For most of my adult life, I thought food insecurity was something that happened to other people. I grew up in Salford, worked hard, built a career, and eventually found myself leading part of a marketing division for a major national company. Life was comfortable. We had a nice home, family holidays, a company car, and all the things that come with years of climbing the corporate ladder. Our conversations revolved around where we would go away in the summer, not whether we c

The chicken soup sat untouched on the stove. For nearly three hours. Leah kept reheating it, then turning the flame back off again. Her two younger boys were asleep on the sofa, still wearing their school uniforms because the heating had stopped working again upstairs. Her baby daughter was finally quiet after crying most of the afternoon. And her oldest son, Moshe, sat at the kitchen table pretending to do homework while secretly watching his mother count coins for the third

I never imagined I would be in a position where putting food on the table would feel uncertain. I’m a mother of a large family, and for a long time we managed. It wasn’t always easy, but we got by. Then my husband became unwell. What started as something we thought would pass turned into a long, ongoing struggle. He hasn’t been able to work, and slowly everything began to unravel. That’s when L’chaim Foodbank first stepped in. At the beginning, I told myself it was temporary—