Depending on who you listen to, the stakes of this election couldn’t be more different. Believe the panic of the super-rich reportedly preparing to flee the UK if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister, and the vote is a threat to billionaires’ “quality of life”. Read the groundbreaking report from the Trussell Trust released today and it could come down to something altogether more elemental: whether families can afford to eat.

The charity’s three-year study shines a light on just how shocking poverty has become in the UK: one in 50 households used a food bank in 2018-19, and 94% of people using them were destitute, meaning they couldn’t afford to eat regularly, be clothed or clean. Brutally, almost three-quarters of people at food banks live in households struggling with ill health or disability. One in 10 have a learning disability.

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The explosion of food banks over the past decade is about more than just hunger – it’s about what sort of society Britain has become. It’s one where 14 million people are living in poverty and workers can earn wages while still facing homelessness. It’s one where more than half of children are growing up below the breadline in some neighbourhoods, and teachers find pupils sleeping rough behind bins. Mass destitution has flourished under a sticking-plaster welfare state. At the start of this decade, the Trussell Trust ran just 57 food banks. Now it’s 424.

The thing about the normalisation of hardship is that it’s only a matter of time before something that once horrified a nation is allowed to get worse. Years after food banks went from a temporary blip to a staple of most towns and cities, it’s now standard practice for some to give out “cold boxes”: tinned groceries that can be eaten without the need for hot water or heating. Volunteers noticed some people would collect a box of pasta and rice only to admit it was useless to them – once they got home, they wouldn’t be able to afford to switch on their cooker or kettle. Other food banks tell me they are now doing a “delivery service” to disabled people who are starving but too ill to leave the house to get an emergency food parcel.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘At the start of this decade, the Trussell Trust ran just 57 food banks. Now it’s 424.’ A volunteer prepares emergency food boxes. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

If this seems obscene, it’s because it is obscene. But what should be our greatest concern is that in one of the richest nations on earth, such horror is now an accepted part of life. One of the most pervasive myths in modern society has long been that gross inequality is natural – that the best and brightest can quite rightly become billionaires while others, typically due to their own failings, will always go hungry. The Trussell Trust research is a skewer to this fallacy. It shows the biggest driver of food bank use is a benefits system that has undergone such disastrous “reforms” in recent years, from cuts to the value of social security payments and delays in universal credit to people being rejected for disability benefits. Forget families too idle to “manage their finances”, this is a wheelchair user wrongly found “fit for work” or a care worker in crisis because she’s just been evicted.

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For all the complexities of poverty, the conversation around food banks is quite simple. More and more people are reliant on these services because all avenues of a dignified and secure way to feed themselves have been cut off – whether that’s a competent benefits system, affordable housing or an economy where workers can earn a wage they’re able to live on. These are not unfathomable problems beyond our grasp but ones that have clear enough causes and solutions. There is hope in this, if we wish to find it. Just as hardship has been created by ministers who have been willing to toss large swathes of the public aside, it can be lifted by a political class that decides they matter.

As the UK heads into a make-or-break election, rightwing pundits are predictably already out in force with the cliches – spending pledges are too expensive, fair taxes would be disruptive to the wealthy, the safety net is working. But the more they feel the need to defend how things are, the more tangible real change feels. The greatest trick a government can play is convincing the electorate that their suffering is inevitable. It should be the unwritten slogan of the election: Food Bank Britain is not the best we can do.

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist