London, Oct 2: Britain has seen a 20 percent increase in the past year alone in the number of people who cannot afford food, a media report said Sunday.
FareShare, which redistributes surplus food from major manufacturers and supermarkets to social care charities, has seen the number of people requesting for food handouts increasing from 29,000 per day to 35,000 per day.
Food donations are ordinarily taken up by the homeless and destitute, but now FareShare and similar organisations are seeing families and working people who have lost jobs benefiting from the service, Daily Mail reported.
"We're seeing a big increase in what you could call, for want of a better phrase, normal working people, those who have lost their jobs or seen their own businesses go under," Jeremy Ravn, manager of the food bank network told The Observer.
"The big problem is that the welfare state is not reacting fast enough to the needs."
The food that is distributed by FareShare would ordinarily go to a landfill because it is out of date or is not fit for sale due to things like errors on packaging.
An estimated three million tonnes of food like this ends up being thrown away in Britain every year of which FareShare takes around one percent, the Mail said. IANS

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