The survey aimed to gather data on the impact of the COVID19 outbreak on the food support providers active in Greater Manchester. The lockdown created organizational hurdles to many services providing food to the most vulnerable. The survey explored more in depth the obstacles, the needs and the prospects of 55 organizations that were on the frontline in the first months of the crisis.In the United Kingdom food banks are increasingly required to alleviate hunger and food insecurity. In Greater Manchester (GM) alone, the GM Poverty Alliance mapped 171 emergency food providers. While the renewed interest of social scientists in the topic has produced an abundance of scientific literature, there remains a lack of knowledge on the webs of influence, support, conflict and interdependence between families experiencing food poverty and the emergency food providers. Project HUNG, by embracing a relational approach, focuses on the space of relations occupied by actors and institutions engaged with one another. Thereby, it proposes a relational object of analysis: not food poverty or food banks per se, but rather the interactions and transactions involved in the process of charitable supply and food demand. The project, based on the GM metropolitan county, makes use of quantitative analysis and ethnography of the everyday life to throw light on the "hunger bonds" connecting emergency providers and their users. On the one side, by gathering original survey data on food banks and their users, it provides a descriptive analysis on the determinants of food bank use through a dataset suitable for multilevel modelling (individuals nested in food banks). On the other side, it offers an in-depth ethnography of the daily life of a small sample of families that frequently rely on food banks by shadowing their meal choices for a prolonged period of time. By doing so, HUNG creates twofold added-value for the research community and for policy makers. Scholars nterested in food inequalities will have access to a ethodological toolkit, that could be used to extend research in other metropolitan domains. Simultaneously, by describing in detail the determinants of food bank use, it will improve the capability of agencies fighting food poverty to influence public policies to end food poverty.

Survey data were collected to obtain standardized information on the characteristics of different food support providers and on the impact of COVID-19 on their operations. First, the datasheet containing contact details for 222 services connected with food aid throughout Greater Manchester was extracted from the open-data map of food support providers created by Greater Manchester Poverty Action (GMPA). To this dataset details of 26 food support providers found on the Mutual Aid Groups Map, and 9 others were reached by sending a link to the questionnaire in the GMPA newsletter to get as close as possible to the statistical population. The contact database was then shared with a research agency that administered the questionnaire via CATI (Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing) or CAWI (Computer-Assisted Web Interviewing) once operators had spoken to directors or spokespersons.