It’s happened to me once. It was during Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake , which includes a heartbreaking scene at a food bank. I had never felt such tangible sadness while watching something, and as soon as the film ended, I immediately walked out and set up a monthly donation to the Trussell Trust.

Have you ever sat in a pitch-black cinema full of people and wept? Not in the way your dad awkwardly tears up on the sofa during Toy Story 3, but actual sobbing in a packed screening as the credits roll, just before the lights come up?

The Trussell Trust is a UK charity, founded in 1997, that provides emergency food for those who can’t afford to eat. The 428 banks across the country provide basic sustenance (think baked beans, tea, and tinned pies) for those most in need, throughout the year, funded entirely by donations—11,175 tonnes of food in 2016, to be precise. While the usage of food banks has been steadily increasing since the charity’s inception, one period every year is worse than others: Christmas.

It’s ironic that, at the time when our world becomes centred around how much we can physically eat and drink without dying, food banks are most in demand. As every shop window, every TV advert, every aspirational Instagram post becomes soaked in gorgeous, alluring food, I wanted to find out what it means to be eating baked beans on toast on Christmas Day.

Which is why I’ve come to Queens Road Baptist Church in Coventry, just as a freezing fog covers most of the Midlands and forces the temperatures down close to zero. Situated next to an A-road in the city centre, the church houses the busiest food bank in the UK and has been feeding the city’s most vulnerable for the last seven years.