I'm really only passing this on in case you missed it: it's so easy to miss a mid-afternoon debate about social security in the House of Lords. If you have a job, most likely you'll have been at work; if you don't, just admitting to have seen Lord Freud and his serpentine, clownish position-taking would probably be grounds enough to get you sanctioned.

Baroness Miller put a question about food banks. We all know the top line: their use has gone up from about 70,000 people two years ago, to Oxfam's estimated half million today. Many of us have visited a food bank, and seen first hand that peculiar, punitive blandness of charity, leaping from metaphor into real life: you can't put anything nice in a food parcel. Nothing fattening, nothing indulgent, of course nothing unusual, because realistically it will probably be kids eating it. It's the cold dead hand of a tin of frankfurters.

I don't mean this as a criticism of food banks. I'm sure they would love to add to their valiance and industry the occasional Ferrero Rocher or a potato that's not in a tin. But they're running with a crowd that sees anything beyond the means of brute survival as an outrageous gift from one human being to another. Jack Monroe, author of the brilliant blog A Girl Called Jack, who has used a food bank in the past, recalls: "There was an article in our local paper, one of the online commenters had spotted a box of Maldon sea salt, and said, 'I'm going to go and queue up at my local food bank so I can get free Maldon sea salt'. But if somebody's donated it, that's why it's there. You're at the mercy of dented cans of supermarket returns most of the time."

Anyway, yes, Lord Freud knew the very food banks of which the chamber spoke: he's a fan: "Local provision that reflects the requirements of local areas is absolutely right. Charitable provision is to be admired and supported." Well, a) he's clearly trying to make "local provision" sound like "seasonal produce", and have us imagine the destitute of Lincolnshire eating asparagus while the Kentish poor eat bacon. And b) he must know that it is not the charities we don't admire here, but the government.

The question was a technical one, about the criteria for issuing food vouchers at a Jobcentre Plus, and whether anybody was keeping tabs on how widespread hunger has become. But no, woman! The Jobcentre Plus offices "do not issue vouchers"; they have simply been "given the freedom to make local links with food banks".

Consequently, Freud said: "Food banks are not part of the welfare system. We have designed our welfare system to support people with advances of benefit where they require it. It is not the job of the DWP to monitor this provision, which is done on a charitable basis." Wait, what? People are using food banks because, for reasons of lateness or insufficiency or maladministration, their benefits aren't enough to cover food; but as soon as they're in a sub-benefit category, their referrals are no longer a DWP problem? It's like pulling the rug from underneath a person, and then saying: "I'm afraid I can only be responsible for people who are on my rug."

The Lord Bishop of Truro asked, evenly, whether ministers were prepared to concede that "there may be a link between benefit delays, errors and sanctions and the growing number of people using food banks". Here the abandonment of reason was almost festive. "It is difficult to know," averred Lord Freud, "which came first, the supply or the demand … Food from a food bank – the supply – is a free good, and by definition there is an almost infinite demand for a free good."

Infinite demand for a free good; he makes it sound so technical, so colourless, his opinion, when in fact this statement is emotionally quite charged. For an example of a normal, human evaluation of food banks, ask Katherine Trebeck, policy and advocacy manager for the UK poverty programme at Oxfam: "You have to be in a pretty desperate place to ask someone else for food."

But to factor in desperation or dignity or what a human being might need to feel part of the march of life and not trampled under its jackboot, that would take an imagination.

Let's not leave Freud wriggling on that hook; ask, instead, does his proposition make rational sense? In order for this phenomenon to be supply-led, food banks would have had to spring up from nowhere, expanding for no other reason than their enjoyment of dispersing free stuff, mainly kidney beans. The demand would have to meet and exceed supply, not because people were hungry but because they are grasping, and their appetite for free stuff had no limits.

But in that case, why don't we all (being rational creatures of the market) go to food banks? Because you have to be referred, by your local authority, or by the social services, or by a jobcentre; so now Freud would have us believe in a solid half a million people prostrating themselves before some or other agency, possibly – within his worldview – walking away from a job, for the sake of some stuff that is free. Some free peas. As an assessment of your fellow man, this is unhinged; I would say it bordered on a phobia. Maybe Freud was bitten as a baby by somebody he thought was poor.

What to do about this withered meanness, this denaturing mistrust of others? How prevalent is it? I have no idea. But when a Tory comes so close to saying who he despises and why (hungry people, for being so greedy), it seems important not to miss it.

Twitter: @zoesqwilliams