In Britain, five years of economic weakness, austerity and rising prices have left a mark: Average hourly earnings have risen a mere 7 percent while the cost of living has gone up by almost 20 percent, leaving at least 500,000 people here reliant on food aid, three times as many as a year ago, according to the Trussell Trust, a Christian charity that runs a network of more than 400 food banks. The trust says the number of people it fed in the eight months since April has risen twentyfold since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008.

Food banks distribute food free of charge or at heavy discounts to people generally referred to them by government agencies. They have sprung up in unlikely places, from southern commuter towns to Westminster, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace. Steve Baker, a Conservative lawmaker, says that one in five children in his southern constituency of Wycombe goes to bed hungry, calling the figure a “scandalous indictment of the safety net that is the welfare state.”

The need seems most acute in the struggling, postindustrial north.

Hull, birthplace of the 18th-century abolitionist William Wilberforce and the rock band the Housemartins, once had a thriving fishing industry and bustling harbor. Successive waves of New York-bound Eastern European emigrants stopped through on their way to Liverpool and some stayed. Today, in per capita terms, it has the greatest number of jobless benefit claimants in the country. More than one in three children here live under the poverty line.

The city’s reputation has never been great. “From Hell, Hull and Halifax, Good Lord deliver me,” goes the refrain of a poem written in 1622. More than once, Hull was voted the worst place to live in Britain. Things have actually been looking up recently. In a former fruit market in the rapidly gentrifying waterfront of the Humber estuary, hip art galleries and music venues helped Hull win Britain’s “City of Culture” designation for 2017. But so far little of that regeneration has trickled down.

Ms. Burton’s local food bank is supplied by a charity that until four years ago sent food only to developing countries like Sierra Leone. Today, 80 percent of its work is in Britain. “I never thought I would be doing this in my own country, in my own town,” said Colin Raine, who is one of the founders of the charity, Real Aid, which got its start in 2001.