Grantham

"I get really, really upset sometimes," says Andrew Burton-Fullick, sitting in the front room of his small terraced house in Grantham. "I don't sleep well now. Day-to-day life is a struggle. My partner works his socks off for us and he's had time off with stress. It's hand-to-mouth all the time. And I've done nothing wrong."

Until January 2011, Burton-Fullick, 56, had been working as a care assistant in a nursing home, which he had done for 23 years. The year before, he had had a heart attack, and when he later developed heart complications his doctor told him he'd have to give up work. On top of this, he has been living with diabetes since he was a toddler and it is seriously affecting his health – his sight is deteriorating, he is suffering hearing loss (he wears hearing aids in both ears) and has nerve damage in his hands and legs. He also has arthritis, which makes walking difficult, and will soon be going into hospital for surgery on his bladder. A large plastic tub full of drugs is on the table next to him.

He was given benefits that came to nearly £400 a month – less than he had been earning, but just about enough, combined with his partner's salary as a hospital porter, to live on. Then, as part of a reassessment by Atos, he was told he was no longer eligible for the new incapacity benefit, his benefits would be stopped immediately and that, despite his numerous health problems, he was fit for work and should go and find a job. He appealed, but lost. He isn't even eligible for jobseeker's allowance.

And there are no jobs for him. When he turned down a position because it was only 16 hours a week and almost all of his salary would have gone on commuting costs, he says the staff at the Jobcentre called him "lazy". "Well, how come I worked for 23 years in the care trade and only had to stop through illness? I didn't ask to be ill. I didn't ask for this to happen," he says. "I know people who run businesses and they've told me they wouldn't touch me with a bargepole. There are well people out there looking for jobs, so people like me aren't going to get a look-in."

The couple survive on one low salary. There are no luxuries or treats. Holidays are never considered; the one day out they've had all year was a trip to Nottingham for the recent Gay Pride festival and that had to be carefully budgeted for. Burton-Fullick needs new glasses, but can't afford them; their immersion heater broke 18 months ago but they don't have the money to get it fixed. They can usually afford to eat (though Burton-Fullick will sometimes skip meals), but when the money runs out before payday, the food bank steps in.

Burton-Fullick first used it at the beginning of last year. Their house got flooded and the unexpected expense left them without any money. He was referred by the Citizens' Advice Bureau, which issued a food bank voucher. "We were so thankful, and we still are," he says. "It means a lot. It means we're not struggling." He used it a couple of times last year, and has done the same a couple of times so far this year (it's not meant to be used regularly).

At 1pm the Grantham food bank opens, and we slowly walk the few streets from his house. Burton-Fullick uses a shopping trolley to steady himself (he would like a mobility scooter but can't afford one). The food bank is on the ground floor of a Victorian terraced building, with posters in the bay window. One reads: "Restoring dignity, reviving hope, building community." Inside, several volunteers are packing supermarket carrier bags with food, while other volunteers sit at tables with food bank users, or "clients" as they're called.

Brian Hanbury, the food bank's coordinator, sits down with Burton-Fullick and asks him how he has been. "You're about the 3,000th client," Hanbury says. "We've had 33 tonnes of food come through this little building within the last two years. I'm only telling you this because I know when people find themselves in a hard place, they think they're on their own. We're estimating there are close to 6,000 people in this area who are just a few steps away from not being able to put food on their plate."

The food bank asks clients to write their stories in a book – they range from young people leaving abusive homes and ending up in a hostel, to people who had to have time off work for illness, to those affected by the new bedroom tax. Hanbury estimates around 40% of his clients come in because of Jobcentre sanctions against them stopping their benefits. Hanbury leaves us sitting at a table and when I look over to Burton-Fullick, he looks as if he's going to cry. After a while, he says: "I get so angry."

Back at home, he unpacks the bags. "They say there's three days' food here but I can make it last a lot longer than that. They are very generous." He has also been given a bag of toiletries, including loo roll, toothbrushes and shower gel (the food bank started providing this after a young mother said how horrible it made her feel to have to wash her children using supermarket value brand washingup liquid).

The food donation includes tinned vegetables, pasta sauces, packets of spaghetti, a bag of porridge, chocolate biscuits and stir-fry sauce. He runs through a list of meals he can make: "I've got some mince in the freezer so I'll do a cottage pie, curries I can do, I can convert this," he says, holding up a packet of pasta sauce, "into a risotto."

He seems so cheerful unveiling each item – we laugh at the incongruousness of a large jar of bratwurst – and you momentarily forget what an outrage it is that thousands of people are having to rely on food banks such as Grantham's in order not to go hungry. "Sometimes," he says, "I sit here and get so angry. I would love to get Mr Cameron to live at the end of the month on what we have to live on. I'm not asking for thousands of pounds, I'm not asking for people to feel sorry for me. I just want a fair deal."

Emine Saner

North London

‘I can eat bread and water but she needs infant milk’ … Tereza Stanova with her daughter Beyonce Photograph: Martin Godwin

It's midday at the Trussell Trust food bank in Stoke Newington, Hackney, and Tereza Stanova has already spent three hours on foot, in search of answers to her financial problems. After this, she will walk another hour back to her flat. She has an Oyster card but can't afford £1.40 for the bus fare – that money goes towards nappies for her nine-week-old baby, Beyonce, whom she's bringing up alone. Her daughter snuffles and sighs behind us, asleep in her pram. Tereza is in a cycle many will recognise, her life measured out in 10p pieces.

"It's not about my food," says Stanova softly, so as not to wake Beyonce. "I can eat bread and water. It's about providing for her. She's growing fast. You give her some clothes and she can wear them for two weeks, then she's too big ... And as she grows, she eats more. I'm trying to breastfeed her, but it's not enough. She needs infant milk, and also nappies because you need to change her every three or four hours, sometimes even more, so it's eight to 10 nappies a day. That's really expensive." The pair need £5 a week for electricity, about the same for gas. "You need electricity, because you can't give her cold milk. You need to boil the water, you need to bath her."

Stanova is a quiet woman of 20, who has spent all her adult life in the UK, having arrived from the Czech Republic nearly three years ago to work as a nanny. She enjoyed looking after two children for a family in Kent, but when she was four and a half months pregnant, her midwife warned that the 13 hour days could prove risky – one of the children she looked after was two, the other a newborn, so there was a lot of heavy lifting and carrying. It was suggested that part-time work would be better, so she left her job and started applying, without any success.

The jobseeker's allowance she received initially ended 10 weeks before her due date. Stanova then applied for income support, but was turned down, a decision she's appealing. While still pregnant, she was able to live with friends and use the savings she'd accumulated to prepare for Beyonce's birth. Having earned £900 a month, she had some money set aside. But as her due date came closer, the savings dried up and she had to find more permanent accommodation. After looking around the handful of flats available to those on benefits, her former employers put her in touch with a landlord friend with a flat for DSS tenants in Hackney. Two weeks before giving birth, Tereza moved in and applied for housing benefit, which was also denied. She is now down to her last £50.

This is her second visit to the food bank. She was told about it by a friend, and referred by the Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB). We look through what she has been given. Cereal, milk, baby wipes, nappies, first infant milk. There is some sweetcorn she will mix with rice and canned tomatoes, Spam and tuna she will use for sandwiches. CAB has helped her apply for a crisis grant, which she's hoping will come through before she and Beyonce go hungry. The food bank only allows three visits.

Stanova says she needs to stay hopeful for her baby. "When you are upset, she can feel it, she's stressed." I ask what will happen if her appeals for housing benefit and income support are unsuccessful, and she says she doesn't know. "I'll probably have to go and call myself homeless." Her face crumples, she starts crying, and Liza Cucco, the food bank manager, rushes forward with a handwritten list of helpful organisations. "You're not going to become homeless," she says, grasping her hand.

The number of people who visit this food bank has doubled since changes to the benefit system in April. They now feed around 250 people a month. "The main reason people come now," says Cucco, "is because of a change, delay, or sanction in their benefit, or their inability to access short-term crisis grant funding." There are almost 90 organisations authorised to refer people to this food bank, and "typically what happens," says Cucco, "is that they realise in the course of dealing with their client that they've got no money for food. So in a children's centre, for example, someone might notice that a kid is eating crayons, and find out the family isn't able to give them breakfast."

Stanova is keen to return to work – if she could get a little financial support, she says, she has friends who could look after Beyonce three days a week, so she could work part-time. She doesn't have much contact with her family in the Czech Republic; all her strong adult ties are here. For now, she's trudging around north London for hours each day, in the hope of securing just enough financial support "for nappies," she says, "and to live normally, to not be stressed every day".

Kira Cochrane

Rotherham

Volunteers at the Rotherham food bank. Photograph: David Sillitoe

Neil is 17 years old. He arrived at the Rotherham food bank by skateboard, armed with a voucher given to him at Rush House, a charity providing a range of accommodation and support services to young people.

At the end of July, Neil [not his real name] appeared in court charged with criminal damage after climbing on a roof in the town centre while drunk and accidentally smashing some air vents. He pleaded guilty and received a £250 fine, which the judge agreed he could pay off in instalments of £5 a week from his benefits. But when Neil went online to check his bank account a few weeks later he saw that all of his benefits for the forthcoming fortnight – £103 – had been docked to pay the fine off more quickly. Suddenly he had no money at all.

Neil has not had a good few years. Kicked out of home aged 15, he sofa-surfed for two years until March, when he was taken in by Rush House. They helped him come off drugs (mephedrone, marijuana, MDMA), got him enrolled on an art course at college and found him shared accommodation. Then he got drunk one midsummer night, did something daft – and now he's hungry. "I've had no proper food for days now," he says. "I've just been eating pasta with no sauce for every meal and drinking water. It's not ideal."

Pasta, it turns out, is one of Neil's favourite foods. "I like cooking pasta dishes – lasagne, spag bol, carbonara, things like that."

The two carrier bags given to Neil by two kindly parishioners do contain pasta, but in the form of a pre-cooked tin of macaroni cheese. Many food bank visitors have very rudimentary cooking equipment and can't afford to pay for gas to do much more than heat things up. Also inside the bags are a box of value cereal, teabags, a packet of chocolate digestives, tins of beans, tuna, soup and peas, bread rolls, toilet rolls and other bits and bobs. The haul is supposed to last just three days, but Neil will make it go further.

Many of the food bank visitors say they feel ashamed and embarrassed to be using a food bank. Not Neil. "There's nothing to be embarrassed about," he says. But he doesn't want his face to be seen in our photograph, and he doesn't plan to return. "I've been to the youth court and shown them a letter from the judge, so hopefully in a few days the paper work will be sorted."

The Rotherham food bank has been open for business for two hours a week since April 2012. Run by the local Hope Church under the Trussell Trust banner, it has so far fed 700 families for all manner of reasons. "People come to us via the probation service, from a women's refuge, the citizen's advice bureau, Yorkshire Housing, parenting groups, social services, children's centres, a homeless shelter, the NHS, Rotherham College, all sorts of places," says Danny Miller, pastor of Hope Church. He divvies out the vouchers to these organisations and it is their unenviable job to decide which of their clients needs food the most.

On the Thursday the Guardian visits, those with vouchers include: a man released from prison the previous Friday, having been on remand for shoplifting offences (accused of stealing food from a supermarket, he was found not guilty); another man collecting food for his ex-wife and their two grown sons, plunged into crisis after her tax credits were stopped without warning when the youngest boy finished his college course; a 41-year-old struggling to feed his wife, 16-year-old twins and toddler grandson, who had recently moved in under a court order. And Neil.

The food bank is always busy, says Miller: "If I give out 20 vouchers each week, we get 20 more families coming in. We can't match the demand."

As time goes on, they add new items. "We're learning as we go along. Recently we started giving out pet food. Because if you're struggling to feed your family, you'll let your dog starve before your kids," says Miller.

It is always intended to be a stop-gap measure rather than a long-term solution, he says. "We have a three-strikes-and-you're-out rule – in other words, you shouldn't really be coming to us more than three times. We want to avoid dependency. Our role is to help in times of crisis."

But the food bank is not temporary, he believes. "Unfortunately, we're here to stay. I can't see the need going away."

Helen Pidd