Food charities should ditch low-quality processed food and focus on fresh, home-cooked meals

The cost of living crisis is yet another painful turn of the screw for people who struggle to put a meal on the table.

The Food Foundation says one in seven adults are skipping a meal to make ends meet, and 7.3 million adults live in ‘food insecure’ households. Alarmingly this figure has rocketed from 4.7 million only in January. A grotesque 2.6 million children are affected.

Shamefully, even through the UK is in the G7 club of rich nations, citizens were queuing up at food banks long before this latest frightening hardship spike. And this week the Food Foundation reports food bank users are increasingly asking for items that don’t need cooking because they can’t afford to switch on the gas or electricity.

This grim fear of using fuel will only highlight the deficiencies of food banks. Already they hand out too many over-processed, low-quality convenience products – the antithesis of home cooking – and offer little or nothing that is fresh, or that adds up to a balanced meal.

The most equitable, empowering alternative I have seen comes from Can Cook, the Deeside charity campaigning for everyone to have healthy, nutritious food by providing fresh, quality ingredients and useful training to cook simple and sustaining meals.

Can Cook operates a ‘mobile corner shop’ in communities that struggle to access good food, and also a door-to-door service providing recipes and fresh-cooked meals direct to households in crisis.

But for me, Can Cook’s single most original strategy is that it provides households with slow cookers and slow cooker bags. Each bag contains a recipe card and the fresh ingredients – everything you need to cook a tasty, nutritious meal.

Slow cookers plug into an electric socket, so no cooking facilities are needed. The running costs are negligible.

Cash-strapped families, often with adults who work two jobs, can switch the contents on when going out in the morning and come home after a tiring day to a hot, wholesome meal.

Can Cook is showing us that food poverty organisations should ditch the failed model, based on charitable donations and voluntarism, for an approach that puts cooking skills and reliable access to fresh ingredients at its heart. Policymakers should sit up and take note.