Food banks have been one of the few growth industries of the past 14 years

Stacey Solomon

One was from Trussell (formerly The Trussell Trust) asking me to make a donation to help fund their food bank programme over the Christmas period.

It took the form of a letter from the manager of Exeter Food Bank, asking me for a donation of £18 “to help provide urgent support for the thousands of people who won’t be able to afford the essentials this Christmas”.

The other was inviting me to take out a subscription to Hello Fresh. I was promised a free dessert for life if I did. The face on this letter was not of someone working hard to solve food poverty but a B-list TV celebrity.

“We’ve teamed up with Stacey Solomon to make evenings a breeze again, with tasty dinners”. If you’ve never heard of Stacey Solomon, you have obviously never read Hello magazine. She’s essentially famous for being famous. I never knew she was famous for her cookery skills, yet here she is working for Hello Fresh.

If you’ve never heard of Hello Fresh, they deliver food to your front door which is hardly a unique concept these days. If you’ve never read Hello magazine, it has nothing to do with Hello Fresh other than featuring Stacey Solomon. It is a glossy weekly full of pictures of people who are famous for being famous.

Food banks, celebrity trash mags and grocery delivery companies are some of the few growth industries of the past 14 years. Online supermarket shopping was quite popular at the start off 2020, then really mushroomed during the pandemic.

When the Tories came to power in 2010, Trussell ran 35 food banks in the UK. This had risen to a staggering 2800 by 2024. To take our minds off the fact that millions live in grinding poverty, we look at pictures of Holly Willoughby on holiday, or read stories about Katie Price’s latest arse extension.

Anyway, I made a donation to Trussell. I won’t disclose how much, but it was above their requested amount. And I chucked the Hello Fresh letter in the recycling bin. I can cook my own dinner without any help from Stacey Solomon.