I spent my whole career working in public health nutrition, and I am now a Labour councillor in Southampton, where around a third of families live in food poverty. Many rely on food banks.

Recently I raised a motion at full council that proposed the creation of a legal right to food. It was rejected, with the ruling Tory council saying it supported ‘the sentiment of the motion’, but not ‘its political element’. I suspect that what this really means is that they agree on some level that it’s bad that children are starving, but aren’t prepared to do anything about it.

The thrust of the motion was that Southampton should become a ‘right to food’ city. This essentially means creating a legal framework to enshrine in law the right to food. Building on the UNICEF declarations on the right of children to ‘nutritious food’, the driver of the Right to Food push from people like Ian Byrne is to secure that legal mechanism, but also to facilitate a conversation about poverty and inequality.

When we talk about the need for food security, we don’t just mean food being available—we also mean people having the capacity to access it, pay for it, and cook it. In this country the problem is that the food is there, but it’s too expensive.

Legacy media, of course, often responds to this with the standard conservative appeal to ‘individual responsibility’ and weaponises fatphobia by pointing at Britain’s obesity rates and asking how there can be a problem around food poverty when there are poor people who are overweight. This victim-blaming is poorly informed and misleading.

In the global capitalist system, governments subsidise a range of foods including sugar and maize (partly to shore up the votes of farmers), which are the basic ingredients of most snack foods, and which are cheaper to produce because of these subsidies—meaning they can sell these products at low prices and still make huge profits. It’s hardly surprising then that when people are hungry, they’ll often buy a Mars Bar and a can of Coke rather than a more nutritious and more expensive alternative.

The global food system makes unhealthy food cheaper and healthy food much more expensive, at a time when national and local economic structures are keeping ordinary people’s wages and other forms of income low and rents for private tenants high. That means that working-class people are short of time as well as money—they have to spend more time working in order to make ends meet, so they have less time to spend on preparing healthy meals.

All of this pushes people towards eating cheap food that can be bought, prepared, and eaten quickly, but is often not very nutritious. People have access not to food, but to a market. And this isn’t even the kind of ‘free market’ that classic liberals and many Tory politicians claim to believe in—it’s a market heavily distorted by the subsidising of ingredients that go into junk food.

Growing fruits and vegetables requires more soil, more water, more land, and more intense labour, and they are harder to store. They should be produced close to where they are consumed, although of course a whole industry has been created around the transportation of food, which has consequences for the environment, and thereby has further consequences for health.

Capitalist food systems are also very inefficient. About a third of food is wasted during production, plus another third at retail level. Food purchased is wasted at home, too. Waste at each level is detrimental to the planet, not just because of the waste itself but also because of what is done with the wasted food: incinerators or landfill.

Last week, a comrade from Southampton Social Aid Group phoned me to tell me that a supermarket had 100 kilograms of perfectly good potatoes that they were throwing out. If we hadn’t gone and picked them up and taken them to the Social Aid Group’s food club, they’d have gone to a landfill site.

But it’s cheaper for a supermarket to do that than to work out how to make sure it gets to people who need it. So while there are people who are malnourished because they can’t afford healthy food, there are big, profit-making companies throwing healthy food away.

Legislators could put an end to this almost overnight. Thanks to the efforts of Marcus Rashford, we have seen that food poverty can be ameliorated at the stroke of a pen, if the political will to do so can be created. Politicians choose not to do so for political and ideological reasons.

It’s hardly surprising that Conservative Party councillors would reject a motion seeking even the most meagre of reforms for political reasons. It’s less surprising still to read a socialist saying ‘the problem is capitalism’.

The local Tories calling for us to ‘work together to end food poverty’ are not, to my knowledge, Gladstonian liberals like Ian Duncan Smith who think it’s good to have a few people starving in the streets. Yet the UK’s polity is so lacking in imagination and rabidly anti-socialist that the reforms I am advocating for do not seem to be politically possible.

In a socialist system, there would be no need for food banks and food clubs—but in the present political climate they play an important role in meeting the nutritional needs of families and building solidarity in communities. The development of this solidarity is likely to be crucial to the cause of labour in the years to come.

Local union branches have provided vital financial support for the Social Aid Group’s work with the food group. Perhaps a time will come when the food group and others like it can support the militant industrial action that will be necessary in advancing our movement’s interests. Unions can sustain strikes financially, to a point, but imagine if striking workers on picket lines could be sustained by hot, nutritious food provided by organisations like ours.

As well as striving for political power, we must strive to create working-class autonomy, and what I think Gramscians might call a ‘counter-hegemonic’ project. While the Tories talk about working together to fight food poverty, ordinary people are actually doing it—and this collaborative, cooperative process is expanding their radical potential, and raising their consciousness.