Jack Monroe has not grasped the correct end of the stick here

We’ve long pointed out that food banks are wondrous things. People would be hungry without them, hunger is bad, therefore food banks which reduce hunger are good things. Unfortunately Monroe gets the expansion of food banks the wrong way around:

The Trussell Trust has consistently reported, for the last 10 years, that more than half the people referred to its food banks for emergency aid are there because they are in debt to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Those numbers have steadily increased year on year; not, as some MPs claim, because availability of food banks has increased. Food banks expand according to the need for them, not the other way around.

No, that’s not how new technologies work nor spread.

And food banks are new technologies. They really didn’t exist back in the year 2000 when the American idea was adopted and copied here. That problem of the state being incompetent at handing out free money was not newly created at that date - we’ve direct personal experience of that truth. What was new was the ability to solve that problem of the state’s incompetence.

Think for a moment how new technologies do spread. Mobile phones have rather increased their market penetration since the 1980s. This is not because the need for communication has increased but because the ability to sate that previous need was invented. Smartphones really started with the iPhone in 2007. The fastest adopted technology in all of human history did not spread because the requirement for cat pictures changed - it was because the ability to sate that previously extant demand for cat pictures was invented.

This was also true of all those domestic technologies which have appeared in the past century and a half. Automobiles sated the desire to travel, not created it. People did wash clothes before the washing machine, that was simply a better way of doing it. Flush toilets were not near universally adopted because there was some new need to go potty but because we had a better technology to suit that fundamental need.

The state has always been incompetent at the details - things like getting the right amount of money to the right benefit claimant at the right time. Food banks are a new technology which aids in solving this extant problem. Jack Monroe simply has this the wrong way around. New technologies - and yes, a method of organising something is a technology - spread because they solve extant problems.