renewed attention should be focused on voluntary-sector policy mobilities, their troublesome origins, and their entanglements with state and corporate power, as well as on the divergent practices of acquiescence, incorporation, and resistance enacted by voluntary-sector organisations themselves. We call for particular attention to be focused on the role of religious networks and the movement of religious ideas regarding poverty management. From the evolution of the Elizabethan Poor Laws -characterised by Shilliam as a secularised "instrument to calculate the just receipt of Christian benefaction" (2018, p. 13) -to late Victorian "Visiting Societies" and Operation Christmas Child in the late 20th century, Christianity has been integral to shaping the problematisation of hunger, the provision of food charity, and the rapid emergence of food banking itself both locally and globally (Lambie-Mumford, 2013;Riches, 2018). Following the mobilities -of people, discourses, and practices -within and between corporate, state, and faith-based charity sectors offers a fruitful line of enquiry for geographers of religion and political-economy. Through their involvement with right-wing think tanks like the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) (with which The Trussell Trust worked as a member of an "alliance of poverty fighting groups" to give "the charity opportunity to provide input into and to influence policy at national level" (Trussell Trust, 2010, p. 4)), Christian thinking and organisations have played a key role in Conservative policy agendas -whether the Big Society's lineage in the Conservative Christian Fellowship and the CSJ (Monahan, 2015) or the more recent New Social Covenant that has sought to further expand faith-based welfare provision (Kruger, 2020).
But scholarship must also remain cognisant to the role of religious networks in helping curate more radical possibilities in areas of welfare and food provision -be that collaborations between Black Panther breakfast clubs and churches in the 1970s (Lloyd, 2017), community organising (Slessarev-Jamir, 2011), or the work of community farms, food cooperatives, and land ownership as part of Black liberation and reparative justice (McCutcheon, 2021). To this end, we hope that being alert to the ways in which the more regressive organisational and technological systems common to many UK food banks have been challenged in the past -by religious as well as secular groups -may yet work to undermine their ideological doxa and encourage future challenges too.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Adrian Bailey, Phil Emmerson and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful guidance and comments on this paper. Thanks also go to Suvetha Purushothaman and the production team.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data derived from public domain resources. The data that support the findings of this study were derived from the following resources available in the public domain: Companies House https://find-and-update.compa ny-infor mation. servi ce.gov.uk/; The Charity Commission https://regis ter-of-chari ties.chari tycom missi on.gov.uk/chari ty-search; The Wayback Machine https://archi ve.org/web/; The British Newspaper Archive https://www.briti shnew spape rarch ive. co.uk/; Nexis UK https://www.lexis nexis.com/en-us/profe ssion al/nexis/ nexis -featu res.page; Daily Mail Historical Archive https://www.gale.com/intl/c/daily -mail-histo rical -archive; Times Digital Archive https://www.gale.com/ intl/c/the-times -digit al-archive; Daily Mirror Digital Archive https://www.gale.com/intl/c/the-mirro r-histo rical -archi ve-1903-2000. and in 2018 ASDA launched a three-year partnership worth £20 million with the Trust and FareShare. 2 Even working within this more limited timespan, our research uncovered more material than we have space to fully explore here and we provide additional detail on several of the cases outlined in the main paper in the attached Supporting Information.